Historiography, Pastoral, Novel:
Genre in The Man of Feeling
April London
I
n a letter to his friend James Elphinston, Henry Mackenzie ends his
summary account of The Man of Feeling with the comment that these
"episodical adventures" should not be considered a novel: "You may,
perhaps, from the description, conclude it a novel; nevertheless, it is
The disclaimer
perfectly different from that species of c~mposition."~
might be interpreted as little more than pro forma were it not for the
critique of novel writing that is so conspicuous a feature of Mackenzie's
fiction. Such metanarrational commentary is not unusual in eighteenthcentury novels. But Mackenzie's version deserves particular attention
because it engages the conventions of other, competing genres in highly
revealing ways. In the process, The Man of Feeling testifies at once to
its author's keen awareness of the prestige attaching to the classical
modes and to his sense of the extensions of meaning that the novel's
less prescriptive understanding of genre allows.
Fiction's most distinguished rival in the art of constructing narrative
was history. Mackenzie, anxious to rescue the novel "from the contempt which it meets from the more respectable class of literary men,"
was particularly alert to the challenge posed to the novel by Enlight1 "To James Elphinsfon." 23 July 1770. Literarum nnd tircmti. The literary Correspondence and
Noteboob of Henry Mnekcnrie. blm I. L c n m 17661827, ed. Homt W. Drescher (Prankfurl
am Main: Peter Lang. 1989). p. 48.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 1, October 1997
44 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y F I C T I O N
enment hi~toriography.~
In an attempt to legitimate his own novelistic
practice as a form of social commentary interesting to an educated, male
audience, Mackenzie counterpoints his fiction against two authoritative
genres, each possessing a characteristic relationship to time. The first,
classical historiography, is present inferentially in Mackenzie's adaptations of its principles to the structure of his own narrative. The second,
an ahistorical pastoral, is directly and explicitly invoked in the characterization of the hero, Harley. While Mackenzie's use of both history
and pastoral serves as corrective to the perceived "lowness" of contemporary fiction, he nonetheless wishes to draw on the novel's own distinctive
strength: its ability to render the complementarity of private and public
spheres. But gender also contributes to his sense of the novel's representational possibilities. In the essay that follows, I argue that Mackenzie's
depiction of genre in dialogic terms is informed and enabled by the prescriptive force of customary gender distinctions. The intersections of
genre and mode-history, pastoral, novel-are thus underwritten by a
gendered language that ultimately allows him to affirm the political efficacy of literature. This framing of the debate between historical process
and literary discourse (and its sexual politics) survived the fleeting popularity of The Man of Feeling, acquiring new urgency in the revolutionary
literature of the 1790s. and shaping the early fiction of his admirer, Sir
Walter Scott.
d
As an active participant in what he elegizes in a letter of 1784 as the
"brilliant Era" of Hume, Kames, and Ferguson, Henry Mackenzie was
particularly well positioned to assess recent developments in historiographical and literary practice. To him it appeared that "general &
philosophic views of the subject [form] the great distinction between
Modem History, since the time of Montesquieu, & the Ancient.") His
2 Henry Mackenzie, Thc Loungrr 20, 18 June 1785. Novel Md R o m e 17&18W. A Doewncntary Record, ed. loan Wnlliarrs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1970). p. 328. Enlisting
supponing comments from a periodical essay published some yeam after the novel in question perhaps requires explanation. 'Ex wntemporary underslanding of g e m , I think, suppons
such cmss-generic references. As I argue over the wurse ofs @
i essay, the interdependency
of genres is premised on authorial responsiveness to the challenge mounted by the competing f o m and on a subscquenl tendency to anatomize rival characteristics. This is especially
true of emergent, unstable genres such as the periodical essay and the novel, each of which justifies its own workings by invoking the practices of the other. 'Ex periodical essays are especially
interesting in t e m of the insights they provide because they explicitly discuss questions relating to audience that are broached in the novel through less direct means such as fictional
readen.
3 "To William Carmichael," Letters [early 17841. pp. 123-24. For an analysis of Mnckenzie's
GENRE IN T H E MAN O F FEELING 45
own later essays reveal the powerful influence of these philosophical historians and of their insights into the emergence of civil society. And he
himself aspired throughout his career to the writing of history, as witnessed by his plans to complete Hume's H i s t o r y , his projected biography
of Pitt, and the "Life and Writings of Mr. John Home," first read to the
Royal Society in 1812 and then published in a much longer version in
1822.'
But he was also clearly convinced that despite its current limitations,
the novel could theoretically fulfil a "moral or instructive purpose" equal
to, if different in kind from, Enlightenment history's didactic role.5 In order to compete with the expressive possibilities of philosophical history,
he sets the practices of the novel (especially its focus on the individual
sensibility) against those of classical historiography, which differs from
its Enlightenment variant in its focus on history-as-event. When he describes his novelistic career as the writing of "little histories" offering
"records of private life," his vocabulary deliberately strikes a contrast
with this classical political history. But resistance to the structures of
classical historiography does not entail a complementary espousal of
philosophical history's progressivism. Mackenzie's "memoirs of sentiment, and suffering" instead make an emotional appeal to the reader's
sympathy for individuals betrayed by time.6 There are a number of strategies pursued in this effort to represent the corrosive effects of time and to
heighten our sympathy for those who are its victims. A key one involves
the silent invocation of the assumptions that govern classical historical
writing and Mackenzie's deliberate refusal to shape his text in accordance
with them.
The most obvious of these revisions centres on the relation of commentary to primary documents. The historian recovers the past by making a
continuous story from the surviving fragments of original records. In The
Man of Feeling, Mackenzie tacitly questions this procedure by providing
relationship to the Edinburgh litemli, see John Dwyer. Wmow Direoursr: Smibilily and Cornm n i l y ul Lore Eighteenth-Century Scothnd (Edinburgh:John Donald Publishers. 1987); I&
of Feeling in Ihe Eighteenth Crntury (OxMullan. Sentiment and Sociobilily. 71u -wage
ford: Ciarendon Rsss. 1988: rp(. 1990). pp. 11446; and Nicholas Phillipson, 'The W s h
Enlighlenment." The Enlighlennvnr inNationol Context, ed. Roy Porter and MiLulas Tcich (Cambridge: Cambridge Univemity Press, 1981). pp. 19-40. David Spadsrora's The Idea o f P m g ~ s s
in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Ress, 1990) provides
a compnhcnsive account of the British Enlightenmnl.
4 Lrners, pp. 141. 21l%11.2424.
5 Lovngcr 20. p. 329.
6 Henry Madrenzie, L l i a de Roubignc. A T'k. In a Series of Lrttrrs. Publirhed by the Author of
7 k Mon of Feeling. and The Mon ofthe World In l b o Volumes (1777; New Yo& and London:
Garland, 1979). pp. v, viii.
