Hatred and the Eighteenth-Century Writer in Britain

Abstract

Building on literary and historical work on emotions, this dissertation offers a new history of eighteenth-century feeling. Working across genres to reconstruct how writers from Alexander Pope to Frances Burney experienced and wrote about hateful feelings, it argues that the proliferation of print and growing willingness to write and publicize the self across the century must be understood not only as a possible agent and opportunity for good-natured sympathy and civility, but also for animosity. Chapter one, on the infamous feud between Pope and his enemies Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Hervey, shows how poetic hatred, much like poetic love, exposes the poet’s vulnerabilities. Chapter two, on Johnson and “good hating,” addresses the moral hazards of hatred in conversation, criticism, and biography, while chapter three turns to one of those biographers, James Boswell, to consider autobiography, confession, and religious self-hatred. Chapter four, on Horace Walpole’s letters, focuses on the styles, moral value, and social risks of hateful feelings among the elite, and chapter five reads Burney’s much-maligned final novel The Wanderer (1814) in terms of the limits put on how women, servants, and the laboring poor expressed their hateful feelings. While grounded in eighteenth-century texts, the dissertation also explores the role of hateful feelings in critical history: these feelings turn out to be vital not only in eighteenth-century literary culture, but also in the history of eighteenth-century studies.