The Man of Feeling

Henry Mackenzie's 1771 novel, "The Man of Feeling," is a preeminent locus of a number of mid-to-late eighteenth-century discourses: sentiment, sensibility, sympathy, and moral philosophy. A fragmentary work, "The Man of Feeling" is ostensibly a biography of one Mr. Harley, written in tribute by his friend Charles, and put together by an anonymous editor. Harley is a man of the lesser gentry, propertied, but not wealthy. His greatest concerns revolve around his heightened ability to sympathize with and bring comfort to people in distress. The multi-layered framework of the narrative places its readers at an interesting distance and requires us to judge the various narratives, and the protagonist, for ourselves. The novel begins somewhat abruptly with an introduction, in which the manuscript of "The Man of Feeling" is discovered on a hunting expedition - a village curate has been using its pages as wadding to stuff ammunition into his gun. Immediately we are assaulted by the notion that this man of the cloth has little regard for the work that we are about to start reading. Already, the hermeneutic that we use to interpret Harley and his sentimental adventures is split - are we as readers expected to sympathize ourselves with Harley, or to regard him in the callous manner of the curate? The editor, who rescues the work from its ignominious fate, seems to think otherwise - and presents us with 19 chapters (which are non-continuous) and a handful of fragments sometimes accompanied by his own interjections.