Changing Sentiments and the Magdalen Hospital: Luxury, Virtue and the Senses in Eighteenth-Century Culture by Mary Peace (review)

When the charity movement to reform penitent prostitutes hit Britain in the mid-eighteenth century, there was no question that "Magdalen" would appear in its name. Aligning prostitutes with the sympathetic biblical figure was never at issue, but the noun for the charity was. In the decade before its official incorporation as a "Hospital" in 1769, it was variously referred to as: house, hospital, asylum, penitentiary, charity, institution. Does the shifting designation matter? Mary Peace persuasively argues that it does in Changing Sentiments, her deliciously deep dive into the Magdalen Hospital's textual archive. Peace unearths the subtle differences between the various terms—"asylum," for instance, connotes a retreat from the world, whereas "hospital" denotes a temporary place to heal—and she traces the ideological contestations that each term represents. This nuanced reading, which focuses on complexity rather than homogeneity, is why Changing Sentiments will now be the definitive scholarly text on the Magdalen movement. Many scholars (including myself) dedicate chapters and essays to the Magdalen Hospital's cultural history and, in so doing, tend to paint the charity with a broad brush, often placing the institution within a Foucauldian disciplinary history in which female sexuality is managed for the good of nation and empire (one historian in 1917 proudly proclaimed it to be "the mother Penitentiary of our Empire"). Peace's book demonstrates why detailed scholarly work in the humanities still matters: by delving into the complexity of the Magdalen movement, Peace refuses to categorize the institution as politically reactionary or progressive, holding off moral judgment and complicating the ideological terrain.

The most general and persuasive argument the book makes is that, while the Magdalen Hospital is a product of sentimental culture, what "sentiment" signifies changes in the literature, revealing ideological contestations between various cultural strains that loosely map onto the distinctions between a moral-sense philosophy and a Rousseauvian sensibility and between a Latitudinarian theology and a Methodist or evangelical belief. These differing conceptions of sentimentalism translate into at least two political projects for reforming prostitutes, which are readable in the Hospital's founding documents. In response to the 1758 prize competition sponsored by the Society for Encouraging Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, ten concerned citizens, including John Fielding, Robert Dingley, and Saunders Welch, submitted plans for a charity that would address the problem of prostitution. Peace describes the rivalry between Dingley's and Welch's plans as one between two visions for the Hospital: an optimistic vision, in which prostitutes were imagined as sympathetic victims of circumstances in need of reform, and a pessimistic vision of a workhouse for sinners in search of penitence. The Hospital was eventually founded on Dingley's optimistic vision, but in the longue durée Welch's vision won out.

Peace traces the optimistic vision of the Magdalen Hospital to Shaftesbury's and David Hume's beliefs in an innate moral sense, one shared by all humans (including, most radically, by prostitutes). Moral-sense philosophy underlies the secular humanism that inspired the major benevolent institutions of the mid-century, and it is also, Peace importantly underscores, fundamentally attached to the new commercial culture and to a progressive view that luxury refines manners and arts. For the optimists, life is getting better because the world is wealthier, morals and manners are improving, and we can eradicate prostitution through sympathetic reform. For the pessimists, the world corrupts and evil lurks in all sinners. With a wonderful chapter on "Prostitute Memoirs, Luxury and the Fall of Rome," Peace links the evangelical side of the Magdalen movement to an anxiety that luxury will not lead to progress and that it signals, as it did in Rome, the downfall of civilization. Peace reads Rousseauvian primitivism as containing a similar but secular version of the Fall of Rome thesis. Whether it is romantic sensibility or evangelical religion animating William Dodd's early novel The...