A sentimental virtuous man navigates an unjust world. ( )

Sometimes hard to tell if this was supposed to be satirical or not. ( )

2.8 stars. The book was written in fragments, instead of a complete story. Basically a man traveling and he runs into a person or persons and listens to their stories, and then he tries to help them.

By reading these fragments at night before I fell asleep I would often restart and have no idea who was talking and how the book got to that point. I would go back several pages and it still didn’t always help. Very disjointed. ( )

I don't know why I read this. Or, if I have to put something down, then I read this because the power was out for 24 hours and this was the only thing I had on my tablet that I hadn't read, and when it got too dark to read by daylight that was my only remaining option. But why did I have it on my tablet? Because it's exactly the kind of book that gets talked about in an English graduate seminar. Something about how impossible it is to understand Romantic or sentimental novels without this, which is both the parody and the epitome.

At any rate, it's not the kind of book we'd now read for enjoyment. This is a quintessential syllabus-book. There's not much to recommend it beyond it's relevance to the better novels that influenced it or were influenced by it. It entered and left my consciousness at various times since I first heard of it (I don't remember when, but I know it was in a seminar room somewhere, all of which look vaguely similar in my memory now whether they were in Ottawa or Vancouver or Oxford), but I think what prompted me to find and download it in recent weeks was coming across Mary Shelley's reading list from 1815 and suddenly recalling that though this was not on that list, it was similar enough to some of the other novels to prompt me to download it before I forgot again. And I might not have got around to it at all if it weren't for the power outage.

I've gained nothing from reading this, but I'd be a goddamn liar if I said that this would stop me from mentioning it in a class discussion if I were still taking those old seminars. ( )

In this eighteenth century sentimental novel we are shown fragments of Harley's life and events he heard about or witnessed. Harley's parents died when he was young, and the only thing his guardians could agree on was that he should find a way to increase his income. To this end, he travels to London and back to the countryside again. Along the way he encounters various people, all of whom are going through some kind of hardship. Harley, as a man capable of empathizing with others in a world governed by selfishness, tries to help as much as he can, even though he is sometimes taken in by swindlers.

It was a little hard to get into, and there's very little actual plot, but this relatively short read is a good introduction to the genre of the sentimental novel. The focus is on emotions over everything else, and Harley is certainly full of emotions: sympathy, compassion, benevolence, pity, etc. The events get a little hard to believe after a while, but that was characteristic of the genre. This book is well worth reading for it's place in literary history alone. ( )