Carlyle Studies Annual - Number 16, 1996 PDF

Front Matter
Source: Carlyle Studies Annual, No. 16, Special Issue: Carlyle at 200 Lectures II (1996)
Published by: Saint Joseph’s University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44945742
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:47 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Saint Joseph’s University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Carlyle Studies Annual
This content downloaded from 78.109.76.157 on Tue, 07 Jan 2020 09:47:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carlyłe
STUDIES ANNUAL
Special Issue
Carlyle at 200 Lectures II
Bicentenary Conference
Memorial University, St. John's,

Newfoundland
Illinois State
UNIVERSITY
Publications Unit
Department of English
Carlyle STUDIES ANNUAL -
Editor:
Rodger L. Tarr (Illinois State University)
Manuscript Editor:
Anne Skabarnicki (Royal Military College of Canada)
Book Review Editor:
D. J. Trela (Roosevelt University)
Associate Editors:
Mark Cumming (Memorial University of Newfoundland)

Fleming McClelland (Northeast Louisiana University)
Editorial/Production Assistants:
Ann Greenseth, David Dean, Joe Tigan
Advisory Board:
Ruth apRoberts (University of Carlifornia, Riverside); Rosemary Ashton (University College, London); Murray Baumgart
of California, Santa Cruz); Patrick Brantlinger (Indiana University); Ian Campbell (University of Edinburgh); Aileen C
(University of Edinburgh); John Clubbe (University of Kentucky); David J. DeLaura (University of Pennsylvania); Ho
(Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz); K.J. Fielding (University of Edinburgh); Fred Kaplan (Queens College); Geor
(Brown University); Joel Myerson (University of South Carolina); John Rosenberg (Columbia University); G. Ross Ro
of South Carolina); Clyde de L. Ryals (Duke University); David R. Sorensen (St. Joseph's University); Michael Timko (Q
G. B. Tennyson (University of California, Los Angeles); Chris R. Vanden Bossche (University of Notre Dame)
Submissions
Carlyle Studies Annual (formerly the Carlyle Annual) is an international journal devoted to Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle and
their times. Manuscripts of any length are welcomed, including notes and reviews, on any aspect of the Carlyles' work, lives, and
times. There are no restrictions on approach or treatment. Manuscripts should be double-spaced. MLA-style is preferred. Two copies
should be sent to Anne Skabarnicki, Department of English, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7K 5L0
or to the Editor.
Subscriptions
Carlyle Studies Annual (ISSN 1074-2670) is published in December. The annual subscription rate is $12 (U.S.) for individuals
$15 (U.S.) for institutions. Subscriptions and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to Rodger L. Tarr, Edit
Department of English, Campus Box 4240, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois 61790-4240 USA.
Carlyle Studies Annual is produced by the Illinois State University Publications Unit.
Copyright © 1996 Carlyle Studies Annual
(áy)
Member, Council of Editors of Learned Journals
Illinois State
UNIVERSITY
©
Publications Unit
An equal opportunity/affirmative action university encouraging diversity
Carlyle
STUDIES ANNUAL
Special Issue
Carlyle at 200 Lectures II
Bicentenary Conference
Memorial University, St. John's,

Newfoundland
Illinois State
UNIVERSITY
Publications Unit
/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']
/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']
Carly
Special Issue
Carlyle at 200
Page 7
Jane Welsh Carlyle: Letters, the Self, and the Literary

Norma Clarke
Page 15
Constructing Reality: Jane Welsh Carlyle's Epistolary Narratives

Aileen Christianson
Page 25
Carlyle's Scotch Scepticism: Writing from the Scottish Tradition

Ralph Jessop
Page 37 '
Romancing the Past: Walter Scott and Thomas Ca
Lowell T. Frye
Page 51
The Cultural Revolution of Sartor Resartus
Brian Cowlishaw
Page 6l
Selective Affinities: Carlyle, Goethe, and the French Revolution

David R. Sorensen
Page 75
Carlyle's Subliminal Feminine:

Maenadic Chaos in The French Revolution
John Clubbe
continued on next page
Carlyle studies annua l
Page 89
Racialism and the P

"Occasional Discou
Jude V. Nixon
Page 109
A Latter-day French Carlylean

Ruth apRoberts
Page 117
The Stupidest Novel in London:

Thomas Carlyle and the Sickness of Victorian Fiction
Hilary M. Schor
Norman H. Strouse Annual Lecture
University of California, Santa Cruz
Page 133
Years' Work in Carlyle Studies 1994-1995

DJ. Trela
Page 145
Reviews
No. 16
1996
/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']
/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']
Studies
History, Theory, Interpretation
Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism provides a forum for interpre-

tive, cumulative dialogue about Poe's life and writings; about
the cultural and material contexts that conditioned the produc-
tion and reception of his work; and about his interrelationships
with other writers, especially those who work in traditions of
dark romanticism. Features include review essays, periodic spe-
cial issues dealing with such topics as "Poe and Gender," and a
biennial "International Poe Bibliography."
The journal invites submission of original articles and notes,

and welcomes work grounded in a wide range of theoretical and
critical perspectives. Address submissions and inquiries to the
Editor, Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism , Department of English,
Washington State University, Pullman, Washington 99164-5020.
Contributions should conform to The Chicago Manual of Style.
Poe Studies is published twice a year by the Washington State

University Press. Address inquiries concerning subscriptions
and advertising to the Journals Coordinator, Washington State
University Press, Pullman, Washington 99164-5910. Subscrip-
tion rates in US currency are as follows: for individuals, $ 10.00/
one year and $18.00/two years; for institutions, $15.00/one
year and $28.00/two years. Foreign subscriptions should add
$5.00 for postage and handling. Back issues are available at
$7.50 per number.
LEGACY
A Journal of American Women Writers

Karen Dandurand, Martha Ackmann , Susan K. Harris , Editors
LEGACY is the premiere journal devoted exclusively to the rich

and diverse traditions of American women's writing. From Phillis
Wheatley to Ida B. Wells-Barnett, LEGACY spans four centuries in
offering the most groundbreaking and incisive analysis of American
women's literary traditions. A leader in the rediscovery and evalua-
tion of women's writing, LEGACY has been a scholar's indispensable
resource since 1984. Offering essays in literary history, biography, bib-
liography, and textual criticism, LEGACY also presents reprints of for-
gotten texts not available in any other scholarly journal. Published
twice a year, LEGACY is also the journal to turn to for the most up-
to-date and expansive listings and reviews of books, articles, and dis-
sertations on American women writers.
Published twice annually ISSN 0748-4321
Personal Subscriptions, $20/Outside U.S. $23 • Institutions, $30/
Students, $12/Outside U.S. $14.50
HIGHLIGHTS FROM RECENT ISSUES

Late Nineteenth- Spirit Matters: Re- Profiles
Century American possessing the African-
Women's Nature American Literary Bathsheba Bowers,
Poetry and the Tradition 1672-1718
Evolution of the Anne Dalke
Imagist Poem Jarena Lee, 1783-18??
Paula Bennett Entitled to More than
Caroline Kirkland,
"Peculiar Praise": The
Double Talk: The 1801-1864
Extravagance of Alice
Power and Glory of Cary's Ci overnook Sarah Pratt McLean
Paradox in E.D.E.N. Judith Fetterley Greene, 1856-1935
Southworth's The
Hidden Hand The Wild Side of The Dorothy Canfield
Lynette Carpenter Wide, Wide World Fisher, 1879-1958
Veronica Stewart
rn PENN STATE PRESS
) To subscribe, write or call the Penn State Press, Journals Department,

820 North University Drive, University Park, PA 16802-1003
EDITOR'S NOTE
Author(s): Mark Cumming and Rodger L. Tarr
Source: Carlyle Studies Annual, No. 16, Special Issue: Carlyle at 200 Lectures II (1996), p. 3
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:47 UTC
EDITOR'S NOTE
Our era has questioned the notion that any particular author - or, ind
author at all - should be of perennial critical interest. Yet, as we conclude our
of Carlyle's bicentenary, there appears to be little doubt concerning his enduring p
a subject for thoughtful research. Carlyle seems an inescapable cultural presen
narrative constructions of the Victorian age and prophecies of modern life can be
but not profitably ignored. And, he remains - though this is still something o
secret" that needs to be divulged - a fabulously gifted writer.
This second selection of bicentenary papers, garnered from the "Carlyl
conference hosted by Memorial University of Newfoundland and the Carlyl
Annual , demonstrates our continuing professional interest in Thomas Carly
developing professional interest in Jane Welsh Carlyle. I am pleased to have this op
to offer a final thank you to all who contributed so generously to the conference's
and to note that, while this is the last of the special issues devoted to the bicenten
of the conference papers will continue to grace our pages in the 1997 issue.
Mark Cumming, Guest Editor

Memorial University of Newfoundland
I would like to extend my thanks and appreciation to Mark Cumming

splendid conference he hosted in 1995, and for his excellent work as Guest Ed
last two issues. Further, Carlyle Studies Annual wishes to acknowledge form
Terrence Murphy, Faculty of Arts, Memorial University of Newfoundland;
Haycock, Arts, Royal Military College of Canada; Dean Carlos D. Fandal, College
Arts, Northeast Louisiana University; and Dean Paul Schollaert, College of Arts
Illinois State University for their most important support. The journal also acknow
valuable assistance of Roosevelt University. Finally, I would like to acknowledge
support of Ronald Fortune, Chair, Department of English, Illinois State Univer
Rodger L. Tarr
Illinois State University
Jane Welsh Carlyle: Letters, the Self, and the Literary
Author(s): Norma Clarke
Source: Carlyle Studies Annual, No. 16, Special Issue: Carlyle at 200 Lectures II (1996), pp. 7-
14
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:47 UTC
J
a
the literary critic with a problem. In the case of Jane Welsh Carlyle, the ongoing
Writers the project literary whoproject
of theofearnthe critic
CollectedCollected
Letters aoíwith place a inhasproblem.
the Carlyles Lettersto present-day
made available literary oí history the In the Carlyles case on the of has basis Jane made of Welsh personal available Carlyle, writings to the present-day ongoing present
readers a resource whose richness is probably unparalleled. And yet, what is one to do with
such writings? Traditionally, the personal writings of individuals have been drawn on more
by historians and biographers, as "evidence" or "background" - vivid vignettes of past life,
or - in Jane Carlyle's case - for pen drawings of the famous. Literary critics have shown
some, but not much, professional interest. Collections of letters do not, on the whole, find
their way onto reading lists of courses in 18th or 19th Century literature, and we don't know
how to evaluate them.
All this is rather surprising when you consider that the term, Letters, onc
encompassed the whole of what we call Literature. Jane Carlyle was a self-conscious
epistolary artist writing at a time when the letter occupied an unchallenged place in th
discourse of literate - not merely literary - people. We know about the importance of th
epistolary in the development of the novel, but to think of Jane Carlyle as one of Pamela's
Daughters would be misleading. She fits much more obviously within the tradition of letter
exchange and circulation between groups of friends and family, often undertaken by
women. In the 18th Century, this kind of letter writing took on a particular function for
intellectual and literary women, who used the form, in a semi-public way, to engage i
debate - sometimes establishing informal networks of considerable influence with leadin
men, as Hannah More was able to do.1 It was not necessary for such a correspondence t
be published for it to be known about, but publication - perhaps with a loving Memoir b
a surviving relative attached, possibly with journal extracts - established it as a genre. The
early decades of the 19th Century saw many such volumes into print, and they were popular
the Memoirs of Elizabeth Carter (a leading bluestocking) for example, published in 180
went through four editions between then and the 1820s. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu may
be identified as the first confessedly to write and keep copies of her letters with a view to
publication - they were published in 1762. Anna Seward, who gained a reputation as a po
in the early 1780s, began transcribing her own letters for future publication in 1784.2 Such
letters are formal compositions and recognised as such. They often had a stateliness which
sets them apart from the "artlessness" and breathlessness coded as "feminine" by such literary
prototypes as Richardson's Pamela or Rousseau's Julie. This latter style, however, came t
dominate in the early decades of the 19th Century when, in literary terms, the "spontane-
ous" - in poem, speech, prose, or letter - became the quintessential^ feminine.
For the Romantic p

