The Sentimental Virtuoso: Collecting Feeling in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling

This article explains the ambiguities in Henry Mackenzie’s quasi-ironic sentimental novel, The Man of Feeling, by examining its debt to an earlier, formative literary tradition: the seventeenth-century character collection that features the caricatured antiquarian virtuoso. Character collections, exemplified by Samuel Butler’s Characters (mainly written between 1667 and 1669), constitute catalogues of ridiculed social and psychological types, prominent among whom are collector-characters derogated for antisocial self-absorption, arrogance, scopophilia, impotence, and credulity. As a sentimental novel, written in an era that highly valued sociability, The Man of Feeling reveals how this satiric inheritance complicates the praise of feeling. It reworks the structure and types of the character tradition and the figure of the antiquarian virtuoso by means of narrative frames that distance readers from the sentimental incidents; an episodic form that fractures sequential narrative; and rhetoric, themes, and characters that play on the opposition between materiality, idea, and feeling that informs the caricature of the antiquarian virtuoso. These features help to explain the ambiguity of the “man of feeling”: the sentimental virtuoso who both objectifies and personalizes a world of collectible experiences

Collecting Trouble: Sir Hans Sloane’s Literary Reputation in Eighteenth-Century Britain [pre-print]

This article argues that the shifts in the reputation of Sir Hans Sloane, the foremost British collector of the eighteenth century, reflect the changing reputation of collecting itself from the Restoration to the Regency. By examining the literary representations of Sloane in genres ranging from poetry to memoirs, it traces Sloane’s reputation in literary culture from that of a model physician and benefactor, to a charlatan, to a toyman, and finally, to an entrepreneur. These shifts reflect the challenges that collecting presented to culture: on the one hand, it threatened conventional valuations, and on the other, offered rich opportunities both for both self-advancement and the advancement of learning. Writers show that Sloane’s activities recast the natural world as a storehouse stuffed with collectibles and collecting as an ambiguous but national practice of imperialistic acquisition. At the same time, they find in Sloane and the fashion for collecting several dangers: it reflected the increasing power of objects to oust abstract concepts as the subjects of literary description, presented new modes of self-definition and sociability, and, above all, led to a transition from an idea of nature as full of wonders to one in which nature is a treasure-house of loot and knowledge. Whereas the Restoration had embraced the new definition of a scholar-collector as a gentleman who contributed to the public good, by the midcentury, collectors seemed self-absorbed and deluded. Yet, by the end of the century, collecting was considered laudable self-advancement. Things had changed, so that on 15 January 1759, when the British Museum opened for “study and public inspection,” Sloane, formerly a charlatan and a toyman, stood as the noble exemplar of the collector and the father of a new British identity

The Mass of the Candidate Exoplanet Companion to HD136118 from Hubble Space Telescope Astrometry and High-Precision Radial Velocities

We use Hubble Space Telescope Fine Guidance Sensor astrometry and high-cadence radial velocities for HD136118 from the HET with archival data from Lick to determine the complete set of orbital parameters for HD136118b. We find an orbital inclination for the candidate exoplanet of i_{b} = 163.1 +- 3.0 deg. This establishes the actual mass of the object, M_{b} = 42^{+11}_{-18} MJup, in contrast to the minimum mass determined from the radial velocity data only, M_{b}sin{i} ~ 12 MJup. Therefore, the low-mass companion to HD 136118 is now identified as a likely brown dwarf residing in the "brown dwarf desert".Comment: 35 pages, 12 figures, 10 tables. Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journa

Astrometry with the Hubble Space Telescope: Trigonometric Parallaxes of Selected Hyads

We present absolute parallaxes and proper motions for seven members of the Hyades open cluster, pre-selected to lie in the core of the cluster. Our data come from archival astrometric data from FGS 3, and newer data for 3 Hyads from FGS 1R, both white-light interferometers on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). We obtain member parallaxes from six individual Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) fields and use the field containing van Altena 622 and van Altena 627 (= HIP 21138) as an example. Proper motions, spectral classifications and VJHK photometry of the stars comprising the astrometric refer- ence frames provide spectrophotometric estimates of reference star absolute parallaxes. Introducing these into our model as observations with error, we determine absolute parallaxes for each Hyad. The parallax of vA 627 is significantly improved by including a perturbation orbit for this previously known spectroscopic binary, now an astrometric binary. Compared to our original (1997) determina- tions, a combination of new data, updated calibration, and improved analysis lowered the individual parallax errors by an average factor of 4.5. Comparing parallaxes of the four stars contained in the Hipparcos catalog, we obtain an average factor of 11 times improvement with the HST . With these new results, we also have better agreement with Hipparcos for the four stars in common. These new parallaxes provide an average distance for these seven members, = 47.5 pc, for the core a \pm 1 - {\sigma} dispersion depth of 3.6 pc, and a minimum depth from individual components of 16.0 \pm 0.9 pc. Absolute magnitudes for each member are compared to established main sequences, with excellent agreement. We obtain a weighted average distance modulus for the core of the Hyades of m-M=3.376 \pm 0.01, a value close to the previous Hipparcos values, m-M=3.33\pm 0.02.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, Astronomical Journal, accepted 2011-3-