Why do we feel the way we do today? Why do we attach certain words and ideas to our emotions, and why do we deal with difficult feelings using particular therapies, but not others? A Revolution of Feeling traces our modern attitudes to emotion back to a seismic shift at the turn of the nineteenth century; back to what the politician Edmund Burke called ‘the most important of all revolutions…a revolution in sentiments’. During this transformation, one world-view about emotion gave way and a new one was born – and this new landscape was the direct ancestor of our attitudes today. 

Rachel Hewitt goes back in time to before this revolution, to unearth ideas about feeling – what the passions are for, and how we should manage them – that have largely been lost. She reveals an era in which emotion and desire were more important for their social and political functions, than for individual wellbeing (as they are today). Hewitt discovers how five people at the end of the eighteenth century concocted projects that took early attitudes to emotion to their limit. The young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the physician Thomas Beddoes and the first photographer Thomas Wedgwood all thought that the passions were key to reforming sex, education, commerce, politics and medicine, and they devised wildly optimistic schemes to change the world through the emotions.

But, in the final decade of the eighteenth century, the political wind turned and these five projects failed. Feverish optimism gave way to bleak disappointment, and the way we think about need and longing changed forever. A Revolution of Feeling is a vivid and absorbing account of the dramatic end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of an emotional landscape preoccupied by guilt, sin, failure, resignation and repression. It shows how our contemporary ideas about emotion were born out of this shift – and Hewitt articulates an impassioned defence of the lost age, in which feeling and desire were urgent political issues.

Rachel Hewitt was awarded a Gladstone’s Library Political Writing Residency for A Revolution of Feeling.