Because social capital is an inherently multidimensional concept, its study calls for a detailed analysis of a wide variety of social resources, ranging from intimate personal relationships with friends and family to linkages to the broader community via involvement in clubs, groups, and other organizations. Research on this topic usually focuses on particular aspects of social capital, often drawing on just one data source or measure. This chapter describes the wide range of measures we interrogate in our analysis and the numerous data sources upon which it is based, including sources such as the General Social Survey (GSS), the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), the Current Population Survey (CPS), the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality (MCSUI), the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), and nearly two dozen other data sources – some nationally representative, some more regionalized, including an analysis of urban elites’ networks in a large city. This chapter clarifies the conceptualizations of social capital implied by this data coverage. It also lays out the steps we take in analyzing these data, including different types of descriptive analysis, heavy reliance on tables and figures, and a parsimonious and uniform approach to multivariate analysis.

This chapter explores the intersections of the aural and the tactile in Romantic poetry. To trace the emergence of form within organic and inorganic matter, Romantic poetry draws on the anatomical and musical concept of formant, a material structure that shapes sound into melody within musical instruments and within the organs of hearing and phonation. The anatomists who explored the inner ear discovered a form of internal landscape, with crags and crevices, akin to geological formations. This prompted Erasmus Darwin and William Wordsworth to meditate on the aural potentialities of inorganic matter: the mineral at the origins of sensation and the phonic richness of matter. Percy Shelley also attends to the vibrancy of matter aspiring towards form when he muses on sculpture: honing the stone but also the senses of the artist, sculpture orients the senses towards the invisible and the potential, awakening the aspiration for freedom.

As it traces the emergence of organic life and the gradual transformation of species, Erasmus Darwin’s treaty in verse The Temple of Nature develops a poetics of what eludes our sense of sight, of the viewless and eyeless beings at the radical origins of life. The chapter thus retraces a poetic journey back to a perceptual framework in which sight does not yet exist. Erasmus Darwin tries to apprehend life before the first eye opened, to envision a world so young that sensation itself had just been born. That journey also goes back to the origins of the alliance of poetry and science in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and its poetics of corpora caeca, those viewless bodies that create entire worlds through blind contact. It lastly registers some of the aesthetic and epistemic aftershocks of Lucretius’ and Darwin’s poetics of blind bodies in the poetry of William Blake.

As late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century scientific advancements generated new modes of comprehending life and matter, they also expanded the modalities of sensation, and generated new representations of the senses and of the act of sensing. Touch joined sight as a predominant source of analogies for scientific investigation. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the proliferation of modes of scientific imaging based on transferring the object of observation onto a material subjectile: from anatomical casts to the study of fossil imprints, modes of apprehension involving direct transfer ‘from matter to matter’ flourished, endowing direct contact with a paradigmatic role. What happens, then, to Romantic vision when touch reasserts itself? The creative interactions between touch and sight raises with renewed acuity the question of the modalities of figuration at the heart of Romantic conceptions of imagination. Who or what is sensitive and affected? Who and what envisions?

Scientific discourse on the vibratory nature of light and sound is reflected and deflected by the supple and regular structures of Percy Shelley’s last poems, which trace the emergence of transient beauty through an aesthetics of propagation and dispersal. In ‘To Jane. The Recollection’, ‘Lines written in the Bay of Lerici’, and ‘The Triumph of Life’ (1822), Shelley reflects on the fate of light and sound once they come into contact with the humours and integuments of the eye and the ear. The motif of the waveform, as a transient signal reaching the sense organs through the fluid mediums of water and of air, reflects the pleasure and transience of contact. This creative state of the body is unstable, like the eye of a storm, and the poems also record the moments when sensation comes undone, when the signal unravels and dissolves into the noise of ordinary sense-data.

The Romantic age is generally seen as fertile ground for vibrant synaesthesiæ, reconciliations of the senses, when, for instance, one is invited to feel the texture of an object by merely looking at it: sight endowed with the power to touch at a distance. This chapter explores the opposite, uncomfortable experience of the eye forced into direct contact, when touch invades the eye and neutralizes sight, in order for poetic vision to emerge. It is an invitation to explore the other side of synaesthesia in the works of a late Romantic and fervent reader of earlier Romantic poetry: Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey’s attempts at healing the disconnection between sight and touch aims at imaginatively turning the eye into a sensitive surface. De Quincey’s aesthetics of development, in the photographic sense, opens up new sensory experiments into the relationship between sight and touch.

The overarching question that guides this chapter is: Are social ties, and the resources they represent, equally distributed throughout society? That is, are these connections so free and abundant that they transcend the relentless constraints that people face in obtaining other forms of capital? In particular, do people from disadvantaged backgrounds enjoy the same level of access to such ties as wealthy people? This requires close examination of factors such as people’s connectedness to friends and family; the number of such ties they have and how often they engage them; how much turnover and instability there is in people’s networks; the internal wiring of the networks in which they are embedded, and how that relates to dense connections and brokerage potential; the status and wealth of their contacts; involvement in exchange processes; and connections to community organizations. This chapter navigates the thicket of findings regarding the distribution of these various forms of social capital by first walking through analyses of personal, micro-level connections, and then proceeding upward to more macro-level, organization-oriented indicators. This set of analyses reveals some latent, surprising, and fateful truths about how universally bountiful and reachable these valuable social resources really are.

The last chapter brings the volume full circle as it looks into the ultimate confines of perception, across the limits of death. Contrasting with the Christian sacralization of the last breath, physiological research at the time revealed various stages in death, when vital organs fail one after the other, raising the troubling possibility of sensory remanence running through nervous fibres as the body gradually dies. These specters of sensations were invested by the Romantic imagination. This chapter investigates paradoxical imaginings of sensation after death in Keats’s Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, Percy Shelley’s ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which registers the dawn of sensation in a creature composed of tissues taken from the charnel-house, learning to feel through dead flesh. Such sensory experiments offer imaginative answers to the paradoxical question: what do the dead see through closed eye, through empty orbits?