46 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
us with nothing more than a "bundle of little episodes" accidentally rescued from use as gun-wadding? Textual authenticity is assured here by
reference to a standard not of coherence but of contingency, not through
the direction provided by an authoritative voice but by the refusal to mediate the reader's experience of the partial manuscript. As the footnote
to the opening chapter 11 declares, "the Editor is accountable only for
scattered chapters, and fragments of chapters" (p. 7).
This refusal to subordinate the episodic to the imperatives of plot or
to a controlling narratorial presence represents (he formal realization of
Mackenzie's claim that "narrative would destroy" the reader's emotional
engagement with his work.' The conditions of the manuscript's recovery
direct our attention to another of his sceptical responses to the principles
of historiographical composition. In its changed status from testamentatory private memoir, to functional gun-wadding, to circulating public
text, The Man of Feeling, it is implied, has diminished rather than grown
in meaning. As a result, the difference of past from present appears as a
fall from intimacy to anonymity.9 The most powerful evocations of this
past are specified within the text itself through the devices of pastoral,
whose generic conventions relate suggestively to both historiography and
fiction.
The expressive limitations to which Mackenzie points when he parodies classical historiography might suggest that the novel would appeal
to him as an alternative form capable of representing the inward and
private. But the novel was widely perceived as perniciously effeminizing in relation to both subject matter and audience.1° Mackenzie counters
these associations by invoking pastoral, a mode which shares with classical historiography 6lite class and gender assumptions. In his development
of these relations between genre and gender, Mackenzie distinguishes his
work from "the wretched offspring of circulating libraries" by making
7 Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. with an Invoduction by Brian Vickers (London:
Oxford University Fwss. 1967). p. 5 . References me to this edition.
8 Julia de Roubigne, p. x . Patricia Meyer Spacks p u p s The Man of Feeling with such novels of
the 1760s and 1770s as W t r m Shnndy, Sentimental Joumcy, and H u m p h C l i n b r and reads
the "near rejection of plot" as an "ideological challenge" to uontemporary understandings of
sexuality and power. Desire and 7 h t h . Functions of Plot in Eightccnth-Century English Novclr
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Ress, l990), p. 6.
9 Mackenm wdl mvoke Ihe same pancrn m h s lnvodunory cxplanatlon of Ihc ongns of J u h de
Roubrgns. tn whrch the manusmpt IS rescued from '>he ordlnary uses of hr Ithe grocer's] frade"
for whlch a young boy. acc~denlallyencountered,has offered lo x l l Ihc "bundle of papers" (p
"I,,)
10 For a detailed account of this connection, see G.J. Baker-Benfield. The Culture of Semibility:
Sex and Soeicly in Eightccnth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press. 1992).
GENRE IN THE MAN O F FEELING 47
it appealing to "men of genius and knowledge." Considered from this
vantage point of audience response, The Man of Feeling's apposition
of historiography, pastoral, and "the common herd of novels" acquires
particular significance. On the one hand, each has limitations that the
narrative proximity of the others makes apparent. Historiography, construed narrowly as the record of public events, thus is no more able
than pastoral, in its cultivated timelessness, to promote that "certain refinement of mind" which distinguishes "works of genius and feeling."
And the "degradation" of the contemporary novel in turn precludes its
fulfilling its mandate to offer "an interesting relation of events, illustrative of the manners and characters of mankind."" But, on the other
hand, by using each as corrective to the others, Mackenzie makes possible the conversion of narrative reflexiveness into a form of commentary
that balances the inward and private against the social and public.
The relation of historiography to pastoral and their persistence as explanatory structures within sentimental narrative have much to do with
the generic transformations undergone by the two classical modes over
the course of the eighteenth century.ll Each mode in different ways confirms the relation between political change and formal innovation that has
preoccupied novel criticism since the publication in 1957 of Ian Watt's
The Rise of the Novel. More recently, Michael McKeon, in The Origins
of the English Novel, convincingly substantiates his understanding of the
novel as "an early modem cultural instrument designed to confront, on
the level of narrative form and content, both intellectual and social crisis
simultaneously." This crisis ends with the mid-eighteenth century "triumph of the creative human mind," rendered in Richardson through the
consciousness of the protagonist and in Fielding through that of the author. By the end of the century, McKeon concludes, "questions of truth
will be addressed by reference to a notion of 'history' that is now suf11 Lo~lger20. 18 June 1785, pp. 328-31.
12 For the role of history in Laurence Sterne's Trislrm Shnndy, see William Ray, Story and
History. Narrative Authority and Social Identity in the Eightccnth-Century Fnnch and English
Novel (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1990), pp. 27C-94. Ray interprets Uncle Toby as a p d y
of nave historicism and realism: "His enterprise turns around the possibility of subordinating
his story(tel8ng) to histmy-f
creating for his public a rendition of the past that will bear
no trace of subjective manipulation accarding to personal motive, but merely reflect objective
reality" (p. 277). Uncle Toby's recreation of the siege of Namur, when considered in the light
of the exclusively masculine context in which it occurs, can be read as complemnt to the
miniature farm that Harley. Edwards, and Edwards's grandson construct. History-as-event in
both instances is displaced by focusing on an enclosed pastoral wodd that wilfully excludes
awareness of change. For changes in the hierarchy of genres, see note 17. below.
48 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
ficiently separated from 'literature' to be 'realistically' represented by
it,"l3
The implications of this provocative theory for late eighteenth-century
narrative can be both developed and qualified by analysis of The Man
of Feeling. The qualifications follow from the recognition that the distinction of history from novel did not resolve epistemological questions
with quite the ease that McKeon's formulation suggests. As the novel
moves towards canonic status, its capacity for truth-telling relative to history becomes a matter not of consensus but of contention between the
two genres. Ironically, the terms of the contest reveal the convergence
of historiographical and literary interests. Both claim to achieve in their
representations the appropriate balance between the inward and particular and the public and exemplary. Evelim (1778) is entirely typical of
contemporary fiction in its prefatorial gesture towards this double orientation: "To draw characters from nature, though not from life, and to
mark the manners of the times, is the attempted plan of the following
letters."M Enlightenment history, too-unlike its classical predecessoris dedicated to observing the relation between progressive refinements in
man's inner nature and his external institutions.
