Deathly Sentimentalism: Sarah Fielding, Henry Mackenzie

Regarding the eighteenth-century sentimental novel, critics have long argued that sentiment works to bond subjects and to accommodate subjects to society. The sentimental novel also teaches the reader how to die. Looking to Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (1744, 1753) and Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771), I argue that the eighteenth-century sentimental novel deploys death as a figure for thinking about political critique and its limits. On their deathbeds, characters utter politically charged speeches, but cannot act upon their words, such that sentimental critique is both powerful and inoperative. Along the contours of a deathly sentimentalism there are slippages between resistance and passivity, between isolation and socialization. The sentimental novel bespeaks, in its emphasis upon mortality and its vexations, the difficulty of accommodating political expression in rhythm with the momentum of modern history.