James Beattie (1735-1803) was a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He was a popular philosophical opponent of David Hume, and through his famous poem, The Minstrel, he had a lasting influence on Wordsworth and the Romantics. Beattie lived among the great literati of the time, and his wide correspondence provides a treasure trove of information about his contemporaries.
How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study traces the emergence of what became a key concept of intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions, Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the imagination rather than reason as the pivotal faculty through which sympathy is rendered morally effective. Writing at the interface of ethics and poetics, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and others explored the sympathetic imagination as a means of both explaining emotional reader response and discovering moral distinctions. As a result, the sentimental novel became the sight of ethical controversy. Arguing against the dominant view of research which claims that the novel of sensibility is mostly uncritically sentimental, the book demonstrates that it is precisely in this genre that the sympathetic imagination is sceptically assessed in terms of its literary and moral potential.
The life of this actor, manager, playwright, and eighteenth-century gentleman is here refracted through the volurninous correspondence and analyses of roles, plays, and performances in this, no doubt final, biography of David Garrick. As the direct result of modern scholarship accessible only since the 1960s, it is now possible to appraise fully the life of this remarkable person who was born in Lichfield 19February 1717, a childhood friend of Samuel Johnson, who became the greatest English theatrical luminary who ever lived, and who when he died 20 January 1779was mourned by the nation and eulogized by Dr. Johnson as one whose death "eclipsed the gaiety of nations." For twenty-nine years (1747-1776) Garrick managed Drury Lane theatre, caring passionately for its well-being. His own acting set the pace for the performances, his discipline carried it on, and his theatrical innovations attracted the audiences on which the lives, hopes, and families of some 140actors, actresses, singers, dancers, and others depended. In addition, he wrote, adapted, or altered some 49 plays and wrote nearly 100 prologues. What emerges from this big, new critical biography is a fully drawn portrait of an eighteenth-century gentleman, with a wide range of acquaintances, elegant socially, morally, and personally, and an engaging conversationalist with and respecter of women of mark and with his closest friends. He was also, as the evidence now shows, the solid link with his own age and the great dramatic artists of the past, from the Restoration playwrights to Massinger, Jonson, Shakespeare, and early English dramatists.
