ABSTRACT
The emotions are always coupled with what Rom Harre has called the ‘local moral order’ of a given society. In the 19th century, this moral order consists of the moral, social and religious assumptions of that part of society which was – to use Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology – to accumulate the greatest cultural capital: the middle classes. The emotions can serve as a point of distinction because of their importance for the development of such a habitus. Thus, religion is based on and likened to feeling, as the following discussion shows, thereby creating a permitted space for the emotions. Teaching Christian values and experiencing religious feelings allowed the individual a certain space for his or her emotionality, if only one permitting the cultivation of such ‘positive’ emotions as sympathy or benevolence. Many Victorian writers explicitly emphasise the necessity of managing one’s emotions and thereby maintaining social order.
