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Melancholy [ Feelings and Emotions ]

… Abstract While melancholy was essentially a solitary affliction, one that traditionally shunned society and regarded its activities as … by religious counsellors and also, increasingly, by medical professionals. Writers exploring various aspects of melancholy included Shakespeare, Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy , and the poet Thomas Gray in such works as Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard . Concepts > Feelings and …

Solitude [ Feelings and Emotions ]

… century. There was no vocabulary for loneliness in this period, but solitude was a state often associated with melancholy and thus frequently employed in a negative sense. A range of eighteenth-century writers warned about the … Concepts > Feelings and Emotions Keywords loneliness Religion Social relations Conversation Gender roles Politeness melancholy privacy In 1711 Joseph Addison spoke of his vision for his new periodical, The Spectator . In his desire to … affect spiritual, mental, and physical health. The frontispiece to Robert Burton’s seminal work, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), explicitly linked solitude and melancholy, with a visual depiction of solitude. Here, solitude was …

Valentine Greatrakes [ Science / Art and Literature ]

… gestures of the laying on of hands, with its ready-made power to evoke the heavier emotional moods of awe, pathos, melancholy, terror and horror, proved to be attractive to large audiences. Greatrakes’s healing the king’s evil by touch …

Scottish Enlightenment [ Political and Moral philosophy ]

… and situations he termed ‘ unsociable, ’ a quality he encountered in London and elsewhere and which prompted a degree of melancholy that made life almost unbearable. 2 But the passage also opens a window onto the wider subject of sociability …

Ranelagh [ Sports & Leisure ]

… culture. Views by contemporaries were widely divergent 2 ; in Smollett’s epistolary novel Humphry Clinker (1771), the melancholy uncle Matthew Bramble visiting London writes satirically about Ranelagh, ‘One half of the company are …

Notebook writing (and Romanticism) [ Diaries & Letters / Reading & Writing ]

… spaces on the page, we are given a glimpse of this conflictual or fluctuating sociability: ‘ Saturday 15th […] We had a melancholy letter from Coleridge just at Bed-time – . It distressed me very much & I resolved upon going to Keswick the …