it was a recognised
Nouvelle Heloise is
uses of the genre.
Letters Written Dur
blend descriptions
providing the emoti
seeking connection
movement and explo
whose emblem was
Scott) depended he
of Byron, generally
and Journals of Lor
the text.
In Biography, Mem
a range of Persona
dominant in the firs
criticism has devot
religious writings in
real understanding
sermons was more
topography, before
shaped her own writ
19th Century, whe
radically. The sheer
and publishers to p
wife's letters had br
in 1883 as Letters a
almost professiona
manqué , i.e. as a sig
the Brontë sisters, a
the meaning of the
I would suggest th
in letters that would
reputation she had a
was Charlotte Bron
predicted, however,
in the wind in the 1
not least was a disi
There are many i
to this disappointme
neither of them exa
letter-writing. Thes
in one box in the Bo
It was written not w
it is about that most
wri
It t
lett
inp
Fem
The
of a
larg
as if
awa
as S
yet
the
mo
to
com
Incomprise.
In this composition, the domestic squabble is transposed to the Houses of Parliament.
The most private of relational matters is thrown open and conducted on the most public
stage. Thomas Carlyle, deliberately deaf or culpably indifferent to the problems she has been
wrestling with, becomes The Noble Lord. She, the petitioner, becomes by implication, not
a begging wife (the lowest of the low) but a man of power, one in a position to address The
Noble Lord on matters of budgetary concern, to reproach him, and demonstrate before a
packed crowd of parliamentarians the deficiencies in his knowledge of the facts. The rhetoric
suits the occasion: "I will show the Noble Lord, with his permission, what the new current
expenses are, and to what they amount per annum." In brackets, just as in Hansard, "Hear,
hear!" and cries of, "Be brief!"
The piece is not brief - there's a lot to explain - but it is succinct. The voice
throughout is intensely, indignantly personal. The facts are comprehensively laid before the
Noble Lord with enough specificity and some sharp asides to make it impossible that he
should be ignorant any longer. On one condition: that he reads the document. Eight long
pages. We are told that it was made necessary by his refusal to listen to these facts without
losing his temper, and yet Jane Carlyle has no doubt that he will take the time to read what
she writes. So what she writes is a speech. The words he wouldn't hear in their everyday
form around the breakfast table, he "hears" as a Noble Lord in Parliament, as part of a
parliamentary debate, with applauding audience intermittently crying "Bravo!"
Why is she confident that writing will work where speech has failed? Do we know
that speech failed, or is that part of the dramatic presentation - a way of justifying a witty,
crafted composition? For notwithstanding the information in this document, its strategic
purpose is less to inform than to impress. What it announces is that it is a powerful piece
of literary artistry which exists to be appreciated and admired. The reader - one individual -
is positioned variously within the text but rhetorically guided to a single response:
acknowledgment and acceptance. He is to share in the joke: the transformation of a
matrimonial squabble into matter of national importance by means of a letter which is no
letter, between two people who are both private individuals yet living a public marriage,
in a house which is in many ways a stage.4
5?
There is another
document invites. In
stage, we have, of c
and powers. The fem
voice of the Chanc
for let alone perfor
the absurdity of u
she has to speak in
the place of power.
devices.
At the end of this document, in Thomas Carlyle's handwriting, is a comment. What

it looks like, as you come to the end of page eight, is a student essay with a tutor's judgment.
There is the word Excellent. Then his endorsement: "my dear clever Goody, thriftiest,
wittiest, and cleverest of women."
Part of the aesthetic charge of the writing in The Budget of a Femme Incomprise comes
from its tightly controlled framing of the addressee. The second piece I want to consider,
Much Ado About Nothing, written in 1849 (Collected LetterslA: 159-71) and giving an account
of Jane Carlyle's first trip to Scotland after many years away, has no such addressee. It is not
at all clear who it was written for - only that it replaces a letter written to and for Thomas
Carlyle and is not, in itself, in the form of a letter, though it is written on ordinary notepaper -
blue - the sort one would expect to find a letter written on. Unlike The Budget of a Femme
Incomprise , it is not beautifully presented and faultlessly copied. There are scratchings out,
blots, signs of haste. But it's a narrative. It tells a story of a journey, envisaged as a momentous
event, one which involved overcoming fears and extreme emotions about Scotland, but
experienced, according to the narrative, as a sequence of mundane meetings, enlivened by
self-dramatization of a very conscious sort, and structured around a coherent, conventional
set of images straight out of mainstream literature.
In this narrative, Jane Carlyle travels incognito to Haddington, the town in which she
grew up, which she has not seen nor been seen in since her early twenties. She is disguised,
to use her own dry expression, as "A Traveller in Search of the Picturesque." She takes a room
at The George Inn, from where she can stand at the first floor window and look down the
High Street to her own old house. She visits her father's grave and prowls round familiar
locations. By this stage, the inevitable feelings aroused by the experience threaten to break
through and the disguise serves its purpose, for "demonstrations of affection would break
me down in torrents of tears." Undiscovered, she goes back to The George and sits down
to spend the entire evening writing a letter to Thomas Carlyle - then in Ireland - describing
what she has been doing. She writes for three solid hours until 1 a.m. After that she goes
to bed, falls asleep, is awakened by a cat an hour later. This is how she describes it:
The rest of that night I spent betwixt sleeping and waking, in night-mare efforts to "sort
up my thoughts." At half after five I put my clothes on, and began the business of the
day by destroying in a moment of enthusiasm - for silence - the long letter "all about
feelings" which I had written the night before.
Later in the morning she posts a brief, warm, concise summary to her husband:
My dear dear, - I wrote you a long, very long, letter last night at midnight from this
10
sam
You
exc
jour
Had
reac
the vale of silence.
No disguise, evidently, was sufficient to protect her from Thomas Carlyle and Lady
Ashburton, whose inhibiting presences together denounce, in her imagination, what is
produced by the experience. "All about feelings" - coded feminine - bounces about makin
a nightmare of the activity of sorting up thoughts, until it can be disposed of, buried in the
vale of silence. The presentation of self in this note to Carlyle has the finished untroubled
harmony of the graveyard.
This is in keeping with the mood of the narrative which at some time later she
composed as a record of the event, under the self-dismissing, ironically allusive title, Much
Ado About Nothing. Carlyle claimed not to know of the existence of this "very interesting
little narrative" until he found it among her papers after her death. But a letter of his in th
Edinburgh University Collection5 makes reference to it at the time, reminding her she will
have her manuscript to copy whilst holidaying in Auchtertool with her Welsh cousins.
In the surviving narrative of a journey in search of a self, images of death dominate.
The narrator feels herself to be her own ghost, travelling like a shade amongst the dead, yet
unaccountably talked to by living beings. She has abandoned her identity as Mrs Carlyle
she is known in memory as Jeannie Welsh by many of those she encounters. Her objec
is to make contact with this lost self - by retracing familiar ground, standing outside the ol
house, haunting the graveyard, etc. But the insistent, unspoken question driving the
narrative and made evident to us by ironic distancing, is this: who or what is her present se'
As old acquaintances peer beyond the exterior of a middle-aged woman and discover
Jeannie Welsh, the child they knew, so Jane Carlyle, the woman they don't know, dissolves,
disassembles, doubts. Carrying Thomas Carlyle and Lady Ashburton in her head is perhap
the most effective way she can manage to be Mrs Carlyle: that person who destroys evidence
"all about feelings." There is a startling moment of bravado which leaps these complexities
and enacts the child: arriving early at the church next morning and finding the gate locked,
instead of waiting for the sexton she boasts that she "made a dash at the wall, some seve
feet high I should think, and dropt safe on the inside." This was the sort of feat young Jeanni
Welsh was known for. Jane Carlyle quotes Cavaignac's shrugging insouciance - remindin
us thereby of her adult life in Chelsea - : "so what, I'm not dead" only to appropriate it for
a different level of meaning: "but I had none of that feeling - moi - was morte enough
knew, whatever face I might put on it." In the action and the commentary, several layers of
time and experience, carrying identity, overlap.
But the voice that knows itself dead is the controlling voice in the account. This voice
provides a stable frame within which elastic images of lost childhood and lost adulthoo
spring up, like the child leaping the seven foot wall. Death permeates: in the churchyar
is the grave of a young girl who was burnt when she dried her muslin frock too close to the
fire. The grave itself evokes Jane's childhood. The adult Jane Carlyle recalls weeping "little
innocent tears" over this grave "before I had a conception what real weeping meant." Thus
in one composite picture we have here a dead child - the burnt girl under the bright spotless
11
headstone; a lost c
accustomed to weepi
with the lost little J
a part of tourist in
The object of the e
this is not sustainab
the defensive struct
of the Picturesque,"
to be written up as
worshipful, and who
self as she holds. An
loss threatens to u
narrator finds emb
acquaintance. Every
self is both multip
artificialities of fair
And now having bro

Jeannie, I bid mysel
it is only in connect
present Mrs Carlyle
The coda to this ac

in Edinburgh on the
Haddington days:
Oh dear me! how sh

she is! While I sat o
"dear bairn" and loo
I felt, as nearly as p
biscuits wrapt in he
The still-living B
confirms fairy-tal
Haddington visit un
with no improved o
my own self, and pe
forcing herself to
unspoken object we
to speak of these th
(and reminded that
ways) Jane Carlyle
internal coherence
presented itself as o
"oneself - at least m
overhead; common
It is paradoxical th
12
shou
her
par
Not
as i
I be
of w
to i
are
Jan
in t
an
exp
tell
exp
que
wh
sur
hav
acco
the
sug
too
exp
Notes
1 This is illuminatingly demonstrated in Myers, 227-57.
2 See Pennington, Halsband, and the Letters of Anna Seward.

