Rachel Hewitt - A Revolution of Feeling The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind

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"In the 1790s, Britain underwent what the politician Edmund Burke called 'the most importamt of all revolutions ... a revolution in sentiments'. Inspired by the bold beginnings opf the French Revolution, British radicals dreamt of founding new political worlds. The Enlightenment's wildest hopes crested in the utopian projects of optimists such as the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the physician Thomas Beddoes and the first photographer Thomas Wedgwood - all of whom sought to reform sex, education, commerce, politics and medicine by revolutionising attitudes to emotions and desires. But as the French Revolution descended into bloody Terror and the British government quashed radical political activities, feerish optimism turned to bleak disappointment. ... As the revolutionary proposals of 1790s British radicals collapsed, that failure resulted in a profound cultural revolution: a revolution of feeling. Every society, in every age, feels differently, and from the seismic shifts of 1790s Britain emerged the contours of our contemporary attitudes to need, longing, and emotion."--Jacket.

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