Episode 73: The Man of Feeling

If you like feckless boobs who are also giant crysacks (Megan does not), do we have a book for you! Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is a classic sentimental novel with all the trimmings -- a useless protagonist who thinks crying is hot and who can’t stop getting conned by every sharp, coxcomb, and failson in London. It’s a delightfully ridiculous book, one we suspect is very much in on the joke, and we talk discourses of feeling, sentimental critiques of empire and capital, and the funniest sorry sorry we meant saddest death scene in all of eighteenth-century literature.

We read the Oxford edition edited by Brian Vickers with notes and introduction by Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave. There’s a ton of scholarship on sentiment and the related "cult of sensibility," and we highly recommend both Janet Todd’s Sensibility: An Introduction and John Mullan’s Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century.

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