3 See Wollstonecraft.
4 It is remarkable how often, in reading Carlyle letters, one gets the sense of Cheyne Row as a theatre. The
devotees, the intellectuals, the mads, the political exiles, the friends in various states of emotion enter and exit.
Transactions take place within appropriate spaces: the private bedroom for influenza and insomnia, the drawing
room for engagement with the world. Tait's painting A Chelsea Interior ; with its elongated perspectives,
appropriately succeeds in making the drawing room look like a stage set.
5 See Selected Letters.
13
Works Cited
Carlyle, Jane Welsh, and Thomas Carlyle. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ed. Charles
Sanders, K.J. Fielding, Clyde de L. Ryals, et al. 24 vols. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1970- .
Halsband, Robert, ed. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Mon
Letters of Anna Seward: written between the years 1784 and 1807. 6 vo
Myers, Mitzi. "'A Peculiar Protection': Hannah More and the Cultural Poli
Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin
Pennington, Rev. Montagu. Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Elizabeth Carter
are added some miscellaneous essays in prose together with her note
concerning the Christian religion. 2 vols. N.p.: n.p., 1807.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Swe
Holmes. 1796. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1987.
14
Constructing Reality: Jane Welsh Carlyle's Epistolary Narratives
Author(s): Aileen Christianson
Source: Carlyle Studies Annual, No. 16, Special Issue: Carlyle at 200 Lectures II (1996), pp.
15-24
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:47 UTC
Con
Jan
Aile
or amusing commentaries on her own or Carlyle's life, or on the status of Victorian

It women. orwomen.
is amusing
It is alsoquitecustomary
It customary
for herisepistolary
commentaries
talentsalsoto becustomary
extolled asforunsurpassed.
Jane on forButWelsh her her own epistolary Carlyle's or Carlyle's letters talents to to life, be be used or extolled on as the a rich as status unsurpassed. source of Victorian of ironic But
it is less common for her particular letters to be analysed for their literary skill. What this paper
does is examine, through the detail of a few letters, the way in which Jane Welsh Carlyle
dramatised and orchestrated her life, constructing her own reality through her epistolary
practice, the letters providing a space for her to be in control of her material and her life.
A useful analytic approach can be made through the idea of her writing as the construction
of individual dramatic monologues. Her letters are not neutral records of her life; they each
contain particular narratorial stances and attitudes, manipulation of audience response, and
an awareness of effect. It is for the recipient, the reader or the listener, to assess the reliability
of her created narratorial voice.
The style of Welsh Carlyle's letters is remarkably consistent from the beginning. There
is a sense of an artistic consciousness at work, choosing to write with the apparent
spontaneity of dashes, underlinings, breathless constructions, the rhythms of speech rather
than the formality of nineteenth-century published writing, giving the whole an air of
intimacy and immediacy: a stream of consciousness, inviting the reader into sympathetic
and complicit understanding with the writer. Margaret Oliphant uses the phrase "cadence
and measure" in her Autobiography (104) about her own style. This "cadence and measure"
in writing that gives the appearance of speech, imitating the best oral story-telling, is
precisely the effect that Welsh Carlyle achieves in her letter-writing. The rhythms of a
complete letter of Welsh Carlyle indicate a controlling awareness of the way structure as well
as cadence and measure work to please the ear or eye. Oliphant's other phrase "artless art"
(104) encapsulates what Welsh Carlyle might also have claimed with her style of studied,
casual simplicity. Apparently artless, these are "only" letters, dashed off quickly for the
entertainment of husband, relatives, friends. In fact, her letter- writing is allied closely in
stylistic characteristics to her verbal narratives which Oliphant describes as Welsh Carlyle's
"wonderful talk":
the power of narration which I never heard equalled except in my mother, the flashes
of keen wit and sarcasm, occasionally even a little sharpness, and always the modifying
sense of humour under all. (98)
The letters are read internally by the recipients and aloud to a family audience. This
demands layered meanings which speak to the recipient of unspoken feelings and to the
15
listening audience
discussion of herse
accessible and ente
construct a record
respond to just as
In April 1849 We
anecdote about a vis
Agnes. This was be
arrangements, wit
Little Lewis came th

but it is Julia Paulet
eyes" and "smooth fi
it?" In fact his wife
has fallen in love wit
one can -
I used to think these Lewises a perfect pair of love-birds

on the same perch - to speak figuratively - but the fema
hopped some distance and to be now taking a somewha
shaggy mate - ! In the most honey-marriages one has only
of time - Sooner or later "reason resumes its empire" as th
24:10)
This passage illustrates two characteristics of Welsh

dramatic way in which she describes the current state of
with a sharp encapsulation of Lewes's own character. And
the state of her own marriage. In the background is her
of 1846 over Thomas Carlyle's foolish devotion to Lady
she then was; and her own apparent displacement
Thomas's emotional needs. This is what fuels the comm
of taking the thing "when one can" Her concluding
"reason to resume its empire" also carries the sound of
living in hope. These oblique references would have b
not to Jeannie's brother Walter, to whom the letter wou
relief to Welsh Carlyle without exposing her pain to Wal
"the circulation of letters in families ... it is so difficult t
1849, Collected Letters 24:27 2) is what motivates her dev
narratives in her letters, where the recipient can interpr
secondary listening audience enjoys only the surface ente
She writes about the sequel to George Henry and
in 1850:
about eight o'clock walked in Mrs Lewis of all undesired people! My first feeling was
that I was intruded upon by "an improper female" - but as the interview proceeded,
her calm self-approving manner, and radiant face - radiant as with conscious virtue
(!) really - quite subjugated me, and I began to fancy it must be "all right" for ber tho
looking so very shocking to me. She said Lewis was "perfectly happy" in his monstrous
16
positio
as his
"liked
It is ve
tearing
him an
get he
Augus
This p
groun
now be
shift f
Henry
could n
noneth
the gh
In her
narrat
teller
matter
Carlyle
to his
there i
than al
immed
her aw
examin
he had
of the
The na
of the
explic
possibl
the se
A com
be app
The wa
be seen
Deares
Your u
Cunnin
for som
exclaim
you in
it credi
This first paragraph

for Welsh Carlyle's
Welsh Carlyle gives
And it is rational of
been this time more
you - the more I hav
to say being for the
breath is only too g
to my ideas - and s
This contains the c

to Jeannie but that
held in mind with s
controlled pain but
profferred for the
She then moves in
headache detailed to
cold water on the n
I have had no more headachs since that dreadful one I told Helen about - now that
the weather is warmer I can stand a pitcher of cold water on the back of my neck every
morning and that always agrees with me - I have been to several parties - a dinner at
Dickens's last Saturday where I never went before -
Thus she provides a bridge of explicit suffering and puritanical treatment between he
oblique reference to the implicit pain of "Lamentations" that cannot be written and t
succeeding spirited description of a lively social event:
"A great Fact!" - Forster might have called it. Such a getting up of steam is unbecoming
to a literary man who ought to have his basis elsewhere than on what the old annandale
woman called "Ornament and Grander" - The dinner was served up in the new
fashion - not placed on the table at all - but handed round - only the desert on the
table and quantities of artificial flowers, but such an overloaded desert! - pyramids of
figs rasins oranges - ach! - At the Ashburton dinner served on that principal there
were 'ust four cowslips in china-pots - four silver shells containing sweets, and a silver
filigree temple in the middle! but here the very candles rose each out of an artificial
rose! Good God! - Mrs Gaskell the Authoress of Mary Barton was there - I had already
seen her at my own house a natural unassuming woman, whom they have been doing
their best to spoil by making a lioness of her - Before dinner, old Rogers, who ought
to have been buried long ago, so old and illnatured he is grown, said to me pointing
to a chair beside him, "sit down my Dear - I want to ask you; is your Husband as much
infatuated as ever with Lady Ashburton?" - "Oh of course - I said laughing , "why
shouldn't he?" - "Now - do you like her - tell me honestly is she kind to you - as kind
as she is to your husband?" - "Why you know it is impossible for me to know how
kind she is to my husband - but I can say she is extremely kind to me and I should
be stupid and ungrateful if I did not like her" - "Humph! (disappointedly) Well! it is
very good of you to like her when she takes away all your husbands company from
you - he is always there isn't he?" - "Oh good gracious no! (still laughing admirably )
he writes and reads a great deal in his own study" - "But he spends all his evenings
with her I am told?" - "No - not all - for example you see he is here this evening."
18
- "Yes,
for he
old ma
- "On
Have much to bear!"
This anecdote begins with Welsh Carlyle's superior reaction to the nouveaux pretensi
and vulgarities of the Dickens' household desserts, contrasting them critically with t
aristocratic restraint of the Ashburton household desserts. Then she introduces the
customary Carlylean (male and female) disapproval of "the lioness," the woman affected by
fame and popularity assumed, as women ought to be, to have been previously unspoilt
"natural" and "unassuming." She modulates through the description of "the lioness
Elizabeth Gaskell, newly popular with the publication of Mary Barton , into the pain
subject of Thomas's infatuation with Lady Ashburton, doubly painful by being aired in pu
by Samuel Rogers, a well known gossip. What she dramatises here is her strategy for deal
with gossip and innuendo on this subject. Rogers is first undermined by her sharply host
"ought to have been buried long-ago, so old and illnatured he is grown." Then she ens
that the letter is centered on the triumph of her tactics against Rogers' probing. She distan
us from her feelings by narrating through the fencing and parrying of the spirited dialo
with its parenthetic references to his disappointment at her responses and to her " admir
laughter. This is a particularly open exploration of her situation, but it is disguised by bei
embedded within a humorous anecdote containing references to the literati Dicken
Gaskell, Rogers entertaining enough to Jeannie's father, John Welsh, or brother and
other family audience, less intimate than Jeannie or Helen, to divert them from noting h
underlying pain and anger.
The concluding couplet, "On Earth the living / Have much to bear," is the link to th
paragraph on Giuseppe Mazzini, now one of the three leaders of the Roman republic,
under attack and real danger from the French invasion of the ex-Papal states:
Poor dear Mazzini - all my affection for him has waked up since I knew him in jeopardy
and so gallantly fulfilling his destiny - and not mine only - the public sympathy is fast
going over to his side - under the atrocious injustice of the French - who one year ago
loudly invited all nations to form republics and now procede to shoot lead into the only
one that has obeyed the call - It will be the ruin of Napoleon's government this work
in Italy - I have had an Italia del populo sent me daily since Mazzini started it in
Rome - and you may fancy how anxiously I expect it every morning - not sure
whether its discontinuance will not indicate that the French have overcome - I
sometimes feel myself up to wishing that the Romans and Mazzini included may let
themselves all be blown to atoms and their city made into a heap of ruins - it would
be perhaps that the best thing that could rouse Italy into a right fervour of patriotism -
Welsh Carlyle acknowledges that Mazzini's concern for his native land had both irritated
and taken him away from her. She concludes this section with a ringing Carlylean senti
that only complete destruction of Mazzini and Rome, "let themselves all be blown to ato
and their city made into a heap of ruins," would be what could "rouse Italy into a right fe
of patriotism." This is equivalent to Thomas's view at this time that the complete failure
the Irish potato crop was necessary for Ireland to be able properly to solve its prob
It is a cultivation of the harsh, an impersonal and radical solution. The Carlylean harshn
19
of her wish provide

any link:
And now I must like Maggie "put on my bonnet" to go off to Laurence - to - sit for
my picture!!! - Actually I am just now sitting to two artists - "by particular request"!
Bolte wants to possess my image - and that is natural enough as she likes me dearly -
and has employed a German Painter [Carl Hartmann], under great obligation to her,
to paint it - ( gratis of course) - but the other picture - or rather drawing for it is to be
in chalk - is a " grande mistero " Laurence wrote to beg I would sit to him as a personal
favour - as if I were simpleton enough to believe that after having known me for twelve
years he would be suddenly now when I am so old and ugly seized with an enthusiasm
for my face! - No no! - Laurence has some other motive - most probably a money
motive - someone who wishes my picture for the sake of my - what shall I say? -
virtues - has employed him to draw me - not seeing any other way of attaining the
end - I told him I knew there was a do at the bottom of the thing but I would oblige
him by sitting all the same, and he laughed and blushed- I think I know who is fool
enough to be up to giving fifteen guineas for a sketch of my faded charms - It is too
ridiculous! And if you just saw what a fright I am just now! - Kindest love to Walter -
God bless you, dearest Babbie - Don't drop the system of writing off ą few lines at any
willing moment -
Your affectionate Jane Carlyle ( Collected Letters 24:49-53)
This concluding section is a clear example of Welsh Carlyle's ironic construction of herself
as a woman of "faded charm," "so old and ugly," sharp enough to know there was " a do
at the bottom of the thing," who yet was so admired that both her named and unnamed
admirers were commissioning portraits of her. So she simultaneously undercuts and praises
herself, ensuring an appearance of modesty, of cleverness, and of desirability. This is all
presented in the conversational mode of narrative, akin to the "system of writing" she advises
for Jeannie, "a few lines at any willing moment. "
In late January 1849, Welsh Carlyle wrote a letter to an unidentified correspondent
about William MacCall, an aspiring lecturer and writer, whom the Carlyles had helped find
employment with the family of the actor William Macready . The manuscript is lost, but it was
printed in The Pall Mall Gazette , 26 November 1884, under the title "Almost a Tragedy" (see
Appendix for the full text). What the letter illustrates is the skill with which Welsh Carlyle
could fashion a narrative which puts her in a good light and Thomas in rather an
unsympathetic one. The letter recounts the turning away from Cheyne Row of MacCall by
a Thomas
just risen from the sofa, where he had been sleeping, cross as people are with after-
dinner sleeps, and bothered with the prospect of having to entertain a certain
from Manchester. . . .You know his horror of having to

