The Man of Feeling

Henry Mackenzie's 1771 novel, "The Man of Feeling," addresses 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 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. Harley's 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 with an introduction in which the manuscript of "The Man of Feeling" is discovered on a hunting expedition. The finder has little regard for the work, leaving the reader to wonder if they should sympathize with Harley, or regard him lightly. An "editor" of the work then presents 19 non-continuous chapters, together with a handful of fragments accompanied by his own interjections. The result is a hodge-podge of scenarios in which Harley encounters people in pitiful circumstances. His attempts to assist the insane, the indigent, prostitutes, decrepit soldiers, prisoners, fortune tellers, and his conjectures on the practice of slavery give us more a sense of character studies and views of human interaction than any kind of real plot. Through these scenarios in "The Man of Feeling," Mackenzie examines social, political, and economic issues, as well as a range of gender relations.