Family, Kinship, and Sympathy expands the critical conversation about sentimental fiction by extending our understanding of sympathy, or what Harriet Beecher Stowe famously asked her readers to do at the conclusion of Uncle Tom's Cabin – to “feel right.” The imperative to “see to your sympathies” is, however, not solely a feature of Stowe's anti-slavery polemic. “Feeling right” informs virtually all sentimental fiction, regardless of political intentions. Novel after novel tells the story of children learning how to feel right about their families, selves, nation, and God in the face of great pain, which almost always takes the form of parental loss. It should come as no surprise, then, that these texts often imagine their disfigured families in relation to the institution of slavery, whose donnée is the fracturing of domestic order. It should also come as no surprise that Melville's Pierre, our most profound literary analysis of sentimental novels and the families out of which they are made, is about a character whose primary occupation is ridding himself of the parents who prevent him from joining his sentimental cohorts in learning how to feel right about families, selves, nation, and God. Surrounded by one woman who functions as both sister and wife and another who appears to be a cousin (the subject of a later chapter), Pierre finds himself “utterly without sympathy.” Is the family the site where sympathy is produced or annihilated, dispensed or withheld?