The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture by Mary Fairclough

Abstract

Mary Fairclough. The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 294. $105. Edmund Burke was not alone in fearing a quick transit from the demotic to the demonic. Across the revolutionary age, when democracy seemed to many a synonym for mobocracy, the cumulative force that results when people gather was hardly a less pressing issue than the fate of the European monarchies. But what exactly happens when people come together? Or perhaps: what exactly happens to people when they come together? It was in part against the pathologization of crowd behavior by Le Bon and Freud that a half-century ago George Rude, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and others sought to render the crowd as something more (or less) than the primeval sublime. Their work fostered a subgenre in eighteenth- and nineteenth century studies, with significant contributions by Mark Harrison (1988), Nicholas Rogers (1998), John Plotz (2000) and others. Moving this line of inquiry in a productive new direction, Mary Fairclough's new work (shortlisted for the BARS first book prize) asks what the concept of sympathy might have to tell us about Romantic-era understandings (and misunderstandings) of group behavior. The Romantic Crowd opens with a survey of sympathy according to the Scottish Enlightenment. Tracking David Hume's growing unease with the unruly potential of sympathy from A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) to Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Fairclough observes that the conception of sympathy in the Treatise as a universal, dynamic medium of proves extremely difficult to sustain, so that by the time of the Enquiry it has become a phenomenon that requires control (27). This wariness is further registered in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which reveals a sharpened sense of sympathy's disruptive potential. Well before 1789, in other words, we find a recognition that sympathy as a medium of sociality could enable social unrest no less than charitable concern. It was with the fires across the Channel that this recognition grew into urgent admonitions. We might not be surprised that Burke smelled the smoke. But Fairclough's second chapter also makes the case that Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and John Thelwall were variously attuned to and wary of sympathy's wild power. Sympathy was just fine when it prompted middle class regard for individuated victims of industrial capitalism and colonial slavery, but reformers quailed when the objects of sympathy became participants in collectivities. Wollstonecraft and Godwin occupied a particularly fraught middle ground between hope and fear, eager to welcome democratic energy but not chary of articulating fears about potential to overawe individual reason. Fairclough makes a welcome turn to the understudied Historical and MoraI View of the French Revolution (1794) to demonstrate Wollstonecraft's apprehension about sympathy's coercive threat, but it is Thelwall who anchors this chapter, and who is singled out as something of a hero in The Romantic Crowd (the book's cover, a detail from Gillray's Copenhagen House [1795], shows a caricatured Thelwall virtually ranting Fairclough's title as though it were a speech bubble). Thelwall matters for Fairclough because she is interested in the contemporary use of physiological figures to think about sympathy: it spreads like a contagion through the public body, even as it models the internal working of the human body itself (when organs fall out of sympathy, according to contemporary medical writers, systemic disorder results). With at least one eye on the scientific vanguard, Thelwall offers a rare example of an approach to sympathetic communication that addresses its physiological properties and their potential political effects without reducing them to pathology (107). Thelwall's work provides Fairclough with a helpful instance of sympathy conceived neutrally as both a social and a somatic process, but his readiness to accept in materialist terms was not representative of his moment. …