“Vain dalliance with misery”: Moral Therapy in William Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage” by Piotr Kałowski

“…It will be argued that by distorting the women’s accounts of suffering into a didactic lesson for themselves, the poems’ speakers embody the tension present in the chief psychiatric treatment of the Romantic period, moral therapy, which strove to humanise and give voice to afflicted subjects, a t the same time trying to contain and eventually correct their “otherness.”…”
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Richard Dadd’s Passions and the Treatment of Insanity by Karen Stock

“…This article investigates how Dadd’s Passions both reflect and deviate from Victorian psychiatric theories of how the passions could be codified and used in moral therapy. The passions had long been a source of debate, and the playwright Joanna Baillie began a series of plays on the passions in 1798. …”
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