Fear

‘London: A Pilgrimage’ by William Blanchard Jerrold (1826-84),  Private Collection [1]

With the rise of  cultural history, there has also been a growth into the exploration of emotions through the study of ’emotionology’. Peter Stearns has defined emotionology as the examination of the way different societies have come to recognise and identify emotions as well as the history of how emotional standards have changed.[2]  Any study of emotions and emotional displays, relies heavily on the examination of emotional vocabulary.[3] Stearn’s examination into emotionology is pertinent when exploring the history of fear. Joanna Bourke has also explored fear or, more specifically, how fear has been written about within modern society.[4]  Bourke noted an important distinction between the emotion of fear and what can be understood as anxiety.[5] Bourke concluded that the concept of fear is highly subjective, and therefore more of an individual sensation, whereas anxiety was something that was essentially socially-created.[6]

In the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, the urban poor were largely  portrayed as a large undefinable mass. The movement of workers into the cities had turned the urban environment into a highly undesirable place for members of the middling classes.[7] In their historical explorations of the ‘slum’, historians have tended to stick with the well-trodden paths of studying the economics and the moral principles of slum-dwellers. [8]

Jean Delumeau has examined emotions within the early modern period and suggested that the rise of science and rational thought led to the decline of irrational fear and a rise in more realistic and understandable fear. [9] For the Victorians, the incomprehensibility of the ‘slum’ provided the fearful stimuli which became the fodder for sensationalist reporting. This journalism turned ‘the slum’ into a place of fear.

This fear took various forms. One such fear grew out of the mounting assertion that the inhabitants of the slums were naturally violent, unpoliced and ungovernable. Fear of the urban slums also manifested itself through the fear of disease. Poor sanitary conditions had become a major problem which not only affected the slums but spilled out into the wider Victorian society, such as in the Cholera outbreak in London in 1848. James Epstein has pointed out that in Victorian Britain, the maintenance of social order was imperative.[10] The very existence of ‘the slum’ offended ideas of Victorian respectability and gave rise to increasing anxiety about the threat to the existing social order.

What is striking throughout these cases is how class, and the relationship between  classes, was central to these fears. However, throughout the sources, the rhetoric of fear is not  used just to convey anxiety, but as an instrument of change.

Chloe Birkin, Jacob Lovatt and Gemma Renshaw

 

References

[1] William Blanchard Jerrold, ‘London: A Pilgrimage’ 1872 (Engraving), Available online at: https://www-bridgemaneducation-com.ezproxy.derby.ac.uk/en/search?filter_text=victorian+slums Accessed: 25^th November 2017

[2] Stearns, Peter N., and Carol Z. Stearns. “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards.” The American Historical Review, 90:4 (1985), p. 824.

[3] Gillet, Grant and Harre, Rom., The Discursive Mind (London: Sage Publications, 1994),  p.148

[4] Bourke, Joanna., ‘Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History’, History Workshop Journal, 55 (2003), p.122

[5] Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety’, p.117

[6] Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety’, p.132

[7] Perkin, Harold. ‘Short notices’, English Historical Review, 89:352 (1974), p. 676

[8] Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety, p.112

[9] Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety’, p.112

[10] Epstein, James. ‘Victorian Subjects: Introduction’, Journal of British Studies, 34:3 (1995), p. 296