The Man of Feeling (Oxford World's Classics)

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.

What results is a hodge-podge of scenarios in which Harley encounters people in really pitiful states. 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, Mackenzie examines social, political, and economic issues, as well as a range of gender relations within those frameworks.

Also, the more I immerse myself in sentimental fiction, the more I wonder what the role of travel is supposed to be in the genre. Harley is goaded by his aunt, and one of his neighbors, Mr. Walton (who is also father of his primary love interest), to make a voyage to London in search of a property grant to extend his own fortunes. Of course, much like any cautionary eighteenth-century tale in which a naive young country woman ventures into the degraded metropolis of London, Harley's London expedition is a series of misadventures and rude awakenings that further cause us to question the role, the usefulness, the propriety of excessive sensibility. Can a pure Man of Feeling coexist with the modern world, or is he an anachronism whose time has never and will never exist? Is a modicum of self-interest necessary for survival in the social world?

Finally, Mackenzie's novel asks us to consider the place of sympathy and sentiment in a larger geopolitical order. Here is Mackenzie, a Scottish author, writing about an English country gentleman, who speculates on whether India should be an imperial colony, and over the role of slavery in the West Indies. "The Man of Feeling" both celebrates and criticizes a sentimental ontology - are compassion and fellow-feeling, the cornerstones of this brand of moral philosophy, practical as the basis for a life of action in the world? As a national foreign policy? Professors Bending and Bygrave's introduction and critical bibliography to this Oxford World's Classics edition provide a treasure trove of information for further study and a springboard for research. As much information and interest as one can find in a 119 page book, you will find in this edition of "The Man of Feeling." Excellent.