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Describing an emotional culture offers the challenge of identifying common elements in discussions of particular emotions and in varied kinds of popular media. Explaining how this culture arose and what needs it seems to have filled forms the next step in analysis, challenging in its own right. These first two steps are meaningless, however, unless a third can be completed as well: indicating that the emotional culture had genuine resonance, affecting the way people believed and behaved.

Victorian emotionology had impact. This is certain despite the impossibility of ever demonstrating with full precision exactly how many people merely mouthed certain beliefs or exactly how they carried belief into action. More middle-class parents continued deliberately to use fear in childrearing than Victorian standards recommended, but a growing number accepted these standards at least in part, either changing disciplinary behavior or regretting anachronistic impulses or both; but how many fell into which camp cannot be determined. We do not know how many young, middle-class men actually experienced the transcendence of Victorian love or how many sustained the passion after marriage (when even the prescriptive literature suggested some lapse from perfection).²³ Yet without claiming exactitude, it is possible to demonstrate impact. Victorian emotional culture, distinctive in itself, helped shape a distinctive emotional reality.

The best means of sorting through the impact of an emotional culture is to proceed through three layers, the first of which is, frankly, the easiest. If an emotional culture does not affect public arrangements, then it is scarcely worth talking about. People responsible for translating emotional standards into laws and organized activities inevitably reflect the values preached around them, whether they internalize these values in their own emotional lives or not. The fact that this first impact is obvious—public culture and organizational behavior inevitably coincide to a degree—should not obscure its importance. Victorian experience was shaped in significant ways by changes that responded to or reflected the new emotional values. Even if no private echoes of these values could be found—which is not the case—the salience of Victorian emotionology for “real life” would be amply demonstrated—along with, admittedly, a strong dose of hypocrisy. As will be shown, the first layer of cultural impact, at the level of institutional response, displays clearly the Victorian impulse not simply toward repression of undesirable emotional impulses but also toward the promotion of essential intensity.

In 1904 Andrew Carnegie set up a trust for the Carnegie Hero Fund to provide moneys for people who had been injured performing heroic acts, or for survivors of people killed in such acts:

We live in a heroic age. Not seldom are we thrilled by deeds of heroism where men or women are injured or lose their lives in attempting to preserve or rescue their fellows; such the heroes of civilization. The heroes of barbarism maimed or killed theirs.²⁴

Carnegie’s fund followed on a common newspaper genre that had developed by the 1890s, featuring stories of ordinary people who, as one journalist put it, “were suddenly confronted with the question of whether or not they would risk death to save the lives of others” and describing “the manner in which they met, without preparation or forethought, that supreme moment.” Feature stories and the special fund for heroes obviously institutionalized Victorian concepts of facing and conquering fear. They institutionalized the stuff of boys’ stories, emphasizing the ability to experience intense emotion and channel it toward socially useful ends. They highlighted the importance of spontaneity and impulse against any Victorian temptation to stodgy caution. The purity of the emotional experience was primary.²⁵

The Carnegie Fund was not a transformative organization in America, though thanks to the wonders of capitalist investment it survives to this day. But along with the public expressions of belief in courageous mastery of fear written into boy scout literature, newspaper stories, and other genres, the fund did concretely express the extent to which Victorian emotional values could be translated into action. Some Victorians, clearly, were willing to put money where their emotional commitments lay.

Victorian emotionology translated abundantly into sports. There are all sorts of reasons for the rise of sports in the nineteenth-century United States, but among them, and particularly important in the distinctively American enthusiasm for introducing sports into school programs and other sites of youth socialization, was the profound belief that sports helped translate emotional goals into the character-building process. Sports like football or boxing in particular gave young men an opportunity to retain the spark of anger but direct it to particular, appropriate targets; and the same sports offered opportunities for the conquest of fear. The prescriptive literature of the late nineteenth century made abundant connections between sports interests and proper training in handling the dangerous emotions, and sports advocates did the same in touting boxing lessons for middle-class boys or high school football teams. While sports were meant to civilize working-class boys, whose aggressiveness needed restraint, they were no less important in preventing middle-class feminization. Women’s sports, correspondingly, were recommended more ambivalently and for more exclusively physical benefits—the relevant emotional lessons were missing.²⁶

Changes in the law explicitly echoed the Victorian shifts in emotional culture. The incorporation of jealous rage into a crime-of-passion defense in selected murder trials has already been noted. By the 1890s, however, most states were rejecting the idea of passion-induced insanity, denouncing it, as in the case of the North Carolina Supreme Court, as an encouragement to lawlessness and bloodshed. However, juries, particularly in the South, maintained the tradition, and some states like Texas passed justifiable homicide statutes confirming the right to kill for jealousy when a husband discovered the act of adultery, “provided the killing takes place before the parties to the act have separated.”²⁷ (The assumption of accuracy in shooting, so that the wife might be spared, was a tribute to the Texan spirit.) Southern culture, then, refused to resolve this tension between restraint and passion.²⁸