people at one time; this, in the mood he was in, was enou
M. was poor, very proud and sensitive, as poor men o
apt to be - "Say I am engaged and hope he will return soo
at the top of the stairs with a shudder, for I felt how the
unwillingness to produce him before one's fine people. My
best) was to run downstairs and let it go no further, and
But I hesitated in fear of the sour looks and after-scold, and
the man was dismissed to walk back four miles!
20
Here T
like t
sensit
unders
. . . un
receiv
becaus
I knoc
is Mrs
me to
I must
- ?" "O
though
thousa
the w
should
what m
Here w
comm
intern
story.
While
I posit
body.
father
man w
a poor
it stoo
and co
togeth
your m
other
you so
especia
except
uncon
Welsh
the em
into a
togeth
23:215-
What
creatin
Gazett
was a
his cri
That . . . the door w

remember. I am conv
excite any suicidal th
account of her visit t
of dramatic effect it
I wonder Mrs. Carly
be pictured as stupi
stupid servant and th
. . . never told the s
not and could not ha
The bare hard prose o
up to my sitting-roo
surprise and shock
excitement. The first words she uttered . . . were: "You must think I am drunk."
"In fact I got hysterical, and no wonder," Welsh Carlyle had said - one of the few aspects
on which they agree.
MacCall continues his article with an analysis of her techniques. He puts them in the
context of the row that had broken out after J. A. Froude's publication of his biography of
Thomas in 1882 and 1884 and Welsh Carlyle's Letters in 1883:
I do not accuse Mrs. Carlyle of intentional misrepresentation so far as I am concerned.

But she was apt to accept vague impressions, hasty reminiscences, for solid facts; she
indulged freely in pungent speech, and still more freely in satire and caricature when
a story had to be rounded and made easy. If Mrs. Carlyle gave a fanciful portrait of me
in whom she took no deep interest and who was never more to her than an object of
compassion, can we doubt that her satirical tendency, her fondness for caricature, her
habit of assertion led her astray in many cases? Could he escape whose strange moods
so often provoked her?
If Welsh Carlyle can be so inaccurate in small things for the sake of a good story, how much
more likely is it, MacCall suggests, that she was inclined to misinterpret, exaggerate, and
caricature Thomas. He suggests that the character Thomas is given in the letters is artificial,
"untrue." What is interesting here is not the conclusion he draws, trying to undermine the
reader's faith in Welsh Carlyle's "truth"; but rather the way in which he holds her techniques
up for examination, and the way he pinpoints her particular skill for denigrating Thomas
while praising herself. MacCall, by thus reacting to her skills and techniques, provides an
early example of critical response to Welsh Carlyle as a writer.
Welsh Carlyle uses her letters to construct narratives which centre herself and
peripheralise Thomas, the reverse of the way in which they have been customarily placed.
It is inevitable and right, given her position and prolixity, that her letters and journals should
be analysed for subtexts of discontent and critiques of her own life and of women's position.
But it does a disservice to her skill in the art of letter-writing to ignore her literary
achievements in those letters. Her extensive collection of surviving letters represents her
record of commentary and creation. Read separately, they are skilled, individual, dramatic
monologues. Read together, they become her own private form of literary production, an
unrivalled store of narratives of her constructed realities.
University of Edinburgh
22
Notes
Material from this paragraph and elsewhere in the paper is also included and developed in Christianson,
"The Private Writing Career of Jane Welsh Carlyle." The History of Scottish Women's Writing. Ed. Douglas Gifford
and Dorothy MacMillan, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997.
2"[A]11 of us thank God for the merciful destruction of the potato . . . with the potato rotten, Irish existence
can no longer ... be maintained in the hideous quiet chronic state" ("Repeal of the Union." Examiner 29 April
1848; cited in Collected Letters 23:24).
Appendix
JWC to an unidentified correspondent, [late January 18491: 1 daresay you never heard me mention a Mr. M.? He was
introduced to Mr. C. by Emerson while in London. Mr. C. had heard of him long ago from John Sterling, and liked
him, and invited him here. We found him on acquaintance a man of considerable faculty, unappreciated where
appreciation was really important for him - by publishers. He wrote clever things that nobody would print and give
him money for, while the hundred and twenty pounds with which he and his wife and one child came to London
two years ago (!) was slowly but surely melting away, although he did what he could to eke it out by writing sermons
for preachers who could not compose them at first hand. When he first came here he was within ten pounds of
starvation, still, however, keeping up the appearance of a gentleman. Mr. C. exerted himself for him in several
directions - wrote to Lady A. about him, &c., &c., but all without result. One day Mrs. [Macready] applied to me
for a private teacher for one of the boys too nervous to be sent to a public school. I recollected M. as likely to suit,
though teaching was not his calling, and Mr. C. wrote a letter in his praise to Mrs. M., and after communicating
with Mr. M. in America, M. was engaged by them three weeks ago to teach the little boy two hours a day, at a salary
of £65 a year. They are so liberal always, these darling Macreadys! I was glad to have helped to put him in a way
of keeping soul and body together. Well! on Thursday night of last week he came to tea, as he was in the practice
of doing at long intervals, but asking at the door if we were alone was told by Helen "Yes, but not expecting visitors."
Whereupon he turned to go away, saying he would come back another time, and Helen, with her usual
extraordinary want of tact, instead of letting him go, said, "Stop till I tell Mr. Carlyle," and rushed in upon Mr. C.
just risen from the sofa, where he had been sleeping, cross as people are with after dinner sleeps, and bothered
with the prospect of having to entertain a certain [Mrs Salis Scwabel from Manchester, whom we had invited to
tea at the request of G[eraldine Jewsburyl. You know his horror of having to speak to different sorts of people at
one time; this, in the mood he was in, was enough to make him forget that M. was poor, very proud and sensitive,
as poor men of unrecognised genius are apt to be, and anxious to avoid the complication, he answered her question
"Was Mr M to come in?" with a sharp, "Say I am engaged, and hope he will return soon." Which message I heard
at the stop of the stairs with a shudder, for I felt how the man would interpret it into unwillingness to produce him
before one's fine people. My first impulse (always the best) was to run downstairs and let it go no further, and insist
on Mr. M. coming in. But I hesitated in fear of the sour looks and after-scold, and in the moment of hesitation the
man was dismissed to walk back four miles! That was Thursday. On Tuesday morning Mr. C. received a letter from
an unknown individual at B[olton] (the native place of M.'s wife) to the effect that "understanding Mr. C. had been
some time acquainted with the late Mr. M., the writer would be greatly obliged by some particulars of his sudden
death, which he had just heard from M.'s mother-in-law." You may figure the shock! There was more in it for me
than a sudden death of an amiable clever man. A horrible suspicion darted through my mind - had he committed
suicide? - perhaps that night he had come in an emergency to ask some favour of the only man he thought his friend,
and he was turned away because there were visitors - was not this enough to sting such a sensitive visitor to the
quick? Might it not have been the last drop in his cup of bitterness that made it run over and spill his life? I would
not suggest this horror to Mr. C.; but I saw that something of the sort was in his own mind, and that doubled my
apprehension. I must be off to see into the thing, to help the poor widow with money at least. C. encouraged me
to go. Darwin had appointed to drive me to the Pantheon that day - after a basket. I could not wait his time. I would
go up to him in the omnibus, and get him to drive me to the street near [Fitzroyl square where the unfortunate
man had lived. To lose no time, before starting I wrote a hurried note to Lady A., telling what had happened, sure
that she would offer money for the widow. Darwin was shocked at my story. He begged as a kindness to be told
how much money I should like given. At least I hoped to get her provided for. And with this one clear idea in my
head we drove to the house, the belief of a suicide gaining on me all the way. At the door I felt so physically sick
that I could hardly get out of the carriage. I knocked myself very softly, and was opened to by a stupid servant
girl. I asked, "How is Mrs. M.?" "As well as could be expected." "I wish to see her," I said, "will you take me to her
23
at once? If you ask she m

M. is gone!" "What! gone
of Heaven!" I thought,
punctualities." But I was
the same, all the more
depended. "Now, in what
house; you may see him.
body. Yet these London l
him. I durst not let mysel
her upstairs into a poor
the dead man as alive as
wonder, you will say. I m
into you tears.
just tr If
stupefaction shall never I
you? I hope you are qui
than in broken words, "
am very well, thank you
brother died the other d
idea of the man's utter
over a live man whom I
sent me off into uncont
sitting in the carriage at
with me, I led him by th
A new surprise, new lau
I met him in the dark lo
you got that sad busines
M.'s compliments to you
for next day, and was ve
please, [pbd: Pall Mall G
Works Cited
Carlyle, Jane Welsh, and Thomas Carlyle. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ed. K.J. Fielding
Clyde de L. Ryals, et al. Vols. 22-24. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.
Froude, J. A., ed. Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1883.
Jay, Elizabeth, ed. The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. Oxford:
24
Carlyle's Scotch Scepticism: Writing from the Scottish Tradition
Author(s): Ralph Jessop
25-35
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:47 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44945746?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
Ca
W
by
Beginning thirty-eight years of his life in Scotland. He was educated at a Scottish school,
Beginning thirty-eightattended
attended witha Scottish
a Scottish years the unexceptionable
church, and was later of church, his lifeatandEdinburgh
a student in was Scotland.University.
and later general:
Duringa He student was Carlyle at educated Edinburgh was a Scot. at University. a He Scottish spent the school, During first
his university days he was taught by several notable academics who had been involved with
Scottish philosophy. His earlier writings were mainly produced for some of the leading lights
of the Edinburgh intelligentsia - David Brewster, Francis Jeffrey, and Macvey Napier. All
Scottish intellectuals during the first fifty or so years of the nineteenth century would have
been familiar with some of the major philosophical problems of the previous century as
raised by the dual driving energies of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Thomas
Reid. Versions of Reid's philosophy of Common Sense formed the philosophical orthodoxy
of Carlyle's student days and beyond. Hume's work was still thought dangerous and largely
mistaken. By comparison with the works of Reid (the sage from Strachan and professor of
Moral Philosophy at Glasgow until his retirement in 1781), 1 the works of Kant and many of
the other German thinkers with whom Carlyle came to be so fascinated were little known
in Britain during the early decades of the century. In the periodical press Kant was disparaged
by one of Carlyle's lecturers at Edinburgh, Thomas Brown. 2 Carlyle seems to have despised
his moral philosophy professor, but he admired Brown's predecessor, the famous Dugald
Stewart. Stewart accused Kant of plagiarising the work of Reid.3 Kant's philosophy would
later, during the 1830s, exert a major influence on the most philosophically erudite Scot of
the nineteenth century and a staunch defender of the Common-Sense philosophy of Reid,
Sir William Hamilton.
Hamilton and Carlyle were friends during Carlyle's Comely Bank and Craigenputtoch
years. Although they seem to have had very little later correspondence, Carlyle clearly
admired Hamilton (see Collected Letters 6:311; and cf. Collected Letters 6:318; 387).4 We
know that he read and was dazzled by at least one of his major articles published in the
Edinburgh Review in 1829, Hamilton's "Philosophy of the Unconditioned" (see Collected
Letters5 A5 ; 5:64). 5 In this article Hamilton first propounded what would later become a point
of doctrine in his philosophical approach, his doctrine of nescience or learned ignorance.
According to Hamilton "a 'learned ignorance' [is] the most difficult acquirement - perhaps,
indeed, the consummation, of knowledge."6 Hamilton's doctrine of nescience was a natural
corollary of his Law of the Conditioned in which he attempted to define the limitations of
human knowledge in direct opposition to Victor Cousin's eclectic philosophy of the infinito-
absolute. The broad thrust of Hamilton's critique of Cousin was that, since to think is to
condition, all thought and all our knowledge is conditionally limited, that we can know
25
nothing of the inf

