The Romantic Crowd

Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture

Mary Fairclough

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781107031692
• eBook ISBN: 9781139604277
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the long eighteenth century, sympathy was understood not just as an emotional bond, but also as a physiological force, through which disruption in one part of the body produces instantaneous disruption in another. Building on this theory, Romantic writers explored sympathy as a disruptive social phenomenon, which functioned to spread disorder between individuals and even across nations like a 'contagion'. It thus accounted for the instinctive behaviour of people swept up in a crowd. During this era sympathy assumed a controversial political significance, as it came to be associated with both riotous political protest and the diffusion of information through the press. Mary Fairclough reads Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, John Thelwall, William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey alongside contemporary political, medical and philosophical discourse. Many of their central questions about crowd behaviour still remain to be answered by the modern discourse of collective psychology.

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Romantic Crowd
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: collective sympathy
• Part I Sympathetic communication 1750–1800: from moral philosophy to revolutionary crowds
• Part II Romantic afterlives 1800–1850: sympathetic communication, mass protest and print culture
• Afterword: sympathy and the Romantic crowd
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series