‘I Will Not Weep’: Tears of Sympathy in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling

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