‘If it could weep, it could arise and go’: feeling grief in the 1840s

Goodman, H ORCID: 0000-0002-0544-1775 (2023) ‘If it could weep, it could arise and go’: feeling grief in the 1840s. In: Romance, Revolution and Reform Conference: Feeling in the Nineteenth Century, 13-14 January 2023, Trinity College, Cambridge, UK.

(Request more information)

Abstract

The years of the ‘hungry forties’, with their high death rates, are often characterised as the peak of sentimentality for the English novel. ‘Sentimentality’, in the nineteenth century as now, was often derided as insincere, more concerned with the aesthetics or performance of emotion than with real feeling. Little Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) notoriously provoked a national outpouring of weeping, though Wilde later claimed that more readers would ‘dissolv[e] into tears […] of laughter.’ This paper explores more subtle, often hidden, and transformative affective experiences of grief from the 1840s, in which ‘feeling’ inseparably bound mind and body. Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Charlotte Brontë depicted sophisticated conceptions of this bond, long predating the same conclusions in psychological and anatomical texts in the 1870s-80s. In Barrett Browning’s ‘Tears’ and ‘Grief’ (1844), the experience is defined by a paralysis of ‘everlasting watch and moveless woe […]/ If it could weep, it could arise and go’. The bodily ‘blanching’ effect was examined by Carl Lange and William James. William Sweetser wrote that those who weep find relief after ‘a paroxysm of grief, just as sweating does to a paroxysm of fever’, warning that those who cannot ‘generally experience much sharper sufferings.’ For Lange, grief was also characterised by immobility (‘the vascular muscles are more strongly contracted […] the tissues and organs of the body become anaemic’) and according to William Bell, quoted by Darwin, contracted facial muscles made it difficult for the genuinely bereaved to shed many tears.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions:	Chancelry and Research Management
Related URLs:	https://www.rrrjournal.com/
Date Deposited:	30 Jan 2026 16:42
Last Modified:	30 Jan 2026 16:42
URN:	https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/17525

	Request a change to this item or report an issue
	Update item (repository staff only)