Spaces for Feeling

Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650-1850

Susan Broomhall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138828162
• eBook ISBN: 9781317554097
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Spaces for Feeling explores how English and Scottish people experienced sociabilities and socialities from 1650 to 1850, and investigates their operation through emotional practices and particular spaces. The collection highlights the forms, practices, and memberships of these varied spaces for feeling in this two hundred year period and charts the shifting conceptualisations of emotions that underpinned them.

The authors employ historical, literary, and visual history approaches to analyse a series of literary and art works, emerging forms of print media such as pamphlet propaganda, newspapers, and periodicals, and familial and personal sources such as letters, in order to tease out how particular communities were shaped and cohered through distinct emotional practices in specific spaces of feeling. This collection studies the function of emotions in group formations in Britain during a period that has attracted widespread scholarly interest in the creation and meaning of sociabilities in particular. From clubs and societies to families and households, essays here examine how emotional practices could sustain particular associations, create new social communities and disrupt the capacity of a specific cohort to operate successfully.

This timely collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of the history of emotions.

1 ‘At my mother’s house’

Community and household spaces in early eighteenth-century Scottish infanticide narratives¹

Joanne McEwan

In March 1712, after being twice brow-beaten at her local church court over a suspected pregnancy and subjected to a physical examination, Christian Strachan led a search party to the bank of the river Tweed, where she dug up the body of a newborn male child. She was indicted for child-murder under a particularly harsh capital statute, enacted in 1690, which declared that ‘if any woman shall conceal her being with child during the whole space [of the pregnancy] and shall not call for and make use of help and assistance in the birth, the child being found dead or missing, the mother shall be held and reputed the murderer of her own child’.² When the case went to trial before the High Court of Justiciary, Scotland’s highest criminal court, Christian’s defence counsel mounted a legal objection to the charge. They argued that she had disclosed knowledge of her pregnancy to the man who had fathered the child: therefore, she had not concealed her pregnancy and her crime did not fall within the terms of the statute. The prosecution, in response, insisted that ‘the revealing ought to be direct and plain and made to persons living in the neighbourhood with her, and who might be help full to her in the birth, so that revealing to the father, or to others at a great distance … does nowayes take off the lybel’.³

The prosecution’s rebuttal⁴ made two key assumptions about space and emotions in the events surrounding illicit pregnancies and infanticide investigations. The first was that women needed to rely on the people closest to them in proximity for help. Practically speaking, physical assistance from midwives, family members, and local women was called upon by most pregnant women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁵ But, for women skirting dangerously close to the statute, this circle of contacts was especially important, because of the need that the ‘Act Anent the Murthering of Children’ established for witnesses. These first-hand observers were required to testify to the pregnancy, and to the birth of the child, in order to mitigate a murder charge if the baby died or if suspicions arose that there was a baby and it was missing. By extension, this meant that localized physical spaces, such as that of the neighbourhood or more specifically the household, were important. They were the sites where these witnesses could be located, where suspicions would be voiced and confirmed or denied, where discoveries would be made, and where events would ultimately play out.

The second assumption was that people within the local vicinity might be helpful. Although the quoted passage was probably intended to refer to opportunity, this phrase ‘might be’ raises interesting questions about choices, personal investments, and community reactions: Who was most likely to help? Who was not? And what factors influenced their decisions? These considerations render the spaces present in infanticide narratives important on an emotional level as well as a social one. They were sites where affective engagements were realized and articulated, where responses – both individual and collective – were negotiated and expressed, and where managing to foster a sense of ‘belonging’ could, against the backdrop of the 1690 statute, literally mean the difference between life and death.

Witness testimonies and statements made by defendants in child-murder trials,⁶ which are recorded for early eighteenth-century Scottish cases in the case papers, minute books, and books of adjournal for the High Court of Justiciary, provide us with a rare insight into the events surrounding infanticide prosecutions and the actions and reactions of the various individuals involved, from the people who were there. Admittedly, these narratives were mediated in various ways: by the strictures and interests of the legal process; by editorial decisions made during the recording process; sometimes through the act of translation for Gaelic speakers; by the extraordinary nature of the circumstances; and by the ways in which a witness’s own investment or interest in the case influenced what they were willing to disclose and how they constructed or ‘framed’ their testimony. This, however, does not lessen their value. It is important to recognize that these are partial, mediated accounts, and as such they do not provide us with a singular, objective account of ‘what really happened’, but collectively they do paint us a picture of events from the people who were there and, indeed, their real value lies in the multiple perspectives they provide.⁷ It is often in random snippets of information provided by witnesses, or through the differences and disparities in what is being represented (and the questions this generates), that we can garner a sense of emotional investments.

