With the recent resurgence of interest in sentimental texts, an interest strongly indebted to cross-disciplinary discussions of emotion and its production, a renewed focus on sentimentality as a means of constructing shared sympathy and communal feeling has emerged in literary criticism. Critics have agreed that sentimentality, understood in Robert Solomon's terms as 'an appeal to the tender feelings' (defined as pity, sympathy, fondness and compassion, among others), served a vital function in

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... relation to the rapid pace of change and subsequent emphasis on dislocation or alienation in nineteenth-century British and American culture and literature. 1 However questionable sentimentality might have become, this argument runs, it remained the best model for the sharing of emotion amongst a community of readers. As Fred Kaplan, in his classic study of Victorian sentimentality, observes: The Victorian 'sentimentalists' believed that the alienating and dehumanizing pressure and structures of modern culture, all of them dry-eyed exponents of misery and suppression, are more and more separating human beings from their natural sentiments, and that the desire to repossess them is widespread even if dormant. 2 Philip Davis supports this in an excellent recent dissection of sentimental fiction: When people moved from the countryside to the towns and hardly knew where they were any more in that harsher and faster world, at least they still knew the communal heart was in its right place. Is that not what Victorian sentimentality is: a defensive part of urban social history, democratizing inarticulate good feeling, offering family feeling a place in the new world? 3 As a model for this perceived need for connection between humans and their emotions, both critics turn to the peculiarly Victorian cliché of the heart. Kaplan writes that sentimentality operates as 'an attempt...to generate, or at least to strengthen the possibility of the triumph of the feelings and the heart over self-serving calculation'. 4 Similarly, Miriam Bailin has argued that it 'served the interests of the rising middle classes by providing a flexible language of feeling associated with gentility but arising naturally from the heart rather than from custom or breeding.' 5 Kaplan, Bailin and Davis agree on the central importance of shared feeling, and the