But while the authority of history lends credence to the pronouncements of a Hume or Smith or Ferguson, Frances Bumey must hedge her
claim to social commentary with an opening admission that "In the republic of letters, there is no member of such inferior rank, or who is so
much disdained by his brethren of the quill, as the humble Novelist." For
her, as for Mackenzie, this depressed status clearly has more to with audience than with author. Directed towards "young ladies in general, and
boarding school damsels in particular," novels typically spread "contagion" and "distemper," by invoking "the fantastic regions of Romance ...
coloured by all the gay tints of luxurious Imagination." Faced with the
vulgar expectations of an audience at once female and bourgeois, Burney limits her vindication of the novel to the rather limp declaration
that hers at least "may be read, if not with advantage, at least without
injury."IJ Even when read ironically, the assertion testifies to authorial
defensiveness.
13 Michael McKeon. The Originr of the English Novel 160&1740 (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press. 1987), pp. 22. 418-19.
14 Frances Bumey, hvclrno or The Hutorj of o Young Lod)'s h r m c tntv the World, ed with
an lnuoducuon by Edward A. Blwm and Ltlllan D. Blwm (Oxford Oxford University Ress.
1968; rpl. 1991), p. 7.
IS Bumey, p. 8.
GENRE I N THE MAN OF FEELING 49
Many of Burney's contemporaries, however, including Mackenzie,
were prepared to assume a more aggressive or interrogative relation to
the stigma attaching to novels. They counter the perceived lowness of
their chosen form by invoking within their novels the terms of more prestigious genres, specifically pastoral and history. Popular fiction and its
female reader continue to provide the negative point of reference. But allusions to historiography, on the one hand, and pastoral, on the other,
establish a positive standard through their associations with 6lite culture
and the masculine, public domain. The authoritative status of history in
the hierarchy of genres and its affiliation with a privileged audience make
clear history's appeal to a writer such as Mackenzie intent on distinguishing his own productions from what he calls "the common run of novels."I6
If we are to understand the relation between these historiographical references and what seem the ubiquitous pastoral ones, however, some sense
of the transformations of pastoral during the period is necessary.
Numbers of recent genre studies have drawn attention to the repositioning of georgic and pastoral over the course of the eighteenth century.17
A "high and serious kind" in the Renaissance and seventeenth century,
pastoral diminishes in prestige and expressive range in the eighteenth.
Georgic undergoes a corresponding rise as it gradually assumes the discursive functions of the now much restricted pastoral. Moreover, as Alastair Fowler notes, the ascendency of georgic coincides with that of related
didactic forms such as the essay, biography, and novel.18 Their mutual
emphases on work and on constructive engagement with the forces of
change stand in sharp distinction to what appears, in contrast, the high
artifice of pastoral's depiction of a timeless Golden Age.
Mackenzie uses pastoral to identify an aversion to change (which is,
in turn, associated with women) as the source of Harley's disengagement from the present. In electing to define his hero's sensibility through
pastoral, then, Mackenzie not only reveals a formal preference for the
anachronistic over the current, but also associates Harley's impossible
idealism with a mode whose cultivation of timeless perfection stands in
a problematic relation to the more usual progressivism of both novel
16 "Jams Elphinston." 9 May 1771, Lencrs, p. 52.
17 See Ralph Cohen, lnno!+ion ond Varinrion: Litcmry C h g c ond Georgic Poetry. Literatun
ond Hirtory. Pnpers mod ot a Clark Library Seminnr, March 3, 1973 (Los Angeles: William Andtews Clark Memorial Library, 1974); Richard Feingold, Nature ond Society: later EighteenthCentury Uses of the Partoral ond Georgic (New BrunswiQ N.J.: Rvtgers University Press.
1978); and Alastair Fowler, K i d s of Litemturn. An lntmduetion to the Theory of Genres and
Modcr (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
I8 Fowler, p. 227.
50 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
and historiography. G.A. Starr has argued that sentimental narrative substitutes for the Bildungsroman's emphasis on education and process, a
regressive or static hero whose behaviour his culture "associates with infancy or femininity, but not with masculine adulthood."l9 But the static
quality of male characters in a novel such as The Man of Feeling (or
Tristram Shandy) is in fact identified not with effeminacy, but with the
archaic world of pastoral.2oIn both of these novels, pastoral stands for
the consolations of an exclusively male communion that can be discovered only by repressing awareness of present exigencies and focusing
on the past. And in both, history offers the obverse, but still definitively masculine, image of dedication to progress. Pastoral and history,
then, share the prestige of classical origin and with it the associations of
public orientation and masculine audience.
As the detailed discussion of The Man of Feeling which follows will
suggest, these affiliations prove to be crucial to the working out of the
narrative self-reflexiveness that is so consistent a feature of sentimental literature. Mackenzie's adaptation of history and pastoral to a critique
of the novel form quickly leads to an identification of women with all that
is suspect. In a series of contrasts in which the first term is gendered female, the second male, he sets reading against writing, mobile against
G.A. Starr, "Sentimental Decdudon." Augustan Studies: Essays in Honor of lnrin Ehmnpreis,
ed. Douglas Lane Patey and Timothy Keegan (Newa*: University of Delaware Press; London
and Tomnto: Associated University Presses. 1985). p. 253. See also Slarr, "'Only a Boy': Notes
on Sentimental Novels." Gcnn 10 (1977). 501-27.
20 The issue of "effeminacy"-especially as it intersects with the question of Mackende's intention
to satirize sensibility using Harley as his vehicl-is
a complex one. Some clarity may be
achieved by positioning The Man ofFeeIing in relation to huo texts discus& below: An Estinurte
of the Manners and Princiole~of the limes and Evelim. For conduct-book writers such as John
Brown.. "effeminacv"
i n e term for a dimihe
amimt
-~~~~~~~
~-~the hendencv
, serves as the o m i z~, of a
commercial rocrcty to pnwlege mode of exchange over cxtslmg hnerarchies. The consequent
blurnng of d~slinct~ons,
tncludmg the grndered d~stinctionof feminine from m c u l m , . Rmun
sees as preliminary to the ascendency of masculinized w o m n over feminized men. The novel's
more complex depiction of Ihe inward and the social generates a gmUer range of meanings in
representltions of the "feminine." The characIerizaIions of Mme Duval and M. DuRois, or of
Mrs Selwyn and Lovel in Evelino, for instance, are consistent with Bmwn's contention that in
a commercial culture women acquire Amazonian characterisfics, men foppish ones. But these
exemplars of sexual and saeial vansgressiveness serve as foils to the protagonists' more muted
absomtion of Ihe eendered traits of their o ~ w s i t sex:
e Evelina and Orville are mutuallv
,mssessed
of w k t the m i d i a l behavioural code w&id deem kseuline inte&tv~,
and
refinement.
