Spaces for Feeling : Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650-1850

Spaces for Feeling explores how English and Scottish people experienced sociabilities and socialities from 1650 to 1850, and investigates their operation through emotional practices and particular spaces. It highlights the forms, practices, and memberships of these spaces for feeling and charts the shifting conceptualisations of emotions that underpinned them. From clubs and societies to families and households, essays examine how emotional practices could sustain and create particular associations and social communities. Case studies analyse a series of contemporary sources to produce a dynamic new vision of how communities were shaped and cohered through social practices of feeling.

Spaces for Feeling explores how English and Scottish people experienced sociabilities and socialities from 1650 to 1850, and investigates their operation through emotional practices and particular spaces. The collection highlights the forms, practices, and memberships of these varied spaces for feeling in this two hundred year period and charts the shifting conceptualisations of emotions that underpinned them.

The authors employ historical, literary, and visual history approaches to analyse a series of literary and art works, emerging forms of print media such as pamphlet propaganda, newspapers, and periodicals, and familial and personal sources such as letters, in order to tease out how particular communities were shaped and cohered through distinct emotional practices in specific spaces of feeling. This collection studies the function of emotions in group formations in Britain during a period that has attracted widespread scholarly interest in the creation and meaning of sociabilities in particular. From clubs and societies to families and households, essays here examine how emotional practices could sustain particular associations, create new social communities and disrupt the capacity of a specific cohort to operate successfully.

This timely collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of the history of emotions.