ABSTRACT
According to John Keble’s Lectures on Poetry, poetry functions as ‘a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man: which gives healing relief to secret mental emotion, yet without detriment to modest reserve: and, while giving scope to enthusiasm, yet rules it with order and due control’. However, the focus of this chapter clearly lies on the emotionology of the Victorian period, since the analysis is largely text-based. Rather than limiting the discussion of 19th-century feelings to fictional works, the Victorian discourses on emotions need to be described as an enormous array of texts in which different concepts from various genres interpenetrate one another. The French historian Lucien Febvre issued a rallying cry for the historical study of emotions in the early 1940s, pleading the cause for this ‘attractive subject’. Wherever possible, information on a text's publishing history has been included because this illustrates who had access to the text and helps to contextual historically author analysis of discourses on emotions.