~-- feminine
~~-~
The commodlly cullure that shapes Harley's uorld is depncted m terms famtltar from Rmun
But Mdckende'r use of genm suggests that hnr mlenuons arp more complexly nunalgtc h a
cmghtlornud dentihcation of Harle) und effeminacy would allow Whtle he is (Itke Orville)
possessed of a refined sensibility. Harley is denied the reformative agency thaf would allow him
a future. His sensibility remains bound up with the masculinist o r d e ~ o ft k past, a past rendered
as anachronistic through its alignment with pastoral. Harley's feeling sympathy with the other
casualties of change he encounters in London, in tum, qualifies the idea of "pmgress" Lhat
underwrites much Enlightenment historiography. Also notewoRhy in this context is the shess
on class hierarchies present in the relation of Harley ur Edwards.
. .
~~
~
~~
~
~
~~-~-
~
~~~~
~~~
~
~
~
~
~~~
~~
~
~~~-
~~
~~
~~
7~~~~~~~~
~~
~
~
~
~
~~~~
~
GENRE IN THE MAN OF F E E L I N G 51
permanent property, and present and future against the past. Such divisions reinforce for the modern reader the constitutive role played by
gender and genre in the politics of sentimental narrative. The operations
of genre, in turn, make it possible for us to see how the "interrelation of forms" that Ralph Cohen represents as key to the meaning of
eighteenth-century poetry can also illuminate contemporary novelistic
representations of experience."
FIE;
The "Introduction" to The Man of Feeling obliquely introduces distinctions of discourse, property, and temporality as part of the editor's account of how he came to possess the manuscript of Harley's life. The
tone is conversational; the activity framing it, the parodically male one
of hunting. Disappointed, he tells, by the loss of the quany which he
and his hunting partner, the local curate, had pursued "in a breathless
state of expectation," the editor stops and registers in precise detail aspects of the scene before him. It is very much a literary landscape. Such
features as the carving on the trees are standard in Renaissance pastoral, others ("a single crow, that perched on an old tree by the side of
a gate") anticipate Wordsworthian revisions of it. But it is the sight of a
woman walking by with a book in her hand that prompts conversation
between the two men:
'<
Some time ago," said he, "one HARLEY lived there, a whimsical sort of a man I
am told, but I was not then in the cure; though, if I had a turn for those things,
I might
deal of his history, for the greatest
part of it is still in my
- know a good
.
possession."
"His history!" said I. "Nay you may call it what you please," said the curate;
"for indeed it is no more a history than a sermon." ..."I should be glad to see
this medly," said I. (pp. 4-5)
The editor later inspects the "bundle of little episodes," finds himself "a
good deal affected," and speculates that had the "name of a Marmontel,
or a Richardson, been on the title page--'tis odds that I should have
wept" (p. 5).
The significance of these teasingly incomplete observations will only
later become apparent when Miss Walton's ties to Harley are more fully
detailed. The effect at present of withholding information is to dramatize
the uncertainties of the reader's relation to the text. In denying us the regulatory conditions of genre or literary reputation-this is not a history, a
21 Cohen. p. 22.
52 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y F I C T I O N
sermon, or a novel whose famous authorship underwrites our attentionthe editor enforces an awareness of the contingencies of reading when the
conventional directive signposts are withheld. Mackenzie will later extend the symbolic implications of this contrast between prescriptive and
discretionary reading by aligning it with the oppositional terms that stmcture the novel proper. In this larger context, the vilified terms are the new
order, verbal prowess, a feminized, c o m p t present, and an emotional investment in the siren lure of the future. These are distinguished from
the countervailing virtues of a masculine civility authenticated by lineage and broad acres. Or to put it more bluntly: in this novel, woman,
and more especially, woman reading, will emblematize cultural decay,
proving the bane of all that is upright and
Such a designation of literacy as degenerate is clearly fraught with
difficulties for an author who wishes to redefine without alienating his
audience. This is why pastoral is so important. In identifying Harley with
pastoral, Mackenzie is able to distinguish both hero and genre from the
more accessible blandishments of the contemporary novel. And in the
process, he is able to invest "the avocation of writing these fragments"
with a moral seriousness that confirms The Man of Feeling's insistently
political subtext.23
We can see genre's underwriting of political meaning in the scene
when Harley, accompanied by the discharged soldier old Edwards, pauses
on his return home after an unsuccessful sojourn in London:
When they had arrived within a little way of the village they journeyed to,
Harley stopped short, and looked stedfastly on the mouldering walls of a ruined
house that stood on the roadside: "Oh heavens!" he cried, "what do I see: silent,
unroofed, and desolate! Are all the gay tenants gone? do I hear their hum no
more? Edwards, look there, look there! the scene of my infant joys, my earliest
friendships, laid waste and ruinous! That was the very school where I was
boarded ... 'tis but a twelvemonth since I saw it standing, and its benches filled
with cherubs: that opposite side of the road was the green on which they sported,
22 Mackenzie's misogyny expresses a widely held scepticism about the increasingly public role for
women mat prim culture encouraged. But as the scope of the economic, culfwal, and temporal
contrasts that structute the novel suggests, misogyny also functions here in more inclusive terms,
as a trope for a range of conlracblal and c o d i f y i n g relations which pcnain to men as well
as to women. T k negative depiction of women in the novel, in o(her words, has as much to do
with w M lhey stand for as with whd t k y me in fact.
23 "To l a m Elphinston," 9 May 1771, Lmerr, pp. 52-53. For differing inlerpntations of the politics of sentimental narrative, see Robert MaMey. "Sentimentality as Performance: S h a h b u r y ,
Sterne, and the W c s of ViRue." 7'he New Eighteenth Cenruq: Thcoq Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nuashum and Laura Bmwn (New York: Methuen. 1987), pp. 21CL30; and
Spacks, pp. 114-33. S p a c b lakes issue with w M she sees as Markley's "condescend[ingl"
assumption that "writers of the pact failed to know what they w e n doing" (pp. 115-16).
i
GENRE IN T H E M A N O F F E E L I N G 53
see it now ploughed up! I would have given fifty times its value to have saved
it from the sacrilege of the plough."
"Dear Sir," replied Edwards, "perhaps they have left it from choice, and may
have got another spot as good." "They cannot," said Harley, "they cannot! I
shall never see the sward covered with its daisies, nor pressed by the dance of
the dear innocents: I shall never see that stump decked with the garlands which
their little hands had gathered." (pp. 95-96)
The superficial resemblance of this scene to Goldsmith's lament to
"Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain" depends on the elegiac
tone established in both works through verbal repetition. But while The
Deserred Village contrasts the "barren splendour" of the present with
a georgic vision of the past "When every rood of ground maintained
its man," Mackenzie's daisy-covered sward upon which garlanded innocents dance invokes pastoral conventions, ascribing to place unique and
irretrievable qualities.14
Pastoral imagery proves especially congenial to this novel's conservative values in part because, as Andrew Ettin has suggested, the genre
typically evokes a predominantly masculine world which, with its focus
on inconclusive relationships, also emphasizes containment and resistance to change.l5In The Man of Feeling this inflection of genre by gender
is heightened by the author's recurring references to standard misogynist claims about the link between women and social corruption. Virtue
is, consequently, represented as recoverable only in exclusively masculine contexts, of which the small farm granted to Old Edwards by Harley
stands as a type, a miniature Arcadia undisturbed by intrusive women:
it was a scene of tranquil virtue to have stopped an angel on his errands of mercy!
