Do emotions have a history?

I think they have. I've come to understand that what we feel isn't simply continual through human history even if it is tempting, and certainly easier, to believe that it is. Karl Marx asserted that the existence of an "inner life" was a modern by-product of the alienations of capitalism. But we don't have to go that far to realise that changing political and economic cultures have an effect on what we feel. Emotions are, more generally, shaped in part by circumstances: by politics and economics, yes, but also by technology, religion, culture, and geography. The inner life is moulded by the outer.

There are many feelings that we have lost. Countless 19th century city dwellers knew what it felt like to watch a public hanging. No-one in the west, thank heavens, knows that now.

But there are also feelings that we’ve gained. I think worrying is one of them. Its history is short but it’s also a revealing strand in the story of what we have been doing to ourselves over the last two centuries.

“To worry” once meant solely what dogs did with sheep. They chased and harassed them, and sometimes they caught them. Shakespeare only uses the word on a single occasion and it’s to describe Richard III harrying living men to their graves. “To worry” can still mean what dogs do to sheep, of course. But in the middle of the 19th century, “worry” began to move into the head. It stopped being confined to physical harassment and became mental too. From the 1860s, “worry” started to describe - in both dictionaries and in fiction - a state of restlessness and fretfulness inside the mind, a mental bother about the future.

By the end of the century, no-one would have been ignorant of this new meaning. “Worry” was in novels (Kipling, Gissing), in the press, and by the turn of the new century, in the new genre of self-help books that aimed to cure - or at least to control - worrying.

Modern life was developing into a breeding ground for insomniac fretting. That was partly because, simply put, the clock was becoming more important: life, particularly in the busy cities, was more minutely scheduled. Business time was measured, not least by Frederick Taylor (1856-1915), one of the leaders of the daunting "Efficiency Movement". Commuting from suburbs added the stress of the public transport timetables. The language of "performance management", of targets and assessments, was upon us.

The neurologist Caleb Williams Saleeby realised in America something of what was happening. "Worry", he said in 1907, was the new "Disease of the Age", the collateral damage of what Dr Saleeby labelled "the High Pressure Life". Familiar by now as a state of low-level anxiety about uncertain futures, worry belonged not only with the strains of modern commercial society. It leaked out into many forms of everyday life. And the creative writers picked it up once again.

James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is famously interested in the everyday. If it is a grand experimental novel of glorious sophistication, it’s also a book about a man wandering around Dublin in 1904 worrying. It minutely charts the underground trouble of Mr Bloom as he frets about his wife Molly, sexual infidelity, and Blazes Boylan. Joyce delicately allows us to infer - from half hints and glimpses in the persistently suggestive nature of his prose - that Mr Bloom is disquieted, like his precursor Odysseus, by what might be going wrong at home.

Other writers between the two World Wars welcomed - if that’s quite the term - worriers into their novels and verse. Mr Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) is a middle-aged unsmiling public man. And he is also a worrier. He’s persistently nervous that his books aren’t good enough. “In headaches and in worry”, added WH Auden in 1937 about modernity in general, “Vaguely life leaks away”. It was fresh recognition of the now well-established mental condition.

Worrying, though it is painful, isn’t pathological and in its ordinary day-to-day form is of no interest to a clinician. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t here to stay. If the 19th century formed the world that we now inhabit, we are the inheritors and developers of its worries too. Contemporary culture, in fact, offers us a host of lively opportunities to worry, to ponder the tremulous question of “What if ...?’”.

The fragility of modern capitalism, for instance, creates fuel for a worrier in specific ways; all the anxiety of stock market crashes, pension failures, housing bubbles, negative equity, and over-extended credit. Capitalism depends on an uncertain future and endeavours to make money out of it. Yet uncertain futures, of whatever kind, are inhospitable homes for the worrier.

Advanced capitalism requires speculation. But worriers are restless, pale speculators in their minds all the time. Modern political culture privileges choice: both the consumer’s ability to make it and the capacity of the market to provide it. But too much choice creates fresh conditions in which the worrier can fret about what decisions they have made or should make. No one would want to be without choice. And yet its establishment as a mantra of the modern world has also the side-effect of encouraging us to blame ourselves individually if things go wrong: I made the wrong choice. We can worry about that too, and add a touch of self-rebuke.

Yet it strikes me that there are advantages to this gaunt companion of our modern consciousness. Worrying, for a start, is a form of self-protection after all. It’s a species of perfectionism gone slightly off course; yet it’s still a form of perfectionism. The worrier’s aim is actually to get things right: to keep the house safe, to catch the right train to arrive at the important meeting on time. Worriers want security. And we are good at obtaining as much as we can, even though the process hurts.

I reckon, too, that we all might profit from a bit more frowning. Woolf’s Mr Ramsay’s isn’t easy to live with. He’s mentally harsh to his son. But we might find something valuable about the new state of worrying he represents nevertheless. I mean that fretfulness, the state of day-to-day tremulous bother, might help protect us from, or at least to doubt, the hyperbole and fake cheeriness of much of our modern culture.

When we’re told by an advertiser that this product or that service will “transform our life”; when we’re asked to “have a great day”; when we’re encouraged, far more seriously, to believe that bland emotions of content and conformist material success are the keys to happiness ... well, worriers might be able to inject a little rebalancing melancholy into all of that.

Life’s hard. And it involves tough decisions, compromises, and a readiness to accept disappointment. Worriers, then, might be - I am beginning to believe - the strange prophets of what we might more reasonably expect from ourselves and our futures.

Francis O’Gorman is a Professor in the School of English, University of Leeds, and author of Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History (2015).