Introduction: Curating Feeling

This introduction discusses the process of ‘curating feeling’ in response to the ‘Fallen Woman’ exhibition curated by Lynda Nead at the Foundling Museum in 2015. It uses this idea to reflect on both the historical specificity of Victorian emotion and the ways in which emotive objects have the potential to collapse time, nurturing a transhistorical sense of emotional community. The introduction presents the articles in this issue of 19, which read the relationship between nineteenth-century arts and feeling across a range of cultural objects including painting, sculpture, music, literature, and architecture.