| Abstract: | Could a man of science be sentimental in an age of objectivity, when emotions were largely purged from the field of Victorian science, and feelings themselves defined as animal instincts and reflex mechanisms? This essay addresses the question through Darwin's work on the expression of emotions, and the relationship between his work and his own emotional experience, with particular attention to grief and tears. An old woman in a railway carriage is suddenly overcome with a painful recollection, perhaps that of a long lost child – her mouth becomes ever so slightly contracted, her countenance falls, her eyes suffuse with tears … . An opthalmic surgeon perseveres with his treatise on the physiology of weeping while mourning the loss of his daughter … . With difficulty, a mother prolongs her infant son's screaming in order to record the shape of his mouth for a family friend and famous naturalist … . Her observations later appear in a work on emotional expression (Darwin's), together with photographs of sobbing children, and faces of a psychiatric patient charged with electrodes. Such subject matter, presented in correspondence, private journals, and print, suggest that science and sentimentality could form a more reciprocal pair, where observation was conducted in a sentimental setting, the feelings of observers regulated but not withheld, processed by an experimental regime, and then reinserted in the domain of print, reconfiguring the sentimental for Victorian readers. |