inconceivable, that
knowledge of pure
to Hamilton.7 Throu
of human knowled
Scottish tradition of Reid.
During that productive period at Edinburgh and Craigenputtoch from 1827 to 1831,
Carlyle wrote "State of German Literature," "Novalis," "Signs of the Times," and "Character-
istics." In these essays, some of which were primarily concerned with German writers, he
expressed dissatisfaction with Scotch philosophy. But his complaints and criticisms of Hume
and especially Reid are tantalizing in their brevity and intriguing in their seeming errors of
interpretation. At least one of his criticisms of Reidian philosophy is very similar to a criticism
Reid himself made of Descartes.8 Other textual similarities with Reid can be detected in
Carlyle's unfinished novel Wotton Reinfred . Carlyle's character Dalbrook, in a world which
the text declares was dominated by David Hume, echoes Reid's anti-sceptical and anti
materialist attacks on Hartleian psychology, mind-materializing arguments by analogy, the
notion that the mind was largely passive, and sensationalism.9 Although Carlyle echoed Reid
and in some ways adhered to the bias of Reidian Common-Sense philosophy, his mai
complaint in "Signs of the Times" against Reid and his followers of the Common-Sens
school was that they had not escaped Hume's scepticism, that Hume had successfully towed
Common-Sense philosophy down into "bottomless abysses of Atheism and Fatalism" an
that the present state of affairs was a philosophical apathy or torpor concerning this might
struggle of the eighteenth century.10
Interestingly, in an Edinburgh Review article from the following year (1830),
Hamilton launched a vehement attack on Thomas Brown for having dragged the philosophy
of Common-Sense back to Hume's scepticism, the very thing which, according to Hamilton,
Reid's philosophy had successfully defeated.11 This was a complex article that not only
attacked Brown but also provided a definition of Hume's scepticism, offered a critique
Reid's philosophy, and outlined Hamilton's Reidian philosophy of natural dualism in
opposition to all philosophical systems which he claimed led to scepticism. Hamilton'
article also indicated something of the problem of apathy concerning philosophy.12 Though
recent serious study of Hamilton's work is still embryonic, it would be fair to say, with David
Masson, Carlyle's one-time friend and professor of English Literature at Edinburgh, that John
Stuart Mill, Hamilton, and Carlyle led a major revival of interest in metaphysics from the
1830s. 13 By a curious irony several later writers who shunned Scottish philosophy claimed
that Carlyle first inspired them to study German philosophy. But as so many of the fin de
siècle German philosophers reacted against Hume and the problems his scepticism raised
the largely forgotten aspect of Sartor Resartus is that it also performed responses to Hume'
scepticism. In doing so Carlyle borrowed or reworked some of the arguments of the school
of Common Sense and adopted the broad basis of their anti-mechanism and anti-scepticism
if not their philosophical style. As Sartor Resartus revolts against and draws energy fro
Humean scepticism, Carlyle was writing from the Scottish tradition.
Hume's sceptical method of disintegrating the universe into atomic units and boldly
stating irresolvable contradiction is evident even in his brief outline at the beginning of the
Treatise of the most dominant theory of mind in the eighteenth century, the theory of ideas.1
If we follow Hamilton's understanding of what Hume's scepticism essentially consisted i
26
it be
to H
undi
subv
dicta
idea
cause
must
when
deriv
the
will
prob
can
must
Acco
ultim
acco
unob
grou
effec
and
we c
repe
repe
idea
habi
Thro
of c
disc
nece
accu
argu
caus
impr
causa
in th
statu
inste
discr
won
relat
all th
scep
If H
thin
27
carry with it no gre

to disturb the relig
continued existenc
connection is transfe
personal identity an
even the non-religio
subjects, and one of
of an example in wh
concerning physical
claims that he is not
of necessity to mor
of Hume's reasonin
teachers at Edinburg
In Sartor Resartu
extreme empiricism
philosophy was no
especially when a c
consists in defying
irrationalism of m
unanalysable, unkn
attempting to re-i
existence, some of
comparatively dire
In a passage that
Necessity" in the "A
principle of spatial
attempts to demons
the idea of necessi
Treatise of Human
gives the following
When we consider h
only one chain of ar
are of the same nat
neither money nor i
obstinacy of the gao
in all attempts for h
one, than upon the i
to the scaffold, fore
guards as from the
of ideas: The refus
executioner; the sep
death. Here is a conn
feels no difference b
of the future event
memory and senses
call a physical necess
28
Wit
Carl
You
Blue
(O w
vibr
med
it is?
neit
Tipst
each
the a
their work.
Thinking reader, the reason seems to me twofold: First, that Man is a Spirit, and bound
by invisible bonds to All Men ; Secondly, that he wears Clothes , which are the visible
emblems of that fact. Has not your Red, hanging individual, a horsehair wig, squirrel
skins, and a plush gown; whereby all mortals know that he is a JUDGE? - Society,
which the more I think of it astonishes me the more, is founded upon Cloth. ( Sartor
Resartus 1.9:47-48 )22
Society is founded upon Cloth construed as an emblem or symbol signifying the

invisible, unobservable, the immaterial or spiritual that bonds together all. Such a notion
defies Hume in several ways. Though Teufelsdröckh's abstract narration anatomizes the
event into an atomistic model constituted by discrete individuals, it insists on the physical
separateness of these individuals to highlight the fallacy of Hume's condition of contiguity
when applied to causation in moral (or human) subjects. Notably, use is made of the
scholastic axiom that "Nothing can act but where it is," an axiom also used in "The World
out of Clothes" chapter when Teufelsdröckh says: "Nothing can act but where it is : with all
my heart; only WHERE is it?" (Sartor Resartus 1.8:42). Of course this axiom was probably
widely known by students of mathematics and philosophy and, therefore, to seek Carlyle's
exact source would be futile and absurd. However, though several sources for the axiom
were available to Carlyle,23 importantly, it was a focal point of attack for the Scottish school
in rejecting the representative thesis of perception which Hume's version of the theory of
ideas enunciates and which, according to Hamilton, was one of the fundamental causes of
scepticism.24
The axiom "that nothing can act but where it is" is one way of stating the principle
of contiguity which, as I pointed out earlier, Hume gives as one of the necessary conditions
of a causal relation. According to Hume one of the necessary conditions in any relation of
cause and effect is that the cause must be in temporal and spatial contiguity with its effect,
the cause cannot act upon its effect at a distance. In discussing the use of this maxim by
Clarke, Newton, and Dr Porterfield, Reid rejects the principle of contiguity when applied by
Hume to perception as an illegitimate use of analogy since nothing need be physically
contiguous to the mind in the act of perceiving.25 The individuals in Teufelsdröckh's example
are pointedly not in contact and thus, since they do not satisfy Hume's condition of spatial
contiguity, they can only act upon one another at a distance and hence inexplicably or
miraculously. The prisoner is executed not by the sound of the articulated word nor by the
29
Judge's physical h
recognising certai
intuition, the abilit
Judge. Hume might
of the principle of
treat the appearance
dualism of Carlyle's
of thought is clothe
akin to that of the
Clearly satirizin
profound and prepo
skins, and a plush
"Cloth." But "Cloth
body, text, and ev
example of the exec
with a logic that r
spirituality of man
follows the position
in the acquisition of
given fact of our be
the two substances
signs which constit
That Reid's work
by comparing some
doctrine of motives
says:
Fantastic tricks eno

things, down even
Balance for weighin
stands he, his Unive
against each other
appointed to haunt
befooled; in all age
worse than any Nigh
of Digestive, Mechan
This passage resona

philosophy of Comm
"he is made of glass
lunacy" - that is, t
Sartor Resartusthe
as ridiculous.28 Reid
mind and body, di
In doing so he refe
Buridan's ass, with
eared enough."29 C
30
allud
met
Geni
mora
brut
read
prev
Wri
robu
seve
scept
most
vita
imag
worl
of t
philo
for h
says
Univ
imm
(Sart
Hum
from
wond
The
bund
bags
was
But
scep
nesc
discu
part
unce
ably
reali
igno
abso
unco
as it
link
calle
know
But
31
philosophy are evide

these days that they
For it is in that hi
Supernaturalism" c
"Of Miracles."36 T
wonder by his own
re-covering miracles
thereby Hume's defi
custom that "doth m
shooting through
comprehension (Sart
manoeuvres the scep
Humean empiricism
ignorance:38
Was man with his E

Have any deepest sc
Universe, and gauge
that they read His g
These scientific indi
handbreadths deepe
without shore. (Sarto
Time and again in "

and as he does so, th
clamorous.39 As wit
faith by refusing t
human kind.40 Inst
opposed Hume wit
disciplined, critica
Hamilton's Discussio
black boundaries of
Supernaturalism" w
freedom and boldne
art:
Whence? - O Heaven
only that it is throu
We are such stu
As Dreams are ma
Is rounded with
Univer
32
Notes
'Stewart, "Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid," 11.

Thomas Brown, 279.
3Stewart, Collected Works , I: Dissertation , 460-61.
4A11 references are to The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Also see Carlyle's reminiscence
of Hamilton in Veitch, 121-27.
5Hamilton, "Philosophy of the Unconditioned," Discussions , 1-38, first published as "M. Cousin's Course of
Philosophy, "Edinburgh Review 50 (1829): 194-221. All references to Hamilton's articles are to this edition.
6Hamilton, "Philosophy of the Unconditioned," Discussions , 38.
7Hamilton, "Philosophy of the Unconditioned," Discussions , 12-15.
8Carlyle, "Novalis," Works 27:23. See also Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Manin The Works
of Thomas Reid, 2.14, 306Lc-d. All references to Reid's Inquiry and Intellectual Powers axe to this edition.
9Carlyle, Wotton Reinfred , Last Words of Thomas Carlyle , 53-54; also see Ralph Jessop, 9-15.
10"Signs of the Times," Works 27:64-65.
"Hamilton, "Philosophy of Perception," Discussions, 39-99, first published in Edinburgh Review 52 (1830):
158-207.
"Hamilton, "Philosophy of Perception" Discussions , 43.

