A Revolution in Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind By Rachel Hewitt
This ambitious and engrossing book expands and explores the familiar history of the intellectual disillusion primarily caused by the ‘failure’ of the French Revolution. Rachel Hewitt, author of a much-admired history of Ordnance Survey map-making, proposes that the moral, political and philosophical reassessments, precipitated by this trauma, ‘forged’, as her subtitle proclaims, ‘the modern mind’. It’s a contentious thesis, complex and porous, but there is no doubt as to the fascination of the issues raised or the depth of thoughtful scholarship Hewitt deploys as she follows its trajectory. The text alternates between three central narratives: the comedy of Coleridge and Southey’s aborted scheme for a communistic settlement in Pennsylvania and its aftermath; the tragedy of Mary Wollstonecraft, which reads like an eighteenth-century Doris Lessing novel; and the not altogether unfruitful failure of Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institute and its experiments with the science of hydraulics. Through it all is woven...
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