... Harley had contrived to lead a little bubbling brook through a green walk in
the middle of the ground, upon which he had erected a mill in miniature for
the diversion of Edwards's infant-grandson, and made a shift in its construction
to introduce a pliant bit of wood, that answered with its fairy clack to the
murmuring of the rill that turned it. I have seen him stand, listening to these
mingled sounds, with his eyes fixed upon the boy, and the smile of conscious
satisfaction upon his cheek while the old man with a look half-turned to Harley,
and half to Heaven, breathed an ejaculation of gratitude and piety. (pp. 101-2)
24 Oliver Goldsmith. The Dcscncd Village, in The P o e m of T h o r n Gmy, William Collinr. Oliver
Goldrmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longmans. Green. 1969). lines 1, 285, 58.
25 Andnw Ruin, Litemrun Md the Parrorol (New Haven and London: Yale University Rcss,
1984), 149. Betsy 'lloughtless's acid response to Truewonh's encomiastic account of the joys
of rural life in Elizs Haywood's Betsy Thoughtkss Rondon: 1751) suhstihrtes the realities of
rlr female condition for his ritualized invocation of dace. While he lauds "shadv bowers" and
"purling streams." ha vcrsron of partoral cenbcr on the mle 11 w l l rmpose on her "Whal' lo
be moped up lrkc a tame dove. only w coo.-and b~ll.--andbncdr' (2 89) Betsy. In n k r
uords. clearly grarpr lk relsnon of gender lo g e m , and m g n t u a the dcceptrons of a received
vocabulary which pwpons to be neuval
54 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Edwards's granddaughter makes no appearance in this insistently pictorial rendering of affective and temporal relationships. The compositional
alignment of the figures and the carefully detailed visual connections between them work both to imply a divinely sanctioned, recessive world
and to suggest that the order of grandfather, substitute father, and child
may function as an alternative to the more usual patrilineal structures
which, of course, involve women.
Harley's verbal exercises tend, in turn, to be prompted by female duplicity and to be shaped by highly conventional structures. The news of
Miss Walton's imminent marriage to Sir Hany Benson prompts the writing of "Lavinia. A Pastoral." While Harley's feeling for her, he writes,
"could never rely" on words-"It reigned in the throb of my heart, 1 It
gleam'd in the glance of my eye"-she, he now suspects, participated in
the falsifying language of social exchange:
Oh fool! in the circle to shine
That fashion's gay daughters approve,
You must speak as the fashions incline;Alas! are there fashions in love?
Yet sure they are simple who prize
The tongue that is smooth to deceive;
Yet sure she had sense to despise
The tinsel that folly may weave.
Having entertained the possibility that she never differentiated between
his authentic voice and the duplicitous ones of others, Harley then executes one of those dazzling leaps of logic that depends on the conventional misogynist association of verbal and sexual susceptibility: "Perhaps, when she smil'd upon all, / I have thought that she smil'd upon
me." Such promiscuousness leaves him "undone" (p. 115). fit only to anticipate "the peaceable womb" (p. 117) of the grave. Most bizarre is the
concluding fantasy of the poem, in which Harley imagines that after his
death he will return to watch over Miss Walton: "Perhaps, if [she is]
with sorrow oppress'd, I Her sorrow with patience to arm." But as the final stanza of the poem suggests, his notion of patience is complicated by
overtones of vengeance, by the desire to inflict upon her a pain commensurate with his own: "Then! then! in the tenderest part / May I whisper,
'Poor COLIN was true;' / And mark if a heave of her heart / The thought
of her COLIN pursue" (p. 117). Both the miniature Arcadia that Harley
constructs and the poem he writes align the received conventions of pastoral against the unreadability of the modem world, whose quintessential
human cipher appears to be the duplicitous woman. In Tom Jones, the expansive, although non-generative, world of Paradise Hall yields to Tom
G E N R E I N THE MAN OF FEELING 55
and Sophia's dynastic imperative; here, creation withers in the construction of an ephemeral toy landscape. For Mackenzie, the masculine mode
of pastoral, like the anachronistic politics of Harley, appears to be at
once attractive and unsustainable.
The consolations of a poetic mode so admirably suited to Harley's
elegiac sensibility are, then, limited by its resistance to change. When
converted to the terms of narrative, pastoral elegy proves no more capable
in its prose than in its poetic form of effecting reconciliation between
past and present. Throughout the novel, the failure of individuals to
survive and prosper will be linked to their singular filiation with the
past. The Bedlam mathematician, stock-jobber, schoolmaster, and bereft
lover who monotonously recount their stories thus conform to Harley's
pattern of withdrawal from an unbearably interested world through the
construction of an alternate order. The Bedlam prison, in other words,
in a manner familiar from Augustan poetry, serves as a displaced image
of the pastoral. Conversely, the beggar Harley encounters on the road
to London makes the necessary compromises that ensure his relative
prosperity. Unable to find a settlement or to acquire sufficient money
by detailing the woes of his past life, he turns to fortune-telling and
discovers that trading on the future yields impressive dividends.
The consequences of Harley's failure to grasp the significance of this
encounter become clear when he is denied the lease of some crown lands
lying contiguous to his estate. The lease has been granted to a footman,
now gauger, as reward for the pimping of his sister to the baronet in
whose power the grant lay; the point of this episode, as with so many
in the novel, can be found in the alignment of money, upward mobility, and the wilful construction of the self as mutable and contingent.
