the practice of charitable donations by private givers to address social needs.

While the word philanthropy became part of the English lexicon in the seventeenth century, it ‘did not become a term of widespread use with the British and American public until the nineteenth century with the emergence of new forms of economic stratification and a new kind of institutional giving’ (Christianson 30-31). The ideological basis of philanthropic giving was an idea of sympathy first articulated by Frances Hutcheson in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), in which benevolence is seen as fundamental to moral virtue. David Hume and Adam Smith adapted Hutcheson’s ideas in negotiating the ‘dynamic between self-interest and sympathy in the regulation of civil society’ (Christianson 37). Adherents to philanthropy argued that it addressed social problems that could not be rectified by market forces or government action; its detractors believed that philanthropy threatened core social values – such as thrift, work, and self-sufficiency – by creating a culture of dependency.

In line with a reaction against sentimentalism in the Romantic period, the writers and reviewers in the Edinburgh Review often questioned the role of philanthropy in public discourse – a review of a pro-abolition pamphlet in July 1804, for example, expresses gratitude that it contained ‘none of that sentimental rant and sonorous philanthropy by which the cause of humanity has been so often exposed to ridicule’ (477).

Brian Robert Wall, IASH, University of Edinburgh

 SOURCES

Frank Christianson, Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot and Howells (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007).

Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie, or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words (London: Huntington Press, 1623 (republished 1930)).