Henry Mackenzie’s A Man of Feeling owed a debt to Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748). Like Smollett’s protagonist, the good-hearted Harley of Mackenzie’s tale is a naive traveler in a too-sophisticated world, sacrificed to professional cardsharps.

A narrator that readers meet in the book’s introduction tells his tale secondhand. Hunting with a parson, the narrator spies a young woman walking with a book, who the clergyman identifies as the daughter of a gentleman named Walton, once a friend of Harley. The clergyman took charge of some papers Harley left behind, which he describes as erratically written, with not “one strain for two chapters together,” explaining, “I don’t believe there’s a single syllogism from beginning to end.” The narrator takes the papers, which the parson is using as wadding for his weapon, exchanging his own wadding, one of the “German Illustrissimi.”

The narrator comments on Harley’s writing that if only the pages had borne the name of a Marmontel, Richardson, or Rousseau, “’tis odds that I should have wept; but one is ashamed to be pleased with the works of one does not know whom.” In this pronouncement, Mackenzie ironically winks at the reader, as he published the work anonymously.

Only when a clergyman tried to claim credit for A Man of Feeling did Mackenzie admit to its authorship. As a student of the teachings of Francis Hutcheson at Edinburgh University, Mackenzie encountered the beliefs of the Earl of Shaftesbury. The Earl proposed that man possesses an innate sense of morality that will lead him to approve moral acts and disapprove immoral ones. He further believed that that sensibility should not simply be enjoyed but must result in actions supporting the humanity of all individuals.

As the narrator recounts, after Harley’s fleecing at the hands of confidence men, he continues his quixotic journey to London in hopes of practicing humanitarianism. In one such act, he befriends a luckless prostitute by returning her to her father and interacts with other characters from the lower class. They present their moral views, supplying many of the “syllogisms” the clergyman had claimed did not exist in the writing.

Harley visits Bedlam, the asylum for the insane, as part of his investigation of the human condition, where he meets a girl destined for the pages of sentimental fiction, as she has been driven to madness by lost love. He also meets a one-time celebrated mathematician, driven mad when he could not prove Newton’s theories, and a gentleman once worth £50,000 who suffered “an unlucky fluctuation of stock.” Their encounters lead Harley to pronounce, “the passions of men are temporary madnesses; and sometimes; very fatal in their effects.”

Another character, the misanthrope, says about Truth, “your very nurseries are seminaries of falsehood; and what is called Fashion in manhood completes the system of avowed insincerity. Mankind, in the gross, is a gaping monster, that loves to be deceived, and has seldom been disappointed.” His statement that females are not “trained to any more useful purpose; they are taught… that a young woman is a creature to be married” and expect an income, would be of interest to feminist critics.

Regardless of his cruel treatment by others, Harley remains steadfastly dedicated to relieving their suffering. He falls in love with a Miss Walton but does not express his feelings, possibly due to the belief clear in his earlier statement that equated passion to madness. She attends him at his deathbed, along with the physician who writes the final two chapters of the account. As he contemplates death, Harley pronounces the world “a scene of dissimulation, of restraint, of disappointment,” one he is not sad to leave. In an intriguing gender role reversal, Harley’s health declines due to unrequited love for Miss Walton, a member of a class beyond his reach.

The book brims with a sincerity and dignity that Mackenzie felt any inclusion of humor might undercut. Although the tale begins with the promise of comedy suggested by the use of its pages for gun wads, Mackenzie never intended the slightest hint of hilarity. That absence makes the book a difficult read for modern aficionados of the sentimental novel.

Bibliography
Thompson, Harold William. A Scottish Man of Feeling: Some Account of Henry Mackenzie, Esq., and of the Golden Age of Burns and Scott. New York: Oxford University Press, 1931.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 18th-century literature, A Man of Feeling, Analysis of Henry Mackenzie’s A Man of Feeling, anonymous authorship, Bedlam asylum, class and gender roles, early modern British literature, Enlightenment literature, female representation in 18th century novels, Feminist literary criticism, Francis Hutcheson, Harley character analysis, Henry Mackenzie, Henry Mackenzie biography, Henry Mackenzie themes, Henry Mackenzie’s A Man of Feeling, humanitarianism in fiction, irony in sentimental fiction, literary irony, literary narrator analysis, literature and mental health, literature of sensibility, madness in literature, Miss Walton, moral philosophy, morality and emotion, Roderick Random, Scottish literature, sentimental fiction, sentimental novel, sentimentalism, Shaftesbury ethics, Tobias Smollett, unrequited love in literature