The Man of Feeling: Analysis of Setting
"The Man of Feeling" explores the nuanced settings that shape the protagonist, Harley, and his journey through various societal landscapes. Harley's home is situated in a rural village, a distance from a stagecoach terminus, hinting at both isolation and a personal connection to the land, as his aunt lives with him and cares for him. His venture into London represents a stark contrast, where he seeks assistance from a wealthy patron in Grosvenor Square, highlighting the disparity between rural simplicity and urban opulence. Throughout his time in London, Harley grapples with themes of suffering and humanity, encountering individuals in distress like a beggar and a vulnerable prostitute, reflecting his sensitivity and moral compass.
The narrative also extends to Harley’s travels, where interactions with fellow passengers reveal societal issues and personal tragedies, such as the plight of Edwards, an old tenant affected by landlord greed. Further enriching the settings, an interpolated tale set in Milan illustrates similar themes of human cruelty. Ultimately, the gravestone of Harley, located next to his mother's grave, serves as a poignant reminder of the emotional legacy he leaves behind, encapsulating the "cult of sensibility" that prioritizes emotion in moral understanding. This intricate interplay of settings contributes to a profound exploration of emotional depth and the human condition.
The Man of Feeling: Analysis of Setting
First published: 1771
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Sentimental
Time of work: Mid-eighteenth century
Asterisk denotes entries on real places.
Places Discussed
Harley’s home
Harley’s home. Village in which Harley’s home is situated; it lies some way beyond a stagecoach terminus, though not as far north of London as the border of author Henry Mackenzie’s native Scotland. The only detail confided to the reader is that Harley’s aunt lives with him and looks after him. Harley is not the local squire but has an estate that includes a few tenant farms, one of which he eventually lets to Edwards.
*London
*London. Capital of Great Britain, to which Harley journeys in the hope of obtaining the lease of Bancroft Manor. The “great man” whom he goes to see for help lives in Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, London’s richest district. While awaiting his reception, Harley spends a good deal of time in and around Hyde Park, on Mayfair’s western boundary. While there he attempts to exercise his supposed skill in the science of physiognomy (reading character in the facial features), but a typical misjudgment leads him to a taproom where he loses a considerable sum of money playing piquet; it is his fellow victim of that deception who informs him, after a chance meeting, that the lease has been dishonestly awarded, after which he resolves to go home.
Among the excursions Harley takes during his fruitless wait is one to Bedlam, a notorious hospital for the insane then located in Moorfields. Although Harley disapproves of making a spectacle out of suffering, he goes with a party to witness the anguish of the enchained patients deemed incurably mad and the silly projects of patients not deemed dangerous; he hears tales of woe in the female quarters. He also visits the house of a “Misanthropist” in order that he may contrast the madness of Bedlam with a cynical and distinctively modern species of wisdom. A more significant encounter takes place in the Strand, when he is accosted near Somerset House by one of many prostitutes loitering there. Taking pity on her, he takes her to a room in a nearby tavern, where she faints from hunger, and then visits her lodgings, where he hears her dismal tale of elopement, betrayal, abandonment, miscarriage, and ruination before her father arrives to save her.
On the road
On the road. Harley has several moving encounters while traveling to and from London; on his outward journey he meets an itinerant beggar, while his homeward journey—most of which he travels by stagecoach—offers him further scope for the exercise of his supposed skill in physiognomy upon his fellow passengers. These include Ben Silton of Silton Hall, one of the few places outside London named in the story. After leaving the inn at the end of the stagecoach’s route, on foot again, he meets an old soldier returned from India, who turns out to be Edwards, the one-time tenant of South Hill—a farm near Harley’s home—whose loss to a landlord’s greed precipitates yet another catalog of disasters. Harley’s distress on hearing Edwards’s tale is exacerbated when he discovers that his old schoolhouse has also been pulled down by order of Squire Walton, and Edwards’s grandchildren are delivered as orphans into the care of the schoolmaster’s widow.
*Milan
*Milan. Italian city that is the setting of yet another tale of man’s inhumanity to man, told in an interpolated fragment in which two Englishmen come to the aid of a family victimized by Count Respino.
Harley’s grave
Harley’s grave. Burial-place near the grave of Harley’s mother, in the only part of the churchyard shaded by a tree. Every time the narrator visits it he is moved to feelings of pity for the contemporary human condition by the “air of gentleness” around it, having evidently been converted by Harley’s noble example to the then-fashionable “cult of sensibility”—inspired by the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau—which deemed emotion more trustworthy, as a source of moral integrity, than reason.
Bibliography
Baker, Ernest A. The History of the English Novel. Vol. 5 in The Novel of Sentiment and the Gothic Romance. London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1934. Baker’s ten-volume history of the novel is now dated in some of its opinions, but it remains unsurpassed in its scope and is still very helpful on Mackenzie.
Crane, R. S. “Suggestions Toward a Genealogy of The Man of Feeling.” English Literary History 1, no. 3 (1934): 205-230. This famous essay, often reprinted, explains the intellectual origins of the eighteenth century’s belief in the “moral sense.”
Foster, James R. History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1949. An important study that relates “sensibility” to deism, discusses examples from both French and English literature, and comments usefully on all three of Mackenzie’s novels.
Thompson, Harold W., ed. The Anecdotes and Egotisms of Henry Mackenzie, 1745-1831. London: Oxford University Press, 1927. A very useful collection of autobiographical scraps.
Thompson, Harold W. A Scottish Man of Feeling. London: Oxford University Press, 1931. The standard biography of Mackenzie. Presents reliable information about his life, but must be supplemented by Mackenzie’s more recently published Letters to Elizabeth Ross of Kilravock (1967).