Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century Before Depression, 1660–1800 Allan Ingram, Stuart Sim, Clark Lawlor, Richard Terry, John Baker, Leigh Wetherall-Dickson Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century Also by Allan Ingram CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF MADNESS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITING: Representing the Insane (with Michelle Faubert) PATTERNS OF MADNESS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: A Reader (ed) THE MADHOUSE OF LANGUAGE: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century Also by Stuart Sim THE DISCOURSE OF SOVEREIGNTY, HOBBES TO FIELDING: The State of Nature and the Nature of the State (with David Walker) THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL ISSUES NEGOTIATIONS WITH PARADOX: Narrative Practice and Narrative Form in Bunyan and Defoe Also by Clark Lawlor CONSUMPTION AND LITERATURE: The Making of the Romantic Disease SCIENCES OF BODY AND MIND (ed) Also by Richard Terry MOCK-HEROIC FROM BUTLER TO COWPER: An English Genre and Discourse THE PLAGIARISM ALLEGATION IN ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM BUTLER TO STERNE POETRY AND THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH LITERARY PAST, 1660–1781 Also by Leigh Wetherall-Dickson THE WORKS OF LADY CAROLINE LAMB (3 volumes, co-ed. with Paul Douglass) Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century Before Depression, 1660–1800 By Allan Ingram, Stuart Sim, Clark Lawlor, Richard Terry, John Baker, Leigh Wetherall-Dickson March 19, 2011 6:50 MAC/MELAN Page-iii 9780230_246317_01_prex © Allan Ingram, Stuart Sim, Clark Lawlor, Richard Terry, John Baker, Leigh Wetherall-Dickson 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–24631–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Melancholy experience in literature of the long eighteenth century : before depression, 1660–1800 / by Allan Ingram ...[et al.]. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–24631–7 (hardback) 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 3. Melancholy in literature. 4. Depression, Mental, in literature. 5. Mental illness in literature. 6. Depression, Mental—History—18th century. 7. Depression, Mental—History—17th century. I. Ingram, Allan. II. Title. PR448.M44M45 2011 820.9005—dc22 2011004139 10987654321 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Contents Acknowledgements vii Authors’ Biographies viii Introduction: Depression before Depression 1 Allan Ingram and Stuart Sim ‘Before Depression 1660–1800’ 1 Cultural inheritance 3 Structure and topics 19 1 Fashionable Melancholy 25 Clark Lawlor The core problem – the paradox of fashionable disease 25 Definitions of melancholy 27 Symptoms and narratives 33 Myths and realities of melancholy for Johnson and Boswell: masculine melancholies 41 Women and melancholy genius 44 Tissot: class, gender and fashionable melancholy in the Enlightenment 46 From fashionable sensibility to Romantic vitalism – melancholy medicine and literature 51 2 Philosophical Melancholy 54 Richard Terry Languages of mood 54 Coping with sorrow 60 Melancholy philosophy 65 The rewards of indifference 74 3 ‘Strange Contrarys’: Figures of Melancholy in Eighteenth-Century Poetry 83 John Baker ‘Unhappy happiness’ 83 On John Pomfret: ‘The dark Recesses of the Mind’ 87 On Anne Finch: ‘Thro’ thy black Jaundice I all Objects see’ 91 On Matthew Green: ‘Laugh and be well’ 94 v vi Contents The hence and hail mode 97 On Edward Young: ‘The great Magician’s dead!’ 101 The world as graveyard 105 ‘No Futurity’ 107 On William Cowper: ‘such a destin’d wretch as I’ 108 4 Despair, Melancholy and the Novel 114 Stuart Sim John Bunyan and the fictionalization of despair 116 Daniel Defoe: despair and the isolated self 120 Despairing of patriarchy: Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney and Mary Hays 123 Henry and Sarah Fielding: despair at human nature 130 Laurence Sterne: melancholy as default 133 William Godwin: despair without religious solace 136 James Hogg: deconstructing a genre 137 Conclusion: the secularization of despair 139 5 Melancholy, Medicine, Mad Moon and Marriage: Autobiographical Expressions of Depression 142 Leigh Wetherall-Dickson Middle-class mind, body and soul: memoirs of ‘A Private Gentleman’ 145 Religious despair and medical desire: Anne Dutton 152 Matrimonial misery: Elizabeth Freke 157 ‘Mad moon’ and masculine melancholy: Edmund Harrold 164 Balancing the books 168 6 Deciphering Difference: A Study in Medical Literacy 170 Allan Ingram Being normal 170 ‘Doctoring the mind’ 173 A promiscuity of symptoms, a plethora of cures 180 Profits and losses 185 A model physician 186 A secular priesthood 189 How to read 192 The study of life 200 Notes 203 Bibliography 228 Index 240 Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust for its funding of the research project, ‘Before Depression, 1660–1800’, between 2006 and 2009. This enabled us to mount an ambitious pro- gramme of activities and to prepare a series of academic publications, of which this is one. Our website, <www.beforedepression.com>,gives further details. We are also grateful to the School of Arts & Social Sciences at the University of Northumbria for resources and encouragement in many aspects of the project. In addition, we should like to thank all those who participated in the various ‘Before Depression’ events, including lecturers, conference participants and members of the public, and who thereby made it a richer and more rewarding experience for all of us. Several individuals gave generously of their help with the present vol- ume: Diane Buie, Hélène Dachez, Michelle Faubert, Charlotte Holden, Pauline Morris and Palgrave’s unnamed reader, who provided detailed and positive suggestions: to all, our thanks and appreciation. All authors’ royalties for this volume are being donated to MIND. vii Authors’ Biographies John Baker is Maître de conférences (Senior Lecturer) in English at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He has published in French and English on themes associated with the writings of Edward Young and the Night Thoughts, and more generally on poetry of the eighteenth century. His interests include eighteenth-century critical theory and the history of ideas, and he is currently working on a study of ‘philosoph- ical’ poems of the early eighteenth century. He has also written on twentieth-century French literature, in particular on Georges Bataille. Allan Ingram is Professor of English at the University of Northumbria. He has published widely in the field of eighteenth-century studies and particularly on literature and madness. His main works include mono- graphs on James Boswell, on Swift and Pope, and on madness and writing, as well as two edited collections of source material, Voices of Madness (Sutton, 1997) and Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Cen- tury (Liverpool University Press, 1998). His most recent book is Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth-Century Writing (Palgrave, now Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, with Michelle Faubert). He was Director of the Leverhulme Trust ‘Before Depression’ project. He is co-general edi- tor and volume co-editor for the forthcoming Depression and Melancholy 1660–1800 set (Pickering and Chatto, 2012). Clark Lawlor is Reader in English Literature at the University of Northumbria, and has published many works on literature and medicine – including Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Palgrave, now Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), which was shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English book prize 2006–08. At present he is writing Depression: The Biography (Oxford University Press, 2011). Stuart Sim retired as Professor of Critical Theory at the Univer- sity of Sunderland in 2008, and is now Visiting Professor of Crit- ical Theory and Long Eighteenth-Century English Literature in the Department of Humanities, University of Northumbria. He has pub-