Fashionable melancholy

Abstract

We know that melancholy could be a murderous condition for the sufferer in the eighteenth century, much as depression can be in our own time - a large part of this volume attests to the profound misery that melancholy and its cognates caused to people rich and poor, male and female, young and old. Nevertheless, the student of eighteenth-century melancholy is faced with a problem: for much of the period, melancholy was frothily fashionable, a condition that often seemed less of an illness and more of a blessing for the budding poet, wilting lady wishing to show off her latest nightdress, or anyone who desired to seem in the slightest bit sensitive or clever. This chapter tackles the thorny issue of melancholy’s fashionability head-on, suggests reasons why the apparent paradox of such a phenomenon existed in the period, and clears the way for an understanding of how a positive interpretation of melancholy might live alongside the negative ones that seem to be a more logical response to the woes of the mind - at least intuitively.