Members of the adaptive Sentimental Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1566 and 1587; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1670.1 Their parents were either the reactive Picaresque Generation or the civic-minded Elizabethan Generation, who nurtured them in a suffocating, overprotective way. Sentimental Generation children emulated their heroic elders, who were meeting the perilous challenge of the Armada Crisis (1580-1588) and seeing to it that the Spaniards were not able to install the Inquisition in England. The children made few demands upon their parents. Conforming to the social norms laid out for them, they had no desire for early independence or adventure. As youths, they avoided risk.
The Sentimental Generation (of the Artist archtype in the Reformation Saeculum, or Cycle) passed through childhood in an era of foreign threats and war. Coming of age with the dawn of imperial peace and prosperity, they built impeccable credentials in law, scholarship, religion, and arts and crafts guilds. In country houses, they swelled the influence of newly literate gentry. At Court, they became apologists for the byzantine policies of King James I. In Parliament, they promoted politeness and insisted on precedent, due process, and full disclosure. In midlife, their incrementalist ethos was shaken by younger calls for radical reform. Their Arminians argued yet resisted; their Parliamentarians applauded yet hedged. Eloquently indecisive in speech and sermon, they watched England veer toward a spiral of hysteria and violence they felt powerless to stop.2
Coming into adulthood during the Elizabethan Renaissance and the decades that followed it, the Sentimental Generation became known for their sensitivity and refinement. The whimsical and satirical poet John Donne can be considered a spokesman for them, in his "Anagram": "Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies." Or in his "The Dream":
Dear love, for nothing less than thee
Would I have broke this happy dream,
It was a theme
For reason, much too strong for fantasy,
Therefore thou wak'd'st me wisely; yet
My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it.
. . .
So, if I dream I have you, I have you.
For, all our joys are but fantastical.
This anxious and romantic generation was known for its humility, its sense of irony, and its nonjudgmental openmindedness. In midlife, this generation was confronted with the spiritual upheaval of their juniors (the idealist Righteous Generation), known as the Puritan Awakening (1621-1640), and they did their best to adapt to it. (Their own children were either this Righteous Generation or the reactive Cavalier Generation that followed it; reversing their own upbringing, they nurtured their children in an underprotective way.)
Some of the Sentimental Generation joined the Puritan Awakening, less from inner conviction or spiritual conversion than from a kind of midlife crisis, a breaking away from the conformity that had characterized them up to then.
As elders in from the 1630s to mid-century, during an era of religious intolerance, the Sentimental Generation lived relatively comfortably, enjoying considerably influence though not very much respect. They were disappointed and worried about their Cavalier Generation children, whom they regarded as too hardened and insensitive. As the poet Donne wrote in his fifties, when Europe was being torn apart by the Thirty Years War:
No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.3
Birthyears for the Sentimental Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)
See the next generation
See the previous generation
Notes:
1. The information on this page has been adapted with permission from William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991). I have coined the label Sentimental Generation for their "Parliamentary Generation." [Back to your place on this page.]
2. William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (New York: Broadway Books [Bantam-Doubleday-Dell], 1997), p. 131. [Back to your place on this page.]
3. From "Meditation XVII" in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623-24). [Back to your place on this page.]
Other sources
Back to the top
Close this window