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Book Reviews Mary Fairclough. The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Cul­ ture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 294. $105. Edmund Burke was not alone in fearing a quick transit from the demotic to the demonic. Across the revolutionary age, when democracy seemed to many a synonym for mobocracy, the cumulative force that results when people gather was hardly a less pressing issue than the fate of the European monarchies. But what exactly happens when people come together? Or perhaps: what exactly happens to people when they come together? It was in part against the pathologization of crowd behavior by Le Bon and Freud that a half-century ago George Rude, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and others sought to render the crowd as something more (or less) than the primeval sublime. Their work fostered a subgenre in eighteenth- and nine­ teenth century studies, with significant contributions by Mark Harrison (1988), Nicholas Rogers (1998), John Plotz (2000) and others. Moving this line ofinquiry in a productive new direction, Mary Fairclough’s new work (shortlisted for the BARS first book prize) asks what the concept ofsympa­ thy might have to tell us about Romantic-era understandings (and misun­ derstandings) of group behavior. The Romantic Crowd opens with a survey of sympathy according to the Scottish Enlightenment. Tracking David Hume’s growing unease with the unruly potential ofsympathy from A Treatise ofHuman Nature (1739) to Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Fairclough observes that the “conception of sympathy in the Treatise as a universal, dynamic me­ dium of communication proves extremely difficult to sustain,” so that by the time of the Enquiry it has become a “phenomenon that requires con­ trol” (27). This wariness is further registered in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which reveals a sharpened sense of sympathy’s dis­ ruptive potential. Well before 1789, in other words, we find a recognition that sympathy as a medium of sociality could enable social unrest no less than charitable concern. It was with the fires across the Channel that this recognition grew into urgent admonitions. We might not be surprised that Burke smelled the smoke. But Fair­ clough’s second chapter also makes the case that Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and John Thelwall were variously attuned to and wary of sympathy’s wild power. Sympathy was just fine SiR, 34 (Winter 2015) 569 570 BOOK REVIEWS when it prompted middle class regard for individuated victims of industrial capitalism and colonial slavery, but reformers quailed when the objects of sympathy became participants in sympathetic collectivities. Wollstonecraft and Godwin occupied a particularly fraught middle ground between hope and fear, eager to welcome democratic energy but not chary ofarticulating fears about its potential to overawe individual reason. Fairclough makes a welcome turn to the understudied Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794) to demonstrate Wollstonecraft’s apprehension about sym­ pathy’s coercive threat, but it is Thelwall who anchors this chapter, and who is singled out as something of a hero in The Romantic Crowd (the book’s cover, a detail from Gillray’s Copenhagen House [1795], shows a cari­ catured Thelwall virtually ranting Fairclough’s title as though it were a speech bubble). Thelwall matters for Fairclough because she is interested in the contemporary use of physiological figures to think about sympathy: it spreads like a “contagion” through the public body, even as it models the internal working of the human body itself (when organs fall out of sympa­ thy, according to contemporary medical writers, systemic disorder results). With at least one eye on the scientific vanguard, Thelwall offers a rare ex­ ample of an approach to “sympathetic communication” that addresses “its physiological properties and their potential political effects without reduc­ ing them to pathology” (107). Thelwall’s work provides Fairclough with a helpful instance of sympathy conceived neutrally as both a social and a so­ matic process, but his readiness to accept sympathetic communication in materialist terms was not representative ofhis moment. By the 1790s “sym­ pathetic communication understood according to physiological models” was “almost uniformly condemned by conservative and reformist com­ mentators alike” (121). And so Thelwall, with a flexible allowance for ma­ terialism...

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