There is, no doubt, any number of routes that one might take through the evolution of the term ‘pity’ during the eighteenth century, but, as I have said in the Preface, this is not strictly a historical study, and so I have chosen three texts, William Collins's ‘Ode to Pity’ (1746) and two novels, Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random (1748) and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) through which to trace elements of this evolution. The works of Samuel Richardson, and the whole flood of fiction (and tears) that we associate with the literature of feeling and sentiment, of which Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) is the prime example, might have provided equally interesting evidence, but space is, as always, constricted.

What first needs to be said is that, on the whole, pity is associated on this terrain with notions of charity, although the relations between them are treated in diverse ways, often dependent on precisely the ambiguity of pity which I have already tried to outline, and therefore in these cases on the social position of the writer, and on his or her conception of whether it is appropriate or inappropriate to feel pity for the disadvantaged. This in turn involves the social location of the presumed reader: are we supposed to feel ourselves aligned with those who have the capacity, or even the leisure, to feel pity; or are we meant to experience what it might feel like to be pitied ourselves, in which case we will naturally align ourselves with those who are to be pitied, those suffering, often, from the complicated experience of not fully understood social change or, of course, from the effects of societal prejudice, whether this be based in gender or other inequalities.