13Masson, 7-8. There are very few recent academic studies of Hamilton. However, the major twentieth-
century works to consult are S.V. Rasmussen and Torgny Segerstedt. For a recent discussion of Hamilton, see H.O.
Mounce. Hamilton's influence on the philosophy of several countries including America, France, and Spain seems
to have been profound.
14For example, see Hume, Treatise , I.i.i.1-7.
15Hamilton, "Philosophy of Perception" in Discussions , 94-95.
l6My discussion here refers mainly to Hume, "Of the Idea of Necessary Connexion," Treatise, I.iii.xiv.155-
72; and Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 5-165, VII, 60-79; and "Of Liberty and Necessity,"
VIII, 80-103, hereafter cited as ECHU.
17Hume, Treatise, I.iii.xiv.l66.
18Hume, ECHU, XII.iii.l64.
19Horner, 120; James Browne, 117-18; Stewart, Works 2:97 ; Laurie, 236-37.
20Thoreau, 242-43.
21Hume, Treatise, II.iii.i.406; ECHU, VIII, 90-91.
22 All references are to the Centenary Edition of Carlyle's Works.
23Reid, II.iv.256La; II. xiv. 30 lLc-302La; Jeffrey, 183; also see Stewart, Works 2:104, and see 99-106.
24Hamilton, "Philosophy of Perception," Discussions, 61-62; 97-98.
25Reid, Intellectual Powers, II.xiv.300Rb-306Lb.
26Cf., Reid's semiotic theory of perception. For example, see Inquiry, VI.xx-xxiii.l82La-194Rb.
27Reid, Inquiry, V.vii.l30Lb; VII.209Rb.
^Carlyle, Wotton Reinfred, 103.
29Reid, Intellectual Powers, I.iv.238Lb-c.
30Compare Reid, Inquiry, I.vi. 103Lc-d; V.vii.l27Lc; VII.209Ra-c.

31For example, see Hume, Treatise, I.IV.vii.263-270.
32The importance of nescience in Reid's work needs to be elucidated at much greater length. However, for
just one example of his insistence that the ultimate nature of the relationship between mind and body is beyond
our cognitive abilities, see Inquiry, VI.xxi.l87Ld; cf. P.B. Wood, 132.
33Hamilton, "Philosophy of the Unconditioned," Discussions, 15.
^Hamilton, Lectures, I.iv.78.
35 The Complete Works of Aristotle, II: Metaphysics, I.i. 1554: "It is owing to their wonder that men both now
begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little
33
by little and stated diff

sun and the stars, and a
ignorant (whence even
therefore since they ph
know, and not for any
^his was perhaps first
95; Hume, "Of Miracles"
37Hume, ECHU, X, 114
^For example, compare
may have been prompte
of Marischal College,
Campbell, 165-68.
39Hamilton, Discussio
40Cf. Camille R. La Bo
Works Cited
Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Bollingen series LXXI. 1984. Princeton an
Oxford: Princeton UP, 1991.
Brown, James. "Morehead's Dialogues on Natural and Revealed Religion ." Edinburgh Review 52 (1830): 109-19
Brown, Thomas. "Villers, Philosophie de Kant," Edinburgh Review 1 (1803): 253-80.
Campbell, George. A Dissertation on Miracles: Containing an Examination of the Principles advanced by Davi
Hume in An Essay on Miracles; With a Correspondence on the Subject by Mr Hume, Dr Campbell, and Dr
Blair. 1762. London, Dublin, Sydney, and Hobart Town: Tegg; Glasgow: Griffin, 1839.
Campbell, Ian. "Carlyle's Borrowings from the Theological Library of Edinburgh University." Bibliotheck 5 (1969):
165-68.
Carlyle, Thomas, and Jane Welsh Carlyle. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ed. Charles R.
Sanders, K.J. Fielding, Clyde de L. Ryals, et al. 24 vols. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1970- .
Hamilton, William. Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education

Brown, Green and Longmans; Edinburgh: MacLachlan and Stewart
Blackwood, 1859-60.
Horner, Francis. "Professor Stewart's Statement of Facts." Edin
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in
Ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.
Jeffrey, Francis. "Drummond's Academical Questions." Edinburgh

Jessop, Ralph. "Carlyle's 'Wotton Reinfred': They Talked of Scotch
La Bossiere, Camille R. "Of Silence, Doubt, and Imagination: Carl
Studies in Canada 10 (1984): 62-76.
Laurie, Henry. Scottish Philosophy in its National Development. Glasgow: MacLehose, 1902.
Masson, David. Recent Bńtish Philosophy: A Review with Criticisms including some Comments on Mr Mill's Answer
to Sir William Hamilton. 3rd ed. London: MacMillan, 1877.
Mounce, H.O. "The Philosophy of the Conditioned." Philosophical Quarterly 44 (1994): 174-89.
Rasmussen, S.V. The Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton: A Study. Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1925.
34
Reid,
Lond
Seger
3-157.
Stewa
Thoreau, Henry David. "Thomas Carlyle and His Works." Graham's M

Veitch, John. Memoir of Sir William Hamilton. Edinburgh: Blackwood
Wood, P.B. "Hume, Reid and the Science of Mind." Hume and Hume's Con
Wright. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1994. 119-39.
35
Romancing the Past: Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle
Author(s): Lowell T. Frye
37-49
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:47 UTC
R
W
Lo
Gertrude Himmelfarb observes that "to the historian of ideas, the insularity of England
In Gertrudeininthethenineteenth
the prefacecentury
nineteenth Himmelfarb
is a standing to Marriage
challenge. century observes
One is constantly temptedistoandbring
a standing Morals that "to among the challenge. historian the Victorians One of ideas, is constantly and the insularity Other tempted Essays of England to (1987), bring
England into Europe, to demonstrate the influence of Kant on Coleridge, Goethe on Carlyle,
Feuerbach on Eliot, Comte on Beatrice Webb, Nietzsche on Shaw. But in each case the
foreign ideas were so thoroughly domesticated, so completely assimilated (co-opted, we
would now say) that the very word 'influence' seems inappropriate" (xi). Certainly critical
attention to Thomas Carlyle during this century has emphasized his debt to Continental
thinkers and writers, German mostly but also French.1 I myself have contributed to that
attention, writing for Clyde Ryals a dissertation that in part examines Carlyle's use of
Schlegelian romantic irony in Sartor Resartus, "The Diamond Necklace," and The French
Revolution. And of course there is ample justification for exploring the Continental
influences on Carlyle's thinking: after all, as we all know, Carlyle studied a broad range of
German thinkers and writers throughout the 1820s and early 1830s. He translated many of
their stories, wrote a biography of Schiller, and, in a series of biographical and critical review
essays, urged his fellows to look to the Germans and especially to Goethe as a way out of
intellectual and spiritual malaise. "Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe," Carlyle commanded,
and generations of literary scholars have obeyed him.
Still, I haven't forgotten an exasperated comment made by Robert Gleckner,
interpreter of Blake and Byron, during my dissertation defense a decade ago - a comment
very much in the spirit of Himmelfarb's observation. Interrupting a discussion of Carlyle,
Friedrich Schlegel, and romantic irony, Professor Gleckner noted (somewhat impatiently)
that Carlyle may well have articulated a theory of irony with the help of Schlegel, but he
likely developed the habit and practice of irony by reading Sterne and Smollett, Swift and
Byron, home-grown ironists whose work Carlyle knew intimately before he began to read
the Germans. Since that time I have considered the issue of influence as far more complicated
than Carlyle's overt statements and public enthusiasms would have us believe. And I have
been persuaded that Carlyle's silences, particularly with reference to British writers and
thinkers of the generation or two before him, frequently mask deep intellectual relationships
that Carlyle did not choose to explore publicly.2
For reasons that scholars have not much explored, Carlyle rarely commented
publicly, in print, about British writers of his own generation or the generation preceding
him - and when he did voice opinions about them in his letters or journals, he was not
generous in his judgments. Many of the pen-portraits found in his letters are not merely
37
touched but rather

a number of caustic
"a mass of richest sp
sails and rudder . . .
the boiler burst" (C
With regard to hi
public silences as we
with his almost fu
recognized that "Car
Kant, Schelling. His
this is the case: of e
Samuel Johnson ev
primarily the men a
Carlyle's ambivalen
though Bloom may b
an unresolved relat
may help account fo
who wished to be s
considered the arid
committing himself
cherishing instead
Coleridge or Scott, e
early 1830s, would i
so his reticence on
But however inten
either from such sil
that Carlyle lacked a
intellectual influen
essay "Sir Walter Sc
jostled; in all ways h
His life is a battle, i
here about Scott, th
of other British writ
and later writing - a
issue of influence,
"direct borrowings
practice: repeatedly
and occasionally the
thereby engages in
primarily German th
but not, often, the
"reactive" intellectu
and the occasion of
One of the most si
Sir Walter Scott and
to the young Car
38
pre
dia
Nev
abo
Car
his
Fr
rec
tha
sel
equ
fam
the
on
Com
kin
the
Let
hou
hig
By
Oc
and
dis
neo
to
it i
ult
Sir
nu
a h
cha
No.
The
Th
me
sen
gre
am
of
Th
Car
wi
exp
pro
35>
must be so long in
(Collected Letters
person (Collected Let
Edinburgh for Lon
seeing Scott, Carlyle
politely but stubbor
With regard to the

