ABSTRACT
As we have seen, in the second half of the eighteenth century a primitivist, Rousseauvian understanding of sentiment came increasingly to overwrite polite moral-sense ideas. One of the most striking effects of this cultural shift was the problematisation of the moral-sense truism that the “goodness” of one’s heart can be performed: that effective performance can be the expression of a feeling heart. In the primitivist tradition the rened moral sense is substituted by the sensibility – the native effusions of the uncorrupted heart – and performance and sensibility are opposing terms. Performance is associated with the cynical strategies of self-serving libertines and sensibility with exquisite moral feelings which most usually render their possessor unt for worldly success. In the wake of the increasing currency of Rousseauvian sentimentality, polite moral-sense ideas will become more and more closely identied with libertine strategy and this association will be naturalised in British culture after the publication and success of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768). The London Magdalen House was fashioned at the height of polite moral-sense sentimental culture in 1758, but it was reinvented as the London Magdalen Hospital in 1769 in the wake of a cultural shift which had seen sentimental performance re-imagined as libertinism and sensibility viewed as increasingly at odds with worldly success. This chapter traces the increasing problematisation of performance in the literature and culture surrounding the London Magdalen institutions.