The episode is also typical in its equation of woman and property: the
baronet accepts the prostitution of the gauger's sister as payment equal in
kind for the conferring of the lease. In this model of exchange, Mackenzie implies, status distinctions are hopelessly contaminated, and with
them, social and personal identity. The narrative of Emily Atkins (in effect, the plot of the gauger's sister recounted from the woman's point of
view) involves the seducer's acting as if there were a standard of judgment that transcended social hierarchies. Winbrooke, she says, "asked
my opinion of every author, of every sentiment, with that submissive
diffidence, which shewed an unlimited confidence in my understanding" (p. 57). Emily's susceptibility to such rhetoric has been conditioned
by her reading of "plays, novels, and those poetical descriptions of the
beauty of virtue and honour, which the circulating libraries easily afforded (p. 5 5 b t h o s e "swarms of foolish and of worthless novels," as
56 EIOHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
James Fordyce caustically labels them in The Character and Conduct
of the Female Sex (1776). "incessantly spawned by dull and dissolute
scribblers, and with unweary industry disseminated from our Circulating
Libraries."26
The relation, implicit in Fordyce's language, of novel-writing and reading to sexuality is confirmed in Emily's subsequent history. Winbrooke
proposes that Mr Atkins's anger at the seduction of his daughter be softened by a cash payment: "'Honour, my Emily,' said he, 'is the word
of fools, or of those wiser men who cheat them. 'lis a fantastic bauble
that does not suit the gravity of your father's age; but, whatever it is, I
am afraid it can never be perfectly restored to you: exchange the word
then, and let pleasure be your object now'" (pp. 61-62). Linguistic, sexual, and social structures are here represented as negotiable, once the
measure of value has been established in terms of exchange, rather than
worth fixed in accordance with long-established convention.
Emily's definition by the plot of seduction interrupts her alliance with
the alternate female plot of marriage. Her father has briefly concealed
from her the inheritance of a sum which would remove the inequality
of "rank and fortune" (p. 59) that precludes her marriage to Winbrooke;
in the interval, she is seduced and enters into a different transactional
world in which her person commands a steadily diminishing cash value.
The alternate marriage plot would not have granted her an identity distinct from her marital status. It would simply have ensured a smooth
transfer from definition of herself as paternal to that of conjugal pmperty; negotiating the future in the humiliatingly stark terms of repeatedly
selling her person would be replaced by absorption into her husband's
sphere.
But The Man of Feeling does not finally invite a sympathetic reading
of Emily's plight. Instead, our attention is deflected towards the suffering
father.n The elegiac cadences of his complaint-"my Emily was the joy
of my age, and the pride of my soul!-Those things are now no morel
they are lost for ever! Her death I could have born! but the death of her
26 lams Fordyce, The Charnear M d Conduct of t k Fernole Sex (London: 1776), p. 48. BakerBenficld comments that Emily Atkins "has k e n warmed up, in accordance with the vaditional
belief in the physiology of female arousal, by a mmbination or oral and limate culhlrchlrc'
(p.
334). Paul Kauhnan's analysis of the sccount bmkn of the Bath Municipsl Library, "the h t
solid evidence of the sex of W n s , " reveals, however, in tern mntrsry to those of most
wmmcntators in the eighteenth century, that women "constituled less than M y per cent" of
the patrons. "In Defof Pair Rendem," Libmrics MdThrir Users: CollrctedPaprs in L i b r q
Hirtov (Landon: Library Associstion, 1%9), pp. 223,224.
27 Susan Smes, "British Seduced Maidens," Eightemlh-Century Studies 14 (1980). comments on
the notable "prominence of the girl's fat& who both in law and in fiction is frsquently seen to
be the chief viftim" (110).
G E N R E I N THE MAN OF FEELING 57
honour has added obloquy and shame to the sorrow which bends my
gray hairs to the dust" (p. 73)--align his mourning with Harley's lament
on the vanished landscape of his childhood, "laid waste and ruinous" (p.
95) by the depradations of the muveau riche squire. And Harley's advice
to Mr Atkins, that he should "look beyond" (p. 73) the world for solace,
anticipates the conditions of his own death, suggesting in turn that for
both men relationships with women have proved fatal.
Harley's death is precipitated in part by his inability to voice his love
for Miss Walton, an inability originating in his relative poverty in the
face of her f4.000-a-year fortune. His final words confess his feeling for
her: "To love Miss Walton could not be a crime-if to declare it is onethe expiation will be made." She responds: "'I know your w o r t h 4 have
known it long4 have esteemed it-What would you have me say?-I
have loved it as it deserved.'-He seized her hand-a languid colour reddened his cheek-- smile brightened faintly in his eye. As he gazed on
her, it grew dim, it fixed, it closed-He sighed, and fell back on his seat"
(p. 130). The logic of this scene suggests that his contravention of class
boundaries (boundaries construed in terms of wealth as opposed to lineage) is indeed a "crime" that demands the "expiation" of his own death.
In the process, Miss Walton mysteriously emerges as the agent of his destruction, a role for which we have been prepared by her engagement,
willed or passive, with the forces of the new order. If Harley's death
is, as Patricia Meyer Spacks suggests, "surely the most dramatic example of sexual avoidance in Western literature," the sexuality which he
resists functions as a trope for other contractual relations (literal and
figurative) to which significantly Miss Walton consent^.'^
She is, like Emily Atkins, a reader, first appearing in the "Introduction" as a figure passing "between the trees ... with a book in her hand" (p.
4); she is rumoured to be engaged to Sir Harry Benson, and she survives
this novel to appear in The Man of the World as the executrix of Harley's
will who has made his philanthropy "the business of [her] life."n Verbal, sexual, legal, and fiscal affiliations intersect in her person in terms
familiar from contemporary conduct-books. John Brown's hugely successful An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the lime (1757)
traces what he sees as the present "Crisis so important and alarming"
to a pervasive "vain, luxurious and selfih EFFEMINACY," itself a consequence, in patt, of "weekly essays, amatory plays and Novels, political
28 Spacks, p. 129.
29 Henry Mackenzie. The Man of tke World. In Two Pans. The Second Edifion, corrected (London.
1773). 254.
58 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
pamphlets and Books that revile Religion." This latter mode of consumption in turn implicates commerce in the feminizing of culture: "The
Passion for money, being founded, not in Sense, but Imagination, admits
of no Satiety.""
The terms upon which Brown's analysis draws-women, money, rkading, imagination, the confounding of distinctions, and the confusions of
gender which will ultimately precipitate social collapse-figure prominently in the fiction of the period. As Samuel Jackson Pratt's Liberal
Opinions (1775) and Shenstone-Green (1779) and George Walker's The
Vagabond (1799) attest, the destabilizing effects of reading were seen
as especially noteworthy. While these three novels centre on the temporary madnesses suffered by male readers who respond uncritically
to a particular text, female readers are more often presented as compromised, even contaminated, by the very act of reading. Fordyce thus
inveighs against "certain books, which we are assured ... are in their
nature so shameful, in their tendency so pestiferous, and contain such
rank treason against the royalty of virtue, that she, who can bear to peruse them must in her soul be a prostitute, let her reputation be what it
will." Interpretation and judgment, the saving distance from textual infatuation that the male protagonists recover at the end of Pratt's and
Walker's novels, are here denied the female reader. Her malleability ultimately depends upon the absence of a coherent identity, an absence
which Fordyce would preserve by advocating attention to a living as opposed to a dead text: "Your business chiefly is to read Men, in order to
make yourselves agreeable and useful. It is not the argumentative but the
sentimental talents, which give you that insight and those openings into
the human heart, that lead to your principal ends as w0men."3~
Underlying these opposed notions of reading are cultural assumptions
about the nature and capacities of women that also inform the relation of Miss Atkins to Miss Walton and of both to the novel as a whole.
