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Mark Neuendorf

Mark Neuendorf
The University of Adelaide
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Claire Walker (Full term)

Claire Walker (Full term)
The University of Adelaide
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Home | Research | Research Projects | Madness in England in the “Age of Sensibility”

Madness in England in the “Age of Sensibility”

This project explores the ways that collective emotions shaped attitudes towards mental illness in eighteenth-century Britain. Analysing contemporary debates about madness and irrationality in the public sphere, we are investigating how various groups shaped society’s emotional responses to madness and irrationality, and how these feelings have, in turn, informed modern ideas about sickness and health, sympathy and stigmatisation.

Madness in England in the “Age of Sensibility”

 The Hypochondriac. Coloured etching by T. Rowlandson after J. Dunthorne, 1788.

This project examines the influence of collective emotions on the treatment of the mentally ill in Britain in the long eighteenth century. Drawing upon a wide of evidence – including books, newspapers, poetry, paintings, letters and medical tracts – it documents the evolving responses to madness exhibited by Georgian polite society, through the so-called ‘Age of Sensibility’ to the height of Romanticism. Utilising the innovative frameworks for the study of emotions pioneered by William Reddy and Monique Scheer, it explains the emergence of a nascent ‘humanitarian sensibility’ as a product of shifts in the dominant ‘emotional regime’ of the British middle classes, and considers the consequences of these shifts for the development of organised psychiatric reform movements. A forthcoming monograph, based on this research, is due for publication with Palgrave Macmillan in 2020–2021.