Changing sentiments and the Magdalen Hospital : luxury, virtue and the senses in eighteenth-century culture / by Mary Peace.

New York : Routledge, 2017.

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This book charts the complex ideological territory of eighteenth century sentimental discourse through the uniquely revealing lens of the London Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes. The establishment of the London Magdalen House in 1758 is read as the cultural high watermark of sentimental confidence in the compatibility of virtue and commerce. It is the product of a whiggish, moral-sense discourse at its most ebullient and culturally authoritative. Equally visible, though, in this context, are the ideological limitations of moral-sense thinking and an anticipation of the ways in which its ideas ultimately failed to underwrite commercial virtue. Sentimental discourse fractures in the course of the mid-century: in part it becomes increasingly divorced from the world; retreating into a primitivist, proto-Romantic virtue which claims no purchase on 'things as they are'. Where sentimental vocabulary persists in a worldly context, it becomes divorced from a vocabulary of moral virtue. It is overlaid with a French usage where 'sentiment' and 'sensibility' describe exquisite emotion rather than refined and cultivated virtue.'

Taylor & Francis. EBA 2024-2025.

Print version: Peace, Mary (Lecturer in English studies). Changing sentiments and the Magdalen Hospital. New York : Routledge, 2017

Books / Online

English

October 04, 2024

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Electronic books.