here, or transmit the
fashion appointed
willingly discharge m
naturally it must fla
of a Foreigner who
Sovereign whom I h
to see and know in p
[at Comely Bank];
opportunity to wait
in person.
Meanwhile I abide your farther orders in this matter; and so with all the regard which
belongs to one whom I in common with other millions owe so much, I have the honour
to be,
Sir, / Most respectfully your servant, /
Thomas Carlyle. {Collected Letters 4:354)
This, to the man he had already dubbed the "great intellectual restaurateur " of Europe! The
encomium is conventional, sounding the socially approved voice of the literary courtier, but
perhaps for that reason it sounds forced, unnatural, coming from Carlyle. We can imagine
what it must have cost so proud a man as Carlyle to write such a letter, to place himself at
the feet of a writer he did not entirely admire.
Unaccountably, Scott did not answer the letter, nor did he mention anywhere his
receiving it; most likely it was misplaced somehow in the commotion of travel. But Carlyle,
made thus to feel his social insignificance, was not in a mood to interpret Scott's motives
generously. In May 1828, the move to Craigenputtoch already begun, Carlyle wrote Scott another
letter, this time polite but curt: "About six weeks ago, I had the honour to write you, announcing
the arrival of a small present from the Poet Goethe .... I wished and purposed, as my orders
bore, to hand you that present; but receiving no reply, I must now be content to forego such
pleasure. Mr Jeffrey takes charge of delivering these medals ; and next time I write to Weimar,
I hope I may be able to say that you have received them safely" (Collected Letters 4:37 5). This
letter seems to atone for the effusiveness of the first so as to salvage Carlyle's pride. The
medals were finally delivered, but Carlyle did not hear anything directly from Scott, and the
two men never met. Stung and disappointed by the episode, Carlyle never forgave Scott for
not responding to the letter of praise and the request for a meeting, concluding that Scott
had been purposely discourteous.9 From that time forward, a sense of hurt, of wounded
pride, hovers over Carlyle's remarks about Scott. The perceived slight may not have
determined Carlyle's attitude toward Scott and his novels, but it certainly helped cement an
opinion about the man and his work that had been formulating itself for some time.
40
Des
for
imp
Scot
this way:
Last night I sat up very late reading Scott's History of Scotland. An amusing Narrative,
clear, precise and I suppose accurate: but no more a History oí Scotland than I am Pope
of Rome. A series of Palace intrigues, and butcheries and battles, little more important
than those of Donnybrook Fair; all the while that Scotland , quite unnoticed, is holding
on her course in industry, in arts, in culture. . . . Strange that a man should think he
was writing the History of a Nation, while he is chronicling the amours of a wanton
young woman called Queen. . . . ( Two Note Books 168)
In this journal entry Carlyle judges Scott harshly by a standard learned from Scott himself.
Only an attentive reader of Scott's novels, attracted to their rich fabric of everyday life, their
attention to manners and language as well as to costume, could have articulated a
dissatisfaction with traditional historiography this way, and Carlyle would later admit as
much in his essay on Scott. A year later, as Scott prepared to sail to Naples in the vain hope
of recovering his health, Carlyle passes harsh judgment once again: "To me [Scott] is and has
been an object of very minor interest for many many years. The novel-wright of his time,
its favourite child, and therefore an almost worthless one" {Two Note Books 214). One hears
in the logic of this observation the resentment of a man exiled in Craigenputtoch, truly a
"Great Unknown" to the reading public.
I have dwelt on references to Scott in Carlyle's letters and journal entries of the 1820s
and early 1830s, as well as on the botched transfer of the medals from Goethe, in order to
put the lie to Carlyle's assertion that Scott "has been an object of very minor interest [to me]
for many many years." Try as he might to dismiss Scott as mere "novel-wright," as a "limited,
almost mean and kleinstädtisch " thinker (qtd. in Froude 2:251), Carlyle could not push Scott
and the Waverley novels out of his way so easily, and it is a testament to Carlyle's intellectual
honesty that he continued to puzzle out Scott's value throughout the 1830s. Despite the
resentment of a poor man toward Scott's success, of a still largely unknown author toward
the most popular writer of the century - despite the distaste of a Scottish laborer's son for
Scott's social pretensions - despite even the distrust of a lapsed Burgher Seceder of Scott's
more comfortable and worldly religious faith, Carlyle could not but admit that Scott seemed
to know something that he himself did not: as he wrote in 1831 , "there is something in [Scott's]
deep recognition of the worth of the past, perhaps better than anything he has expressed
about it, into which I do not yet fully see" ( Two Note Books 214).
Carlyle's inability in the early 1830s to understand "the worth of the past" is
connected, I believe, with his self-confessed inability to understand England, metaphorically
to return home from Germany and address the problems of his own country. Although the
project of writing about Britain was to be sidetracked first by his study of the Germans and
then by his attention to the French Revolution, as early as 1822 he was considering writing
a history of the English civil wars. In 1828 he claimed that "above all things, I should like
to know England , the essence of social life in this same little Island of ours. But how? No
one that I speak to can throw light on it; not he that has worked and lived in the midst of
it for half a century. ... I have not even a history of the country half precise enough. With
41
Scotland, it is little
of England or Scotla
that "the Scotch ha
deeper and richer c
reading of Scott and
Note Books 132-35).
In other words, b
1830s and 1840s, Ch
accounts with Scott
past in understandin
Goethe, the other m
who had to be surm
plan of the Universe
I want to argue he
in the fall of 1837 a
volumes of Lockharť
through which Car
not enjoy writing t
He noted on finishin
in some measure bo
occasionally rather stupid Article
about Sir Walter, and to take down the pegs greatly in respe
of him." Carlyle sounds defensive: "But there is nothing m
one should do with all men, in sincere love and pity for him
been 'sharp' on Scott," he admits, 'but mannerly'; conde
irreverent" (Collected Letters 9: 364). 11 Carlyle knew the es
would be seen by some as a malicious attack on a British
the rhetoric of compulsion: Carlyle felt bound to write t
things," forced somehow to come to grips with Scott's legacy
Byron in the same essay, is a strong misreading that tran
thereby frees Carlyle to glean from Scott's work all that he
In the essay Carlyle famously juxtaposes biting critici
love of money and social position, with honest praise for Sco
old life of men." Indeed, the essay frequently seems to tu
these poles. On the negative side, Carlyle considers Scott a "N
a true writer, "a master of the faculty of easy- writing," of "
that "in the way of writing, no great thing was ever, or will
difficulty!" (Works 29:33, 79-81). More damning, according t
purpose; he was no Vates but rather a successful tradesma
faith and terrified at scepticism, with little knowledge of its
to bear or front," Scott was satisfied to be "the temporary c
maker ... to solace its dead tedium and manifold sorrows
provided an escape rather than a solution, pleasant reve
direction: "the sick heart will find no healing here, the dark
the Heroic that is in all men no divine awakening voice" (
doubt grounded in memories of his own spiritual woes in th
42
Sco
of B
Sco
exh
con
"Er
bad
of
a us
task
to s
Hav
vir
bot
stoo
in t
self
cost
(50)
wri
the
yet
byg
pap
diag
the
ver
to t
hav
and
phi
con
ind
ima
Wh
to
emp
"Th
cam
his
&c.,
try
51).
As
nat
som
43
47). To say that Scot

one who, in a way d
the past so as better
Sprinkled throug
student of Scott - r
Dryasdust in Crom
and Present that ca
Covenanters in Old
borrowings and assim
impact on Carlyle
"Postscript" to Wave
which have a founda
to get his facts rig
in the task (see, fo
introduction to Ann
has led to "more v
against others of my
to Scott than anythi
wonder far more lu
Putting aside worr
in passing that Scot
that this feeling for
past evokes - and t
the chief link betwe
he wished for greate
in "The Diamond N
have such significa
explores in "The Di
Scott's effort to re
but an obligation de
1831 quite explicate:
perhaps better than
(Two Note Books 21
existence embody
introductions and
lifetime's reflectio
"Postscript" to Wave
of the Highland cla
of the limits of hist
severer antiquary ma
well of history wit
ideas of the age wh
a sophisticated und
Carlyle's own quirk
Of equal importanc
in which the fiction
44
to
tion
chis
The
Pet
tra
abh
the
com
to
Pat
awa
stag
(18
non
in
the
his
hist
Thi
of
a di
son
Cro
the
it t
tha
ma
dre
pre
tim
cha
of
Fre
for
resc
by
Our
Pre
Her
fra
itse
us i
be
Ich
45
indistinctly! The m
miracle, - thanks to
Present 49)
History for Carlyle

its fragility, its ten
Why? Because Carl
Carlyle thunders a
4:313). It is unlikely
is consistent with
virtues as a man and
provides readers w
of Cockaigne and Pa
languid men" rath
edification, for buil
course, but necessa
activist reading of t
life labored to make
feel at home in th
immediate change, s
the firestorm of re
readers into action,
history a didactic
ambivalence toward
the nineteenth cent
avoid life and actio
asserts in The Use a
(3). For the sake of
example and achieve
his own poetics of h
Hampd
46
Notes
'See especially Charles F. Harrold, Carlyleand German Thought: 1819-1834 (1934); Hill Shine, Carlyleand
the Saint-Simonians: The Concept of Historical Periodicity (1941) and "Carlyle's Early Writings and Herder's Ideen
(1950); G. B. Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structure, and Style of Thomas Carlyle's First Major
Worki 1965); Peter A. Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold, Pater09TD' Janice Haney,
"'Shadow-Hunting': Romantic Irony, Sartor Resartus, and Victorian Romanticism" (1978); Rosemary Ashton, The
German Idea. Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800-1860 i 1980); Clyde de L. Ryals,
A World of Possibilities: Romantic Irony in Victorian Literature (1990); and Elizabeth M . Vida, Romantic Affinities:
German Authors and Carlyle (1993).
2David Sorenson is also interested in turning scholarly attention from German to British influences on Carlyle.
See "Carlyle, Gibbon, and the 'Miraculous Thing' of History," Carlyle Annual (1991): 33-44, and "Carlyle, Macaulay,
and the 'Dignity of History,'" Carlyle Annual (1990): 41-52.
3See Ian Campbell, Thomas Carlyle (1974), pp. 48-49, for a discussion of Carlyle's reaction to other literati.
4In 1832 he wrote somewhat self-righteously in his notebook that "I have never yet done any one political
act; not so much as the signing of a petition. My case is this: I comport myself wholly like an alien; like a man who
is not in his own country; whose own country lies perhaps a century or two distant. When the time comes, should
it ever come, that I can do any good in such coming forward, then let me not hang back" (Two Note Books 274-
75). Patrick Brantlinger, in The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867(1911 ), still provides the
best account of Carlyle's reluctance to engage in politics.
^The same is true of his reading of the Germans, though perhaps to a lesser extent, especially before 1830.
6In Revolution as Tragedy: The Dilemma of the Moderate from Scott to Arnold (1980), John P. Farrell devotes
several excellent pages to the relationship of Scott, Byron, and Carlyle; Farrell recognizes that in significant ways,
"Scott and Byron were Carlyle's step-brothers" (209). John Rosenberg is also aware that Carlyle was "a keen student
of Scott," though the constraints of the task in Carlyleand the Burden of History (1985) limit the observation to a
footnote (34-35). Other scholars (for example, Alice Chandler in A Dream of Order [1970], Clare Simmons in
Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature [1990], and Judith Wilt in Secret
Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott [1985] ) have commented on the connection between Carlyle and Scott, but that
connection has not been explored with anything like the attention granted to the influence on Carlyle of the German
writers.
7In his letters and journal entries, Carlyle expressed diffidence about meeting Scott. Writing to his mother
in 1827, Carlyle notes that Francis Jeffrey had offered to introduce him to Scott, but "I have not gone yet, being
little careful of such introductions" (Collected Letters 4:190). In 1831, hearing that Scott had embarked for Naples
in a vain quest for health, Carlyle confided to his journal that he had "never spoken with [Scott] (tho' I might
sometimes, without great effort); and now probably never shall" (Two Note Books 215). These statements are at odds
with the sentiment expressed in one of his two letters to Scott in 1828, in which Carlyle hopes for "access to my
native sovereign [Scott], whom I have so often seen in public, and so often wished that I had claim to see and know
in private, and near at hand" (Collected Letters 4:354).
8In 1827 Carlyle noted that Scott had recently 11 avowed himself the sole Author of the Waverley Novels; a
secret which was already known to most part of the world" (Collected Letters 4:208).
9Nine days after Scott's death in the fall of 1832, Carlyle again returns to the slight, recording in his journal
that Scott had "behaved not very courteously" (qtd. in Froude 2:251). Froude notes in another context that "Carlyle
was proud, and proud men never wholly forgive those to whom they feel obliged" (2:27).
10Writing in 1830, Carlyle asserts that "I have now almost done with the Germans. Having seized their
opinions, I must turn me to inquire how true are they? That truth is in them, no lover of Truth will doubt: but how
much?" (Two Note Books 150).
"John Buchan, in Sir Walter Scott (1932), and Judith Wilt, in Secret Leaves (1985), are but two of Scott's
partisans who look skeptically on Carlyle's protestations. Buchan defends Scott vigorously against all of Carlyle's
personal and aesthetic charges (see especially pp. 289, 344-346, 349-350) and attributes many of them to "that
peasant vice of jealous irritation into which at times Carlyle sank" (356). Wilt calls Carlyle's essay "crotchety" and
suggests that Carlyle attacked Scott the man so as to free himself to take what he needed from Scott's "great romantic
episodes" (2, 9). She seems irritated by Carlyle's lack of generosity but willing to read it, in the spirit of Harold Bloom,
as part of a "swerve" necessary to escape the overpowering weight of Scott's example (3). I find her reading here
persuasive, though perhaps unnecessarily hostile toward Carlyle. John Farrell, with his usual fine insight, also
suggests the importance of the essay on Scott as a coming to terms with Scott and Byron both (208-09).
12I am indebted, of course, to Harold Bloom for this concept. Judith Wilt in Secret Leaves claims that
47
nineteenth-century Brit
clearing a space for thei
13John Ulrich commen
Translating the Corpse o
explores Carlyle's use of
the images of magical sp
argues persuasively that
dead and other, but sim
a logic of displacement
of the past that the hist
is so wholly . . . other, an
and history. The untou
irretrievability of the
Mortality traces the insc
the present. As Ulrich p
but the death against wh
(44).
14See Farrell, Revolution

imaginative means, "to in
[of Scott and Carlyle] on
yet their meditations led
tragic note [in Scott's n
revolution "an unexampl
at the end of his life tu
though lacking full faith
the French Revolution w
Works Cited
Ashton, Rosemary. The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800-18
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
Brantlinger, Patrick. The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 19
Buchan, John. Sir Walter Scott [1932]. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1967.
Campbell, Ian. Thomas Carlyle. New York: Scribner's, 1974.
Carlyle, Thomas. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ed. Charles Richard Sanders, K. J. Fielding
Clyde de L. Ryals, et al. Durham: Duke UP, 1970- .
Club, 1898.
1898.
Chandler, Alice. A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-C

