Abstract
Abstract Opening with Thomas Carlyle’s unusual suggestion in 1840 that ‘laughter means sympathy’, this chapter explores the complicated and ambivalent place of laughter within the culture of feeling of the eighteenth century and Romantic period. For many at the time, to be a man of feeling was to be a man of humour, while humour was ‘regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius’. Yet laughter had a troubled relation to sympathy and Romantic poetry, not least on account of its association with ridicule, and restive, disruptive energies. This chapter uncovers how writers resort to a language of feeling to try and account for the vagaries of ludicrous and inexplicable emotions. It thus establishes the animating tensions and strange incongruities at the heart of the laughter of feeling, where a laugh is both an articulation or embodiment of sympathy and a strange resistance to it. Laughter shows the complicated position of sympathy in the era as something to pursue and promote, and retain a sceptical, ironic sense of humour about.
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