30 John Bmwn. An Estimate of the Monncrs and Pdnciplrs of the llmcs (London, 1757). pp. aZ.
29. 42-13, 155. See also An Esn'mntc of the Monners and Prineiplcr of the llmcr. Volume I1
(London: 1758): and Brown's An Explonarory Defence of the &timate of the M m r r and
Principles of the limes. Being on Appendir to that Work occwioned by the Ckzmurs kztely
raised against it among certain R o n b of Men. Wrinen by the Author of the Estimate, In o S e d u
of Lctlcrs to a Noble Friend (London, 1758). For Ihe publication history of Ihe Estimtc, see
Donald D. Eddy, A Bibliography of John Bmwn (New York: The Bibliographical Society of
America. 1971). I.C.D. ClarL's reading of the Esrimarc as a millenarian response to a shortlived series of military crises in the pmsecution of the Seven Years War does not speak to the
ways in which the cluster of idea invoked by Bmwn cantinues to pmvide the organizing terms
for much contemporary fiction. See English Soeiery 1688-1832: Idcobgy, Soeiol Structure ond
Political Practice during the "oncien rdgimr" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
pp. 307-8.
31 Fordyce, pp. 148, 273.
G E N R E IN T H E M A N O F F E E L I N G 59
The prostitution of the woman reader depends upon the ability of words
to penetrate her "soul" unimpeded by the moral consciousness which
presumably mediates between the male reader and his potential contamination. Women must therefore be defined sentimentally, in relation to
the heart and not the soul, to feeling and not intellect, to social compliance and not individual cultivation. Miss Atkins errs in her preference for
the latter of each of these terms, while Miss Walton's actions accord with
the former. That Miss Walton is, despite her exemplary behaviour, tacitly held accountable for Harley's death reflects the peculiar double bind
of her gender. As ciphers defined by their context, women become in
this novel both type and agent of the mutability that is seen to inform the
larger social world. From this perspective, there is finally a negligible
difference between the two women, a commonality reinforced by their financially determined relations with men. Miss Walton, indeed, can no
more escape entanglement by others' intentions, be they Sir Harry Benson's amorous or Harley's testamentary ones, than can Miss Atkins.
She is bound to the enactment of a future whose terms are set by the
conflicting desires of men to define her in their own images.32
Mackenzie's antipathy to juridical interpretations of property (and, correlatively, to the sense of time as commodity) reflects his understanding
of the momentous cultural shift to which Smeaton points in his 1764
comment, "I have heard a mighty bustle of late about securitys of our
liberties and propertys; pray Sir is not the time and skill of any artist em32 Miss Walton might thus be seen as a vestigial nanative embodiment of Forrum, a late manifestation of what I.G.A. Pocock identifies as a recurring feature in Augustan journalism: "She
stands for that future which can onlv be soueht oassionatelv and inconstanflv. and for the hvster-
. .
of actualization of fantasies on whieh--though never oulte comaleted-the
smulative sou-
the "domain of sensibility and sentiment in novels is constituted, in various ways, out of an opposition to a 'world' of masculine desire, wmmercial endeavour, and material ambition" (p. 150),
seems in the conlext of a novel like T k Mon of Feeling to misconsme the wntemporary understanding of masculinity. "Commercial endeavour and material ambition," as the example of the
nouveau r i c h squire suggests, are associated with inattentiveness to tradition (especially in rela
tion to property, as when h e squire pulls down the buildings that interfere with his "prospects")
and orientation to the future. Harley's imprecation, "And from his [the squire's] derogate body
never spring 1 A babe to honour him," hints moreover, in its adjustment of Goneril's gender, not only at the femininity of the squire, but also at his potential eclipsing of the values
of conlinuity and stability. Such feminization accords with Adam Smith's account of the effects of commerce in his Lectures: "Another bad effect of commerce is that it sinks the courage
of mankind. and tends to extinguish m m i d spirit. ... By having their minds constantly employed
in the arts of luxury, they grow effeminale and dasla~dly."Quoted in Alben 0. Hirschman. The
Parsiom ond r k Inrercsts: Politico1 Argumentr for Coptlnlirm before 11s Triumph (Rinceton:
Princeton University Presr. 1977). p. 106.
60 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
ployed in design, his property, his estate?"" The assertion that Lockean
notions of property can possess value independent of one's actual possession of broad acres necessarily, as The Man of Feeling witnesses,
unsettles the traditional bond between individual and polity. For Harley,
identity is inextricably allied with real property; patrilineal inheritance
gives the sanction of time and the promise of continuity to the political
relations which follow from the connection of the two. For the new order, the attractions of property depend on its alienation from the past.
After amassing a fortune by manipulating "imaginary" money, the nouveau riche parvenu (significantly unnamed) extends his sway from city
to country. Those features of the landscape, such as the schoolhouse,
which testify to an established communal order, are erased, and in their
stead emerges a purely symbolic understanding of land as yet another
projection of the self-fashioned personality swayed by the imperatives
of fashion as opposed to innate taste. By virtue of its instability and
opennness to the vertiginous possibilities of the future, such a personality is construed as essentially feminine and thus thematically linked to the
coupled figures of Miss Walton and Emily Atkins, figures whose baleful
influence can only finally be evaded by the sacrificial death of the suffering male. The reader in turn grasps these alignments of masculine worth
and feminine insubstantiality as they impinge upon the act of interpretation. Harley's understanding of world and text expresses itself in literary
form through his pastoral compositions; the stylized, masculine mode
made accessible by a privileged education connects him to the more austere virtues of the classical past. The women in the novel, conversely,
read rather than write and, in doing so, reveal their unstable commitment to the future and to the attractions of the imagined over the known.
They also suggest the equivocal status of the reader of Mackenzie's text,
whose sumgate they are.
When such regressions are pursued to their logical end, The Man of
Feeling must itself become the object of critical s c ~ t i n y As
. ~ a form
33 QuMed tn Mqaret C. Jacob. "Scienufir Cullwe In the Early English Enlightenment. Mcchanlsms. Induslry. and Genllcmly Facts." Anricptionr oj the E n b g h t c ~ v n tan England Frmcr.
and Cerrrmny. cd A C KOR and P J Konhin (Philadelphia: Univcmfy of Rnnsylvma Presr.
