Sentimental Philosophy

This dissertation focuses on the many tales of distressed women found in mid-eighteenthcentury

British magazines and essay serials. On the one hand, I argue, scenes of "virtue in

distress" and amatory fiction more generally demonstrate the increasing commercialization of

literature and the rise of the sentimental reader. On the other hand, they reveal the periodical

writers' drive to educate readers both in and through the passions. I propose that two factors

complicate the pathos of these narratives. In the first place, the periodical form was thought to

work against the arousal of vehement passions. In the second place, even if such passions could

be raised in the miscellaneous format, there were moral reasons why indolent, distracted

periodical readers craving sympathetic identification should not be indulged. Driven by market

forces and yet constrained by the unique nature of periodical publication, writers of miscellanies

responded with ingenuity to these challenges, crafting and deploying literary depictions of

"virtue in distress" that suited this compressed and constrained medium. In part because of the

challenges and risks associated with raising powerful feelings on the limited canvas of the

periodical, some periodicalists worked to suppress or otherwise complicate the most affecting

aspects of their amatory fictions. Others strove to correct the reader's passions in their operation;

and others still called into question, elsewhere in their periodicals, the suitability of a passionate

response.