Blush, Britannia: Collective Shame and the Moral Anguish of Empire, 1776–1807

Abstract

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the British public, shaped by Enlightenment values, is thought to have wholly embraced individualism and self-interest. Yet, with increasing conviction and insistence, literature and political discourse of this period made claims about the collective shame and collective moral failure of Britain and the British Empire. Blush, Britannia: Collective Shame and the Moral Anguish of Empire, 1776– 1807 argues that the idea of collective shame represents a critical and much-overlooked aspect of how men and women ‘at home’ in Britain understood the often-remote violence of empire. Although collective shame is a negative emotion, it was nevertheless unifying, contributing to British national identity at a time when the moral aspirations of British imperialism (to spread liberty, civilization, and Christian values) had come to look imperiled amid controversy over slavery and revolutionary violence. Drawing upon a range of sources, including novels, ballads, lyrics, sermons, pamphlets, and parliamentary records, Blush, Britannia traces the deepening significance of collective shame in the literary and political culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, and it examines how writers of the period used literary form to both represent and provoke collective shame in the national and imperial imaginary.The study approaches the idea of collective shame as a source of productive tension for moral theory and literature—something that resists individualism in our theories of emotion, motivates experiments in literary form, and points towards an alternative understanding of British nationhood and imperium as anguishing rather than affirming. Chapter 1 begins with the observation that the sentimentalist philosophy of David Hume and Adam Smith, which sees moral cognition as socially circumscribed, lacks the conceptual resources to understand the idea of collective shame, much less to ascribe shame to an entire society. As a genre, the sentimental, epistolary novel, which required characters to articulate their moral experience in writing, reveals the constraints of Hume’s and Smith’s sentimentalism and, in doing so, opened up new possibilities for representing and reflecting on shame. Chapters 2 and 3 trace the elaboration of these possibilities in the work of the slave trader-turned-abolitionist and evangelical minister John Newton and the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both Newton and Coleridge develop moral frameworks that transcend those of Hume and Smith, drawing on their Protestant spirituality, knowledge of Hebrew scripture, and distinct literary practices to articulate a compelling sense of the collective shame of Britain. Ultimately, the study reveals how imperial violence around 1800 produced an unofficial and shame-filled sense of Britishness that existing scholarship, in its focus on the embodied ‘affect’ or ‘sensibility’ of private individuals and in its preoccupation with the more triumphalist sides of British imperialism, has yet to make legible.