1987). p. 153.
34 The logic, of course, is supplied by a modwn reader familiar with a m g e of eighteenth-century
literatures and is open to refutation by other rraders for whom authorial intent has prescriptive
power. Inlerpretive diffemcrs cenved an UK absence or presence of satire in this novel, however.
sunsst bat intentionalitv in The Man of Feeline is itself a mnte~ledissue. Far Brian Wckea.
~~~~~~.
h i n o v e l is charmerired by a '.non-kbtguoua'mwd of p&os and sympathy" Introduction.
The Man of Fcrbng (London Oxford Univenity RcssJ, p. xi".For John K. Sheriff, the "several
levels of hcl~onand wvcral narraton" conlnbute lo an unrelenl~ngsarire of Harley. The Good.
~~
~
~
~~~~~
G E N R E IN T H E MAN O F F E E L I N G 61
of public property, the novel is apparently bound to the system of values Mackenzie deplores; as a construct which plays with the reader's
imagination and anxieties about the future, the novel elicits those emotions which he wishes to suppress. But, as his 1785 hunger essay on
fiction suggests, novels at least potentially stand apart both from those
"young" and "indolent" readers for whom "the labour of thought is irksome" and from those authors "whose necessities or vanity prompted
them to write." "Considered in the abstract," he maintains, "as containing an interesting relation of events, illustrative of the manners and
characters of mankind, it [the novel] surely merits a higher station in the
world of letters than is generally assigned it.""
The position he imagines, as his descriptive language implies, is the
one currently occupied by his Edinburgh peers, Ferguson, Kames, and
Blair: philosophical historians who complicate political narrative by their
introduction of conjectural accounts of the "manner and characters of
mankind." As Mark Phillips has argued in relation to the early nineteenth century, such amendments to historical writing can be seen as
responses to contemporary developments in literary theory and practice.=
Reciprocally, this essay has argued, The Man of Feeling challenges historiography by internalizing and then qualifying its conventions. The
agents of this qualification-an ahistorical pastoral and a novelistic attention to feelings of loss and betrayal-in many ways relay mutually
exclusive meanings. But they converge in their shared reading of social change from the perspective of the individual sensibility. As Walter
Nntund M m : The Evolution of a Mom1 Ideal,
0081&
%
-I
(University: University of Alabfma
Reas. 1982). p. 83. Barbma Benedict. in her study Framing Feeling: Sentiment ond Sryh in
English Pmse Fiction 1745-1800 (New Yo& AMS Ress, 1994). develop the mtaphor of
fnuning invoked by Sheriff to agus that Mackenzie uses linguistic and s t ~ c t u t ahl n y to critique
sentimentalism. Tk palitical d i n g s offered by Spacks and Ma%Jey, noted abave, run counter
to Leo Braudy's view of the novel as one that "starches for the most effective way to mime
sincerity and to achieve thneby a form that is innate and individual, unbeholding to the pteexisting orders of society, cultme, and history." "The Porn of the Sentimental Novel." Novel
7 (1973). 6. More recently, Beth Powkes Tobin has analysed The M m of Feeling as a middleclass male critique of the landed clasacs. In Superintending the Poor Charitable Ladies and
Potcrnnl Londlomlr in British Fiction, 177&lSW (New Haven and London: Yale Univmity
M s . 1993), she arguss that Mackenzie supports the new economic order of capitalism by
characterizing Harley as tepresentmive of the ineffkhlslify of a residual patemalit culture. In
chmtiug the ways in which Mackenzie at once honours and d i m i n i s h Harley, Tobin focuses
on the novel's economic relations. My argument complements hers in the sense that l see Ulese
s t r u c t u ~as~ narrativized within the text thmugh reference to the conmtive meanings implicit
in fhe g e m of pastoral, hitory, and novel.
35 Lowgcr. p. 328.
36 Mark Phillip. "Macaulay, Scott, and the Literary Challenge to Historiography." J o u d of the
History of Idem 50 (1989). 117-33. See also his "Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Amoldo Momigliano and the Historiography of 18th-Century Britain." J o u d of the
History of Idem 57 (19%). 297-336.
62 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
Scott's essay in Lives of the Novelists comments, Mackenzie aims to represent "rather the history of effects produced upon the human mind by a
series of events, than the narrative of those events them~elves."~~
Scott's
critical vocabulary here adjusts the terms of Mackenzie's distinction of
ancient from modem historiography (on the grounds that the latter offers "general and philosophic views") to fit the novel, which now appears
as interiorized and affective history.
The retrospect that Scott provides in his analysis of Mackenzie allows us to understand, in turn, the younger writer's indebtedness to The
Man of Feeling and its use of historiography and pastoral. Both authors
claim from their historiographic rivals the dignity of an elevated subject and the prestige of a male audience. Both parody the historian's
methodological scrupulousness and attention to the value of the external and objective: Mackenzie, in the convention of the partial manuscript,
Scott, in the echoing account of the fortuitous rediscovery of the misplaced Waverley. And both adapt pastoral conventions to complementary
ends. In Mackenzie, pastoral represents the irretrievable loss of coherence experienced when the values of an Clite, landed culture are able
to persist only in highly artificial, nongenerative forms. In Scott, pastoral is invested with an archaic historicity through its associations with
the romance of the Highland landscape and with Jacobite heroism. Towards the end of Waverley, however, the intense emotional and aesthetic
pleasures afforded the hero by this vanquished world finally yield to the
elegiac recognition that "the romance of his life was ended, and that
its real history had now commenced."38 The larger complexities of such
"real history" and its literary expression in the nineteenth century owe
much to the earlier work of Mackenzie, as Scott himself perhaps recognized in dedicating Waverley to "Our Scottish Addison," an author
"among the most distinguished of his class.""
University of Ottawa
37 Walter Scott, The Uvcr of the Novelisrs (London: I.M.Dent, 1928). p. 299.
38 Walter Scon, Woverley; Or, '7isSiny Years S h e , ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986), p. 283.
39 Scott. W m d e y . p 343. Scon. b v r r . p 2% For an analysts Ihr seer Walter Scon as the ptvoral
figure ~n Ihe mlcvlauon of the rplatlons of novels to hrtory. ree Ina Ferns. 73e A~chrrvcmrnt
of b r r r q Aurhonr) Gmdrr. Htsrury und rk Wovedry Nmclr (Ilhaca and London Comell
University F'ress, 1991).
I would like to thank Mark Phillips for his careful reading of this paper and for wnversations
that have contributed greatly to my understanding of eighteenth-century historiography.