In the previous chapter, I was principally concerned with the formal properties of the sentimental text: I outlined a general model of the ways in which it goes about the task of signifying. But if the emphasis of the chapter was in that sense on the aesthetic aspects of the text, the intention was not to suggest that these aspects can be separated from the overall social and historical insertion of the sentimental phenomenon. On the contrary, formal analysis led me to two conclusions directly relevant to the social and historical role of sentimentalism: firstly, that an explicitly imagined readership is crucially important in the hermeneutic of the sentimental text; and, secondly, that the underlying dynamic of the sentimental narrative – its drive to establish happiness through the conquest and elimination of adversity – finds an important parallel in the historical utopianism of Enlightenment.

In the present chapter, I propose to focus more exclusively on the treatment of social questions by the sentimental text – what the text signifies in social terms rather than how it goes about that process of signifying. Such an analysis should start from notions of social hierarchy, power and domination. We have already seen that the privileged focus of the process of sentimentalisation is the figure of the victim: misfortune and suffering are the primary conditions of sentimentalisation.