Empathy, it is widely agreed, is a key historical skill.  At the very least, as John Tosh has argued, it recognises common humanity and, more rigorously he suggests, focuses attention on the effort of imagination required to understand the mentalities of those we study [Tosh, Pursuit of History, 2015]. Psychoanalyst and historian Thomas Kohut has suggested that historians think about empathy as a way of knowing, grounded in evidence, logic, and reason as well as in harder to identify tools such as imagination, insight, sensitivity to people, emotional intelligence, and emotional resonance [Kohut, Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past, 2020]. In thinking ‘systematically and rigorously’ about the nature of historian’s empathy, Kohut premises the empathetic observational position as a way of writing empathetic history.  

This paper uses my experiences of reading and writing the histories of eighteenth-century letters and letter-writers to unpick Kohut’s theory of empathetic history, examining more deeply what Michael Roper has called the ‘unconscious work of history’. Using the letter archive, this paper situates both researcher and letter-writer in their social and cultural contexts, and explores the links between empathy, gender, class and lifecycle in the processes of interpreting and presenting eighteenth-century history. By deepening our understanding of the researcher’s empathetic interactions with the archive, this paper is able to explore historical empathy as a methodological tool. It asks how historical empathy is taught and learned by researchers. It asks what empathy adds to historical writing, how empathy might be used (rather than felt) by historical researchers, and how empathy shapes or changes the histories that we write.

Sarah Fox is a social and cultural historian with interests in the social histories of law and medicine, the body, gender, food, and community.  She works as research associate on the Leverhulme-funded project Material Identities, Social Bodies: Embodiment in British Letters, c.1680-1820 at the University of Birmingham.  She is currently co-authoring a book on George III, his dining habits, and understandings of Britishness in the late eighteenth century, and is in the early stages of developing a new project exploring trust in eighteenth-century England. Her first book, Giving Birth in Eighteenth Century England will be published open access in April 2022 by the University of London press.