"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness," begins Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.
Was that true for Dickens? Is it true for us? Dickens was writing about the French Revolution, 70 years before he wrote his masterpiece. We are reading Dickens' novel 165 years after the author lived and wrote A Tale of Two Cities, and more than 200 years removed from the events and people it describes.
Did Dickens experience emotions like anger, fear, love, and hate the same way that people living during the French Revolution experienced them? What did it feel like to be human in the 1790s?
The questions asked by a historian looking into how people experienced life in the past have developed into a new field of historical research that seeks to understand "experience and emotions" as they impact history.
This field of study "refers to history focused less on the facts of the past than on its more ineffable qualities, such as the smells of a 19th-century city filled with thousands of horses, and the quality of grief expressed in the letters of widows during World War I," writes The Atlantic's Gal Beckerman.
Beckerman wrote about the work being done in this field by historian Rob Boddice and how his research group, the Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences, was challenging the conventional wisdom.
"Boddice is interested in a deeper, more expansive concept that encompasses everything about how reality is perceived, melding together emotions and senses and much else into an engagement with 'experience,'” writes Berckerman.
In the 1960s and '70s, the psychologist Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions that were common across cultures and geographic regions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. These emotions were recognizable from the various facial expressions people made when experiencing them.
Ekman believed that these emotions were "hardwired" into every human's brain, not just in the present day. The psychologist believed that all humans throughout history had experienced these six emotions in exactly the same way.
Because not only do we imagine other people to have the exact same set of emotions that we have, but we project this thought backwards through time. Love for us can’t be that different from what it meant to Heloise and Abelard writing letters to each other in the 12th century. The laborers who hauled stones to build the pyramids in Giza felt anger that is our anger. We perform this projection on any number of human experiences: losing a child, falling ill, being bored at work. We assume that emotions in the past are accessible because we assume that at their core, people in the past were just like us, with slight tweaks for their choice of hats and standards of personal hygiene.
"Boddice starts with the opposite premise, that we are not the same — that the experience of being human in another era, with all of its component feelings and perceptions, even including something as elemental as pain, is so foreign to us as to live inside a kind of sealed vault," writes Beckerman.
“There is nothing about my humanness that affords me insight into humanity,” Boddice has said. Instead of being a constant through the ages, human nature "is a variable and unstable category, one with infinite possible shades," Beckerman says.
Yes, it's a radical notion, but it's backed up by some eye-opening research using new tools to study the brain in ways that weren't even possible 25 years ago. There is a body of measurable evidence that emotions are experienced differently by people depending on their life experiences.
What is "pain"? Did a 12th-century carpenter working on a cathedral, who whacked his thumb with a hammer, experience "pain" the same way that a modern carpenter whacking his thumb would feel it?
He has banged his thumb, triggering his nociceptors, or pain receptors—which should really be called “harm receptors,” Boddice said, because all they do is send a signal up to the brain that damage has occurred. They don’t themselves cause pain. To understand what the carpenter experiences, then, we need to begin with a series of questions that might help us reconstruct the meaning produced once the signal reaches its destination. Does this happen a lot? Is the sensation of hitting his thumb a daily or weekly occurrence—something that goes with the job? And then, if religion infused every second of his life, as might very well be true for a medieval carpenter, where would his concept of suffering come from? Does he think about Christ and perhaps feel purified? If suffering, sin, and love are conjoined in an idea of the divine in the carpenter’s brain, and these are “lived connections,” Boddice said, “and you’re surrounded by them,” how might he feel when that hammer hits his thumb?
“What we propose is a disruption of what it is and means to be human," writes Boddice in his 2020 book Emotion, Sense, Experience, which he co-wrote with Mark Smith, a University of South Carolina historian.
Historians have speculated in the past that the pain that George Washington's ill-fitting false teeth caused may have affected his decision-making. That seems fanciful to me. But the idea of delving deeply into how humans in the past experienced emotions strikes me as a rich field of study that demands more attention.
Anything that gives us a better understanding of historical figures and how they lived is worth the effort.
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