Frances Greville’s A Prayer for Indifference The Limits of Sentiment

Abstract

The present article considers Frances Greville’s poem A Prayer for Indifference as the centre of a debate around the nature of the emotions and their social and cultural roles in the eighteenth century. Greville questions the models of the philosophers of sensibility, in particular Francis Hutcheson’s, and, drawing on Shakespeare’s newly prominent status, puts forward literature as an alternative.