The Man of Feeling

The Man of Feeling is a novel by Henry Mackenzie, first published anonymously in 1771 and almost immediately recognised as one of the central documents of the eighteenth century sentimental movement. Mackenzie was a Scottish lawyer and writer who lived from 1745 to 1831, and this short novel was the book on which his lasting reputation rests, even though he produced other longer fictions later in his life.

The novel has an unusual structure. The narrator presents the manuscript of the story as a fragment that has been found in an old chest. The fragment itself is missing many chapters, with the surviving sections numbered to indicate that much of the original is lost. What remains follows Harley, a young man of acute moral and emotional sensibility, through a series of episodes that test and display his sensibility. He visits a madhouse and weeps at the sight of the inmates. He encounters a soldier reduced to begging and gives him what little he has. He meets a young woman who has been seduced and abandoned, and weeps for her. He falls in love with a woman named Miss Walton and cannot bring himself to declare his feeling. The book moves from one such scene to another with no real plot in the conventional sense.

The Man of Feeling is the central English example of the cult of sensibility that dominated late eighteenth century fiction, a cult that valued strong feeling as a moral good and that took the visible expression of feeling as evidence of moral worth. Harley weeps almost constantly in the surviving fragments. He is unable to act effectively in any practical situation. He is, in the language of the period, exquisitely sensitive in a way that nineteenth century readers eventually came to find ridiculous and that earlier readers found admirable.

The book is short, perhaps a hundred and fifty pages. It is essential reading for anyone studying the eighteenth century novel of sensibility, and it remains a fascinating document of a literary moment that the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries largely rejected. It pairs naturally with Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, which influenced it, and with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which was published a few years later and which carries the same sensibility into the German tradition with even more devastating consequences.