ABSTRACT
The arbitrary distinctions drawn between feelings, emotions, affections, passions, and sentiments make it difficult to untangle the 19th-century use of key emotion words. But Victorian 'emotion vocabularies' can be differentiated from earlier and later usage by looking less at individual emotion words but rather at their semantic contexts and the ways certain lexemes are combined. It is also the newest emotion word in the author set of keywords which can be used interchangeably with the other three, feeling, affection, and passion, and therefore perhaps needed longer to enter general usage. The sense of affection as affectation is now obsolete but is still sometimes present in 19th-century usage, thus indicating the possibility of 'faking' feeling. The important relation between passion and literature is illustrated by the fact that in their articles on the passions 18th-century dictionaries and encyclopaedias devote long passages to the role of literature.