Penology reflected the growing hostility to anger-based vengeance in a number of respects. The decline of corporal punishment and its confinement to private rather than public places mirrored growing embarrassment at vengeful motives. The rise of the prison movement and experiments with presumably guilt-inducing isolation provided an emotional basis for treating criminals. Obviously, a host of other motives went into the shift in punishment, and the hopes pinned to incarceration were soon muddied by the realities of prison life and the impurity of social motives. But an emotional shift against shame and tainted anger and toward the role of guilt in rehabilitation continued to find some expression. Later nineteenth-century movements that acknowledged appropriate anger against criminals, as in vigilante movements, reflected the complexities of the middle-class outlook, which had never entirely converted to early Victorian promptings about human innocence, but they also reflected the new acceptance of the idea of channeling anger toward the service of justice.²⁹

Love also met the law, contributing to the evolution of divorce provisions and breach-of-promise suits. From the mid—nineteenth century onward, American law increasingly acknowledged a version of torts targeted at alienation of affections.³⁰ Such a suit could be directed against an individual who purposefully alienated the affections of another’s spouse. The suits obviously expressed proprietary attitudes toward marriage (male and female alike), but they also emphasized the mental anguish caused by loss of a spouse’s or a fiancé’s love. There was no particular reference to material inconvenience, unlike earlier suits against enticement; the focus was on love and the pain of its disappearance. (Interestingly, this kind of action, common in American courts until the 1930s, did not develop in England despite the many similarities in other legal precedents.) Breach-of-promise actions, though less distinctively American, also increased in the later nineteenth century, based again on the enormity of love, even in courtship, and the bitter loss entailed in its disruption.

Divorce law recognized love through the back door of mental cruelty provisions.³¹ Allowances for divorce in cases of physical cruelty developed only haltingly in various American states in the early nineteenth century; even proof of substantial bodily harm did not always suffice. Further, several courts ordered juries to ignore the question of whether a marriage had “that tenderness and affection which should characterize the matrimonial relation.”³² But the increasing emphasis on positive emotional bonds in marriage, along with beliefs in women’s frailty such that even words could sting, gradually widened the mental cruelty concept from a landmark Pennsylvania decision in 1849 onward. Insults could cause as much suffering as bodily pain, for, as the Massachusetts Supreme Court put it in 1867, a “deeply wounded sensibility and wretchedness of mind can hardly fail to affect the health.”³³ Even the need to claim damage to physical health gradually loosened, so that wounding the “mental feelings” of the other spouse might suffice, as in a path-breaking Kansas Supreme Court decision of 1883. This court connected this trend clearly to the new emotional ideals, noting that “the tendency of modern thought is to elevate the marriage relation and place it upon a higher plane, and to consider it as a mental and spiritual relation, as well as a physical relation.”³⁴ A California court repeated this sentiment in 1890, adding that marriage must now be seen “as a union affecting the mental and spiritual life of the parties to it,” exhibiting “mutual sentiments of love and respect.”³⁵ Once launched, of course, the mental cruelty clause outstripped all competitors as grounds for divorce in states that allowed it, but its popularity testifies to its vagueness rather than to mass adhesion to Victorian love ideals. The point is the thinking that underlay the nineteenth-century court decisions: a good marriage now carried such positive emotional valence that cruelty could be found in mere withholding of affection.

Love of other sorts found institutional expressions that reveal what middle-class people actually thought, not just what public agencies decreed. The monetary value of children soared at the end of the nineteenth century, as expressed in the cost of insurance policies and adoption alike. Just as their economic utility was disappearing, belief in the emotional significance of children inflated their market worth.

Psychohistorians pointed out a decade ago that one obvious expression of Victorian emphasis on intense love, and delight in appropriate manifestations of deep feeling, was the introduction of the honeymoon as a ritual following middle-class marriage. The honeymoon was designed to allow a couple to explore mutual feelings as well as sexual interests, and ideally helped translate the emotional intensity of courtship into more permanent bonds. Here was a significant change in the de facto institution of marriage, fully in keeping with, and presumably supportive of, the Victorian valuation of love.³⁶

Grief, finally, had its outlets as well. Death had rituals, inherited from the past, involving family and community participation in the act of dying whenever possible. Rituals after death more clearly changed in the nineteenth century to accommodate heightened emotion. Victorian funeral procedures, unlike those before or since, were intended both to remove the fear of death and to allow open expression of grief through ritual. Increasing use of cosmetics on corpses, and ultimately the rise of professional undertakers and embalmers who took over the handling of death from bereaved families, expressed mainly the desire to allay fear and to direct emotions away from decaying flesh to the bittersweet grief at a loved one’s loss. The practice of wearing mourning clothing spread. Funerals became more elaborate, cemeteries and tombstones more ornate and evocative. Scholars have legitimately argued over whether the paraphernalia of middle-class Victorian funerals expressed simply growing wealth and status rivalry, or real grief, and the sensible conclusion has been that both were involved.³⁷ Families really did need rituals that would allow them to show their grief. Where child death was involved, funeral monuments of unprecedented size combined with haunting epitaphs to convey the sorrow and love that sent the child to heaven. Gravestone euphemisms about death as sleep, or as going home, expressed the grief-induced need to see death as something less than final.³⁸

Love, anger, grief, fear, jealousy, and, somewhat ambivalently, guilt—all had repercussions in public arrangements designed to express intensity as well as regulate its targets. Law and leisure, not to mention burial arrangements or penology, were significantly altered as a result of emotional values, as jurists, school authorities, and other officials faithfully acted under the guidelines of Victorian emotionology. Public expression of the new emotional culture peaked between about 1870 and 1910, suggesting a not surprising lag between the first expression of the culture and its capacity a generation later to affect major institutions.