The immediate audience for these testimonies was a legal one: the judges and fifteen male jurors who would deliberate on the case. On one level, it can be argued that the courtroom functioned as an important space for feeling here, in the sense that it was the space where these narratives would be heard, considered, and their merits evaluated, where confessions and witness accounts were supposed to influence or ‘affect’ the jury in one way or another,⁸ and where by a majority vote this group of men were invested with the power to decide the accused woman’s fate. However, these narratives also reflect on a series of decisions and interactions in other ‘spaces for feeling’ that influenced events long before the case reached the courtroom. It is on these spaces – physical and figurative – emerging in and from the narratives that this chapter will focus, to consider how they functioned as ‘affective’ spaces: how they could articulate and negotiate emotions and affective engagements, whether such exchanges were gendered, how their meaning could change depending on context, and for whom they operated.

Scotland, the kirk, and the community

In the closing years of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, hundreds of women were charged with the capital crime of child-murder in Scotland.⁹ The 1690 statute governing child-murder, which remained in place until 1809,¹⁰ specifically targeted women.¹¹ Most of these women were single, and their pregnancies illegitimate. Unlike the 1624 ‘Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children’ in England,¹² the Scottish statute did not limit its scope to unmarried women and bastard children. Nevertheless, it was widely believed, and indeed argued by lawyers in legal defences, that married women had less reason to conceal a pregnancy or kill a child than unmarried women, whose reputations would be tarnished by such visible and material reminders of their fornication. When Margaret Craig was indicted for child-murder in 1730, for example, her defence counsel argued that she was a married woman and that there was ‘no necessity for a married woman to murder her own child, for the husband must be presumed to be the parent of the child’.¹³ The implication here is that her married status functioned to sever the immediate link that would otherwise be made between pregnancy and a sinful sexual act, thereby protecting her reputation. This speaks to the central role that shame and fear of disgrace played in explaining why so many unmarried women concealed their illicit pregnancies.¹⁴

The Scottish statute was enacted in 1690 to deal with what was perceived, by the elite men who made up the legislature, to be an alarming increase in the incidence of child-murder in the second half of the seventeenth century.¹⁵ The nature of the crime, based as it often was on ‘a steady denial of the pregnancy, and a secret delivery, and concealment of the dead body’,¹⁶ frequently confounded the usual requirements of legal evidence. The Act, Baron Hume suggested, was therefore designed to alleviate a ‘distressing situation’ in which juries had to convict women based on a series of presumptions about their guilt or else acquit them against their conscience.¹⁷ The statute thus validated and formalized these presumptions, presumably lessening the discomfiture Hume alluded to in the process, by equating concealment with murder, unless the accused could prove otherwise by the testimony of witnesses. The standard of proof required for conviction was also relaxed by removing the need for a body or a definite cause of death.¹⁸

Sara Ahmed has suggested that exclusionary language is often employed by those in power to create a dichotomous emotional discourse in which ‘undesirable’ people within society are vilified and then excluded: ‘words generate effects: they create impressions of others as those who have invaded the space of the nation, threatening its existence’.¹⁹ This discursive Othering, based on the evocation of fear, has been employed far more widely than at the national level Ahmed discusses. In eighteenth-century Scotland, the wording used in formal indictments for child-murder sheds light on the threat that disorderly women, who defied acceptable rules and expectations regarding their behaviour, were thought to pose to the community. The court personnel who drew up the indictments made frequent use of inflammatory language, accusing the women of ‘shaking off all fear of God’ and committing ‘atrocious’, ‘horrid’, and ‘unnatural’ crimes, of acting cruelly, wickedly, and maliciously, and of being discovered ‘by good providence’.²⁰ These negatively loaded terms had the effect of ‘Othering’ the accused women, positioning them as outsiders who were excluded from the otherwise orderly and godly community. The indictments identified them as threats that needed to be excised from both the social and spiritual body politic, in large part – as the standard closing line of these documents makes clear – to keep the rest of the flock in check: ‘you ought to be punished by death and the escheat of your moveables, to the example and terrour of others to committ the like in tyme coming’.²¹

