Sentiment and the Magdalen Hospital

Description:

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.'

subjects: English literature, history and criticism, 18th century,  Sentimentalism in literature,  Prostitutes in literature,  Virtue in literature,  English literature,  History and criticism,  Prostitutes,  Rehabilitation,  History,  Women,  Institutional care,  Culture,  Medicine,  Hospitals,  Sex Workers,  Modern Literature,  Charities,  Morals,  History, 18th Century,  Prostituées dans la littérature,  Vertus dans la littérature,  Littérature anglaise,  Histoire et critique,  Médecine,  Histoire,  Culture note,  BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY,  Literary,  Magdalen Hospital (London, England)