Abstract
Tears are the crux of both the success and the failure of Henry Mackenzie’s first novel, The Man of Feeling (1771). Fragmented, short, episodic, and over-abounding with scenes of weeping, The Man of Feeling was immensely popular in its day. Its success in the 1770s was due to its capacity to move and affect deeply, drawing the reader into a culture of tears. As contemporary opinions testify, crying over The Man of Feeling was the test of the sensibility of its early readers. By the time of the novel’s publication, tears were more or less compulsory attributes and signifiers of a feeling heart and unquestionable morality. The anonymous critic of the Monthly Review insists that anyone ‘who weeps not over some of the scenes it describes, has no sensibility of mind’.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Letter to Sir Walter Scott (4 September 1826), in The Private Letter-Books of Sir Walter Scott, ed. Wilfred Partington (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930) 273.
Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990).
Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. Maureen Harkin (Plymouth: Broadview, 2005) 59. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text.
John Dwyer, ‘Enlightened Spectators and Classical Moralists: Sympathetic Relations in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, Sociability and Society in Eighteenth- Century Scotland, ed. John Dwyer and Richard B. Sher (Edinburgh: Mercat, 1993) 112.
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) 118–19
Janet Todd’s chronology of the development of sensibility in the period in Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986) 3.
David G. Spencer, ‘Henry Mackenzie, a Practical Sentimentalist’, Papers on Language and Literature 3 (1967): 314–26
G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 142 and 144
Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800 (London: Macmillan, 1999) 92.
Susan Manning, introduction, Julia de Roubigné, by Henry Mackenzie (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1999) ix
Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave, introduction, The Man of Feeling, by Henry Mackenzie, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) xvii.
Maureen Harkin, ‘Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling: Embalming Sensibility’, ELH 61 (1994): 318–19 and 336.
Harkin, introduction, The Man of Feeling, by Henry Mackenzie (Plymouth: Broadview, 2005) 12–13.
Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (London and New York: Norton, 1999) 50–2.
Henry Mackenzie, Letters to Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock: On Literature, Events and People 1768–1815, ed. Horst Drescher (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1967) 17
Letter to Henry Mackenzie (4 May 1771), Literature and Literati: The Literary Correspondence and Notebooks of Henry Mackenzie, ed. Horst Drescher, vol. 1, Letters 1766–1827 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1989) 50–1.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) 66–8 and 187–218
George Berkeley, ‘An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709)’, The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1901) 127–210
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Penguin, 1997) 109–10.
Harold William Thompson, A Scottish Man of Feeling: Some Account of Henry Mackenzie, Esq. of Edinburgh and of the Golden Age of Burns and Scott (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1931) 40
Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 129.
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, ed. Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968) 6–7, 35–7 and 107–9.
Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple, ed. Malcolm Kelsall (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 19.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 204
Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; in Two Treatises (London: J. Darby, 1725) 132.
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale. Supposed to be Written by Himself (London: F. Newbery, 1766) 26–7. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text.
Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995) 30.
Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988) 7–8 and 32–3.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ (1921), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., vol. 18 (London: Vintage, 2001) 67–143
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis and Affect, trans. Douglas Brick et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992) 1–14.
Peter Brooks, ‘The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Criticism’, The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis, ed. Françoise Meltzer and Peter Rudnytsky (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 152–5
Jerre Collins et al., ‘Questioning the Unconscious’, In Dora’s Case, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Cahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) 252.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary; and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) 135.
Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva, trans. Helen M. Downey (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1993).
Sarah Kofman, ‘Summarize, Interpret (Gradiva)’, Freud and Fiction, trans. Sarah Wykes (Cambridge: Polity, 1991) 85–117
Mary Jacobus, ‘Is There a Woman in This Text?’, Reading Woman (London: Methuen, 1986) 83–109
Rachel Bowlby, ‘One Foot in the Grave’, Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1992) 157–82.
Copyright information
© 2012 Ildiko Csengei
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Csengei, I. (2012). ‘I Will Not Weep’: Tears of Sympathy in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling . In: Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230359178_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230359178_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33904-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-35917-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)