Although the wording used in official legal documents was formulaic, we can see the social (and sometimes spatial) exclusion that it deemed as necessary materializing in the sentencing of women accused of infanticide. Between 1700 and 1730, thirty-five per cent of the 123 women indicted for child-murder were convicted and sentenced to hang. Five women fled before they could be tried and were declared fugitive, and a further fifteen were sentenced to banishment from Scotland or transported.²² Transportation was increasingly imposed as a punishment, especially after 1730, in response to petitions from accused women offering to submit to ‘voluntary banishment’ instead of a trial. Although, again, the wording of these petitions is uniform, it is significant that the reason most often cited for submitting to ‘voluntary’ banishment (which becomes synonymous with transportation in this context) was that their reputations would be so irreparably damaged by a trial, even if they were acquitted, that they could not expect to ‘live quietly’ within the realm of Scotland.²³ Therefore, the two most widely applied punishments in cases of child-murder – hanging and transportation – functioned to remove offenders, alive or dead, from Scottish society.

Even in cases where murder was removed from the charge during the trial or was not proven,²⁴ secondary punishments, such as public whipping, were frequently imposed. This visible disciplining of the unruly female body, often through the streets of her local community on a busy market day, suggests that weeding out disorderly and immoral conduct was a strong and ubiquitous concern for the governing authorities, both in these cases and more generally, and that they deemed it necessary to publicly punish sexual and moral breaches in order to ensure conformity in the future, and from others.²⁵ The offence that these women had committed, really, was that they had engaged in illicit sexual relations, had failed to reveal details of their pregnancies within their local communities, especially to the regulatory authority of the kirk, and had avoided the ritualized process of being publicly humiliated, shamed, and reprimanded for their disorderly conduct. The harsh punishment of these women, even when found guilty only of concealment, functioned to reinforce to the community the demand for strict adherence to moral and sexual standards. It emphasized the inescapability of punishment if one stepped outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour, and in doing so buttressed the social (and gender) order.

Communities in early eighteenth-century Scotland were governed at a local level by secular authorities, namely magistrates, and religious authorities, through a network of parish church courts known as kirk sessions. The kirk session was a permanent parish committee,²⁶ chaired by a minister and populated by a collection of male elders. It was designed to enforce religious and moral order within the community by policing its spatial and moral boundaries, and as such functioned as an institution of control. Each of the elders – local men of good standing, who were elected for life – was responsible for supervising the behaviour of people within a small part of the parish where they lived.²⁷ With a view to enforcing the post-Reformation Calvinist ideals of a godly society, the early modern Church in Scotland had instituted a system of ecclesiastical government that ‘imposed religious and moral conformity, giving a vigorous role for the kirk in local life’, and ‘made the church intrusive in the lives of the citizens’.²⁸ In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries it had focused its attention on prosecuting profanation and religious nonconformity, but by the eighteenth century sexual and moral misconduct, especially fornication, took precedence as the principal concerns of the kirk.²⁹ The presence of elders in each neighbourhood and the operation of the kirk session at a parish level meant that regulation by the religious authorities was pervasive and the populace was closely supervised. Being summoned before the kirk session to answer to allegations of moral or sexual misconduct was unlikely to go unnoticed by neighbours; indeed, the system relied upon them to report suspicious behaviour to the elders. As a result, an appearance before the kirk session had implications for a woman’s treatm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. ‘At my mother’s house’: Community and household spaces in early eighteenth-century Scottish infanticide narratives
• 2. The Mysteries of Popery Unveiled: Affective language in John Coustos’s and Anthony Gavín’s accounts of the Inquisition
• 3. Renovating Affections: Reconstructing the Atholl family in the mid-eighteenth century
• 4. Bringing Order to the Passions: Eliza Haywood’s fiction, 1719 and 1748
• 5. Marginal Households and their Emotions: The ‘kept mistress’ in Enlightenment Edinburgh
• 6. ‘Strolling Roxanas’: Sexual transgression and social satire in the eighteenth century
• 7. Weeping in Space: Tears, feelings, and enthusiasm in eighteenth-century Britain
• 8. Hazlitt on Gesture and Hybrid Emotions: Individuality and community in the Maidstone self-portrait and ‘Fonthill Abbey’
• 9. Faces that Speak: A little emotion machine in the novels of Jane Austen
• 10. Feeling in the Wynds: Media representation of affective practices in urban Scotland in the first half of the nineteenth century
• Select Bibliography
• Index