ABSTRACT
During the late 1750s, when Britain was deep into the war with France, polite-sentimental accounts of the world dominate cultural representation; even the prostitute is deemed recuperable for a narrative of progress. And yet, I have argued, the ghosts of classical republicanism were never quite dispelled and, as the century progressed, these ghosts were conjured back into existence by the emergence and increasing authority of a primitivist, elegiac version of sentimentality. We nd this version rst in the novels of Samuel Richardson but its fullest articulation is in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Here the moral sense, or sensibility as it is increasingly termed, is imagined as existing prior to society and destroyed by contact with it. Like the notes of classical republicanism that sound occasionally in the writings of Hanway, elegiac notes are present from the start in the Magdalen literature. The conclusion to Dingley’s Proposals (1758), where the Magdalen House is described as “an happy Asylum, and desirable Retreat,” and not “a House of Correction,” seems pregnant with distrust of the world.2 Indeed, the historian Donna Andrew characterises the views of the founders as marked by “bucolic nostalgia.”3 In Andrew’s view, “Hanway seemed to speak for the values of an earlier time, a time before the growth of commerce, the growth of luxury, and the growth of an unattached, uncared-for poor.”4 Andrew’s account seems to me to exaggerate the presence of primitivist sentimentality in the founding literature of the Magdalen House. In the late 1750s this strain only ourished with any vigour in those ctional accounts which surround the institution. It can be identied, for example, in The Histories of Some of the Penitents, which I will discuss later in the chapter, and in Edward Jerningham’s poem The Magdalens which carries the subtitle an elegy (1763). Yet, by the late 1760s and 1770s this primitivist version of sentimentality had increasingly colonised the cultural world beyond the covers of the novel. Usage around the Magdalen House, and “Hospital” as it would become in 1769, was no exception. It was the rising dominance of Rousseauvian sentimentality, I will argue, that increasingly pushed the Magdalen charity into the arms of evangelical religion.
