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(2013) Men of feeling in eighteenth-century literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
In a letter to Sir Phillip Francis dated 20 February 1790, Edmund Burke defends the naturalness of his anti-revolutionary sympathies expressed in Reflections on the Revolution in France from accusations of "foppery" and falsehood. He recounts "the abominable scene of 1789" and attests that these recollections draw "Tears' that wet his paper. As Claudia Johnson has observed, the statement positions Burke as a man of feeling similar to Sterne's Yorick in A Sentimental Journey whose 'saturated handkerchief" anticipates "Burke's tear-sodden paper" as a sign of 'superior humanity" (5). What Johnson does not mention, however, is that Burke's declaration to Sir Francis also follows in the tradition of Sterne (and Mackenzie, Smollett and Brooke) by drawing attention to the materiality of the written page. Burke's tear-stained letter operates at the interface of texts and sensitive bodies, imbuing the physical page with embodied sympathetic significance. In this way, Burke's statement is reminiscent of novelistic depictions of men of feeling not only in its open confession of male sensibility, but also in the fact that the confession manifests itself in a self-referential literary gesture.
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Wetmore, A. (2013). Concluding matter: tear-blotted texts and men of feeling in the 1790s, in Men of feeling in eighteenth-century literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 147-164.
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