- Published: 07/11/2018
- ISBN: 9781847085740
- 129x20mm
- 560 pages
A Revolution of Feeling
Rachel Hewitt
In the 1790s, Britain underwent what the politician Edmund Burke called ‘the most important of all revolutions…a revolution in sentiments’. Inspired by the French Revolution, British radicals concocted new political worlds to enshrine healthier, more productive, human emotions and relationships. The Enlightenment’s wildest hopes crested in the utopian projects of such optimists – including the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the physician Thomas Beddoes and the first photographer Thomas Wedgwood – who sought to reform sex, education, commerce, politics and medicine by freeing desire from repressive constraints.
But by the middle of the decade, the wind had changed. The French Revolution descended into bloody Terror and the British government quashed radical political activities. In the space of one decade, feverish optimism gave way to bleak disappointment, and changed the way we think about human need and longing.
A Revolution of Feeling is a vivid and absorbing account of the dramatic end of the Enlightenment, the beginning of an emotional landscape preoccupied by guilt, sin, failure, resignation and repression, and the origins of our contemporary approach to feeling and desire. Above all, it is the story of the human cost of political change, of men and women consigned to the ‘wrong side of history’. But although their revolutionary proposals collapsed, that failure resulted in its own cultural revolution – a revolution of feeling – the aftershocks of which are felt to the present day.
£12.99
Fierce, watchful, unfolding her arguments with clear-eyed logic and political acuity, Hewitt poses questions of the utmost importance: what use is hope? Should we keep our passions to ourselves or use them to change the world around us? This is an outstanding work of historical scholarship, magnificent in its scope yet subtle and intimate enough to register the uncertain human pulses beneath the roar of revolution
Alexandra Harris
Remarkably ambitious... An exhilarating journey through the 1790s, a decade that tends to be pictured in the cartoon colours of Gillray or Rowlandson as a knock-about farce of addlepated utopians and iron-fisted repressives. What Hewitt gives us instead are ordinary men and women, sometimes silly, sometimes cruel, but mostly just trying to bring their inner and outer lives into some sort of alignment
Kathryn Hughes, Guardian
[A] vivid and convincing new interpretation of the revolutionary decade
Marisa Linton, BBC History
From the Same Author
Map Of A Nation
Rachel Hewitt
Map of a Nation tells the story of the creation of the Ordnance Survey map – the first complete, accurate, affordable map of the British Isles. The Ordnance Survey is a much beloved British institution, and Map of a Nation is, amazingly, the first popular history to tell the story of the map and the men who dreamt and delivered it. The Ordnance Survey’s history is one of political revolutions, rebellions and regional unions that altered the shape and identity of the United Kingdom over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s also a deliciously readable account of one of the great untold British adventure stories, featuring intrepid individuals lugging brass theodolites up mountains to make the country visible to itself for the first time.
Rachel Hewitt on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
Sympathy | State of Mind
Rachel Hewitt
‘Before motherhood, I had not thought much about sympathy.’