ABSTRACT
Bureaucratic records, especially the records of social institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, brim with emotion. Codified, flat, ascribed or marginalised, emotions run through the dry notations of officials and record-keepers. This short chapter suggests that institutional records can be very relevant for histories of emotion, offering ways to find out about policies shaping emotional experience; the attitudes of officials towards the emotions of others; the utterances of those affected by institutions whose emotional experience is otherwise hard to locate; and finally, the emotional culture or norms of the institution itself. The chapter foregrounds the rich potential for interpreting past emotion in these records, also highlighting some methods and examples of specific works of history.
