The indulgence of sentiment

Descriptions of the heart touched by an unfortunate's suffering, or of tears shed on hearing a story of an act of kindness, are not confined to the novels of Richardson. By becoming linked to the social question with the development of pauperism, such descriptions continue and even flourish in the next century. The privileged objects of tender-hearted tears are always innocent and persecuted young girls in distress, but their misfortunes are now placed in an urban setting. Similarly, their condition of economic poverty prevails over their domestic dereliction. They suffer because they are poor, lacking resources, lost in the jungle of the towns, like Eugène Sue's heroine Fleur de Marie, of whom Anne Vincent-Buffault justly remarks that she ‘is almost always in tears, either because she is moved by the kindness of her benefactors or because she is tormented by the memory of her past life. Naive and melancholic, her angelic figure is never more touching than when she is bathed in tears’. But without doubt it is Dickens who establishes the closest connection between sentimental tender-heartedness and social denunciation by placing creatures with a natural capacity for sympathy in the hostile and artificial environment of the big industrial town.