ABSTRACT
In the competition to produce the best plan for the Magdalen charity, we saw how Hanway accuses Welch of thinking the Dingley plan “ romantic.”2
The primary denition of this adjective in Johnson’s Dictionary is “resembling the tales of romance; wild,” and is backed up by illustrations which seem absolutely to describe Hanway’s usage.3 Johnson quotes from Joseph Addison: “Zeal for the good of one’s country a party of men have represented, as chimerical and romantick”; and then from Keil on how “Philosophers have maintained opinions, more absurd than any of the most fabulous poets or romantick writers.”4 More than anything, then, this usage seems to imply a quixotic view of the world, and specically the world of politics seen through the lens of romance. Indeed, the OED offers “ quixotic” as part of its own denition of the term. Quite how “romantic” and indeed “quixotic” the Dingley/Hanway scheme was – both in the sense of its ignorance of well-grounded observation and more literally in terms of its novelistic heritage – becomes clear when its ideas are either compared to histories of prostitution at the time or traced back through the pages of the sentimental novels of the 1740s and 1750s. This chapter will build on the identication of the London Magdalen House as a peculiarly sentimental institution, seeded and nurtured in the fertile cultural soil of mid-century, moral-sense economics and latitudinarian religion. It will argue that, in relation to the Magdalen House, a signicant component of this rich cultural soil came from the pages of the sentimental novels, which Richardson, in particular, had made so popular.