Nebraska P, 1970.
Dale, Peter A. The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arno
Farrell, John P. Revolution as Tragedy: The Dilemma of the Moderate from
1980.
Froude, J. A. Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of His Life
1897.
Haney, Janice. "'Shadow-Hunting': Romantic Irony, Sartor Resartus,
48
Romanticism 17 (Summer 1978):307-33.
Harrold, Charles F. Carlyle and German Thought: 1819-1834. Yale Studies in English, no. 82. New Haven: Yale
UP, 1934.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. Marriage and Morals among the Victorians and Other Essays. New York: Vintage Books,
1987.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Use and Abuse of History. Trans. Adrian Collins. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957.
Rosenberg, John. Carlyle and the Burden of History. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.
Ryals, Clyde de L. A World of Possibilities: Romantic Irony in Victorian Literature. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1990.
Scott, Walter. Old Mortality. Ed. Alexander Welsh. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.
Shine, Hill. Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians: The Concept of Historical

1941.
in Memory of John Manning Booker. Ed. Hill Shine. Chapel Hill: U of

Simmons, Clare. Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Ninete
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990.
Sorenson, David. "Carlyle, Gibbon, and the 'Miraculous Thing' of Histo
Tennyson, G. B. Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structure, and

Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965.
Ulrich, John. "'A Labor of Death and A Labor Against Death': Translat
Present ." Carlyle Studies Annual 15 (1995): 33-47.
Vida, Elizabeth M. Romantic Affinities: German Authors and Carlyle
Wilt, Judith. Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott. Chicago: U of
49
The Cultural Revolution of "Sartor Resartus"
Author(s): Brian Cowlishaw
51-60
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:47 UTC
The
by
irritated readers, [I], with outstretched arms and open heart, will wave a kind farewell"
In (298). irritated
(298). Inthethelastmargin
In readers,
of a copytheinparagraph margin
my university' [I], withsomeone
s library, of ofhasa copy Sartorreaders'
scrawled outstretched in Resartus, my university's arms the and Editor library, open writes, heart, someone "To will one wave has and scrawled a kind all of farewell" readers' you, O
perennial response: "After this awful book - every reader should be irritatedM" with the
word "irritated" underlined four times. Sartor Resartus has always provoked this reaction,
in large part because of its thorough and willful obscurity. John Stuart Mill, a frequent target
of Carlyle's anti-Utilitarian rhetoric, articulates this common complaint in a letter to Carlyle:
About . . . that Teufelsdreck, by the way, it has frequently occurred to me of late to

ask of myself and also of you, whether that mode of writing between sarcasm or irony
and earnest, be really deserving of so much honour as you give to it by making use
of it so frequently. I do not say that it is not good: all modes of writing, in the hands
of a sincere man, are good, provided they are intelligible. But are there many things,
worth saying, and capable of being said in that manner which cannot be as well or
better said in a more direct way? (5 September 1833; cited in Rundle 13)
In this case, I would argue, not really. As some other critics1 have argued recently, textual
obscurity is in a sense required to relate Teufelsdröckh's Clothes-Philosophy appropriately.
That is, Carlyle attempts with Sartor Resartus to promulgate the Clothes-Philosophy, the
central tenet of which is that "Clothes" (i.e., words, symbols, outward forms - any sensible
phenomena) are always already inadequate, flawed, partial embodiments of the Infinite (i.e.,
the ideal, the perfect, the divine). If all means of expressing the Infinite, of embodying the
ideal, are necessarily flawed and finite, then perfect, direct expression of ideas must be
impossible. Therefore, for Carlyle to make this argument employing straightforward,
linear, logical rhetoric would be to go against his own Clothes-Philosophy; it would be
to behave as if perfect, direct expression were possible while arguing that it is not.
Therefore, he knowingly, purposely makes Sartor Resartus dialectic and obscure to
demonstrate his own philosophy. In his own text he forces readers to work hard to
glimpse, if only briefly and vaguely, the Infinite lying beneath "Clothes" - and many
readers find this irritating.
This may be, but the argument does not go far enough. This argument would consider
Sartor Resartus' s mad method to be merely an aesthetic or stylistic device: it would claim
the book was written the way it was just so its form would match its content. To claim this
would be to ignore the cultural work performed by Sartor Resartus, cultural work very similar
in techniques and effects to the work of Bertolt Brecht's "epic theatre." I am not, of course,
suggesting that Carlyle borrowed from Brecht, who was writing a hundred years later, or
even that Brecht was influenced by Carlyle. I merely argue that the two writers' techniques
51
and effects are stri

Brechťs own expla
Benjamin's observa
light on Carlyle's S
construction, as wel
can develop and ma
kind of reader. Whe
of hypnotized acquie
that its readers bec
"experts" on what th
forms of authority
readers must recog
of all "Clothes," incl
brings his readers to
deconstruction, a pe
with the actual, a ne
both his text and th
Is there not a chan
help but write obsc
Professor Teufelsdrö
Our conjecture has

concerned in it. See
vehemence to paint
desperately dashes h
it will paint Foam?
However, evidence
reader. For one thi
Teufelsdröckh's obsc
they are, with need
Professor, but whi
chiaroscuro " (185). S
attention to it so cle
And in any case, a
capable of expressin
summarizes the cen
Heroes , Hero-Wors
position:
Fichte . . . declares first: That all things which we see or work with in this Earth,
especially we ourselves and all persons, are as a kind of vesture or sensuous
Appearance: that under all there lies, as the essence of them, what he calls the "Divine
Idea of the World"; this is the Reality which "lies at the bottom of all Appearance." To
the mass of men no such Divine Idea is recognisable in the world; they live merely,
says, Fichte, among the superficialities, practicalities and shows of the world, not
dreaming that there is anything divine under them. (156)
52
Many
also b
Teufe
is also
and P
Looki
with
men,
work
Earth
Kingd
And i
such
vacuit
ought
statin
his fi
If Ca
for a
Carly
in su
philo
[T]he
Specu
combi
Many
where
mad b
solid,
huge
This
essent
and a
Here
conte
the st
a con
platfo
lively
Little
goal
repre
atten
53
backstage, smoking
wear signs displayi
their necks. Lights a
the play, making ot
unadorned platform
signs something like
a production of Br
construction and p
Sartor Resartušs
construction and p
impossible task of c
materials the Edito
Teufelsdröckh's (no
Origin and Influen
Six considerable PA
China-ink, with the
the inside of which
and Snips, written
treating of all imagi
history only at rare
Not only do the pap

used in constructi
advertisements, "s
Testimoniums, Milk
the papers also suff
(108). Complicating
does know about T
revealing Teufelsdrö
Tarakwang, Chinese
point the Editor rec
much. Let not the s
(178). By fabricating
continually emphas
the cardboard-cutou
and smoking backs
The other importa
Carlyle to employ is
starts," writes Benja
epic theatre" (3). Th
the gesture is prefe
by people," for "the
interrupt someone
As a result [of the in

intervals paralyse th
54
spect
chara
Frequ
from
choru
delay
or th
Cauca
"He s
Simil
simila
inter
toget
Teuf
conte
few p
Carly
with
or th
to cr
These
He als
and e
and T
osten
Edito
unde
Magin
publi
castin
muff
the E
labor
cal p
Here,
groun
discer
humo
suspic
cation! (202)
As of course, he would know if the mystification were his own. Thus Carlyle casts doubt
on Teufelsdröckh's story from either side, fore and aft, insuring that readers will not
empathize totally with Teufelsdröckh or the Editor but will instead maintain a critical
distance.
55
Distance, but not in

narratives frequent
"Alienation-effect"
losing itself in it, r
Salutary, I say, for
in a way naturalist
This consciousness en
it were setting up an
not at the beginning
as in naturalistic t
astonishment is the
praxis. In one who
(Benjamin 4)
The Brechtiani pla

entertaining but has
of life in general ,
recognizable "as re
therefore the audie
active interest. The
experiment, for the
points, be checked
develops "the attitu
Again, as in Brech
(although Teufelsdrö
over what happene
are the realities of
Teufelsdröckh himself observes:
Has not thy [i.e., my] Life been that of most sufficient men {tüchtigen Männer) thou
hast known in this generation? An outflush of foolish young Enthusiasm, like the first
fallow-crop, wherein are as many weeds as valuable herbs: this all parched away,
under the Droughts of practical and spiritual Unbelief, as Disappointment, in thought
and act, often-repeated gave rise to Doubt, and Doubt gradually settled into Denial!
If I have had a second-crop, and now see the perennial greensward, and sit under
umbrageous cedars, which defy all Drought (and Doubt); herein too, be the Heavens
praised, I am not without examples, and even exemplars. (185)
Sartor Resartus , then, is not merely about Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh but about
everyone. The text elicits "interest in its primordial form" by showing readers that
Teufelsdröckh's life and opinions are also their own, that they have a stake in engaging even
with such abstruse-appearing philosophical issues as Teufelsdröckh takes up in the Clothes-
Philosophy.
Like the epic theatre, Sartor Resartus'1 revives a Socratic praxis" in which readers play
an active and essential role. This role differs radically from the role of "hypnotized test
subject" (Benjamin 2) offered by naturalistic or illusionistic narratives, which are transmitted
from a centralized, covertly manipulative authority. (To take slightly earlier examples: the
56
novel
enabl
confe
as we
his p
reade
show
canno
confu
additi
as op
Carly
them
navig
interr
thing
agree
and T
move
"Ever
respe
agree
that
asham
Profe
Consi
deriv
fresh
suckin
thou
Next
he is
is alto
almos
Edito
cloth
with
It mu
Radica
and p
Cloth
specu
(63)
Finally comes yet an

it is impossible to
or to love him. . . .
Descendentalism, h
readers the difficul
makes readers de
Caucasian Chalk Circle.
Carlyle establishes this role for readers even more firmly by having Teufelsdröc
constantly asking Socratic-style questions, often several in sequence. The questions ten
to be purely rhetorical; they require real thought. For instance: "[M]ay we not perhaps
Call one Diogenes Teufelsdröckh , and he will open the Philosophy of Clothes ?" (88), as
Professor; and "What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport and up
of war?" (174); and "What is this that, ever since your earliest years, thou hast been fr
and fuming, and lamenting and self-tormenting, on account of? Say it in a word: is it
because thou art not HAPPY?" (191). Such questions call for more than simple, inst
"yes" or "no" answers; they make one pause to formulate a response. Teufelsdrö
questions directly request readers' opinions, confirming their status as sages or ex
Thus Carlyle creates a group of intellectually engaged, interested experts who th
and act for themselves. Carlyle's seemingly mad, obscure methods of organizing
Resartus develop in readers the habit of thinking critically and independently; meanw
the Clothes-Philosophy shows them why they should do so all the time, not just
reading books. Teufelsdröckh's central argument is that all actual forms, all "m
conditions" - intellectual, political, social, philosophical, and artistic - are equall
structed and equally imperfect. All actual forms, even including human conceptions of
and Time, are as much and as obviously imperfect, contingent human construction
Editor's "Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh." Everything could and probably
be different, better; absolutely nothing must inevitably take the particular shape
now - not philosophical systems, not social systems, not governments. One could
Brecht's formulation universally: "It can happen this way, but it can also happen
different way" (cited in Benjamin 8).
In Sartor Resartus, then, Carlyle simultaneously guides readers into the posit
critical, objective, interested experts, and shows them that absolutely everythi
constructed, imperfect, and changeable. He nurtures radical dissatisfaction with the ac
together with the desire more closely to approximate the ideal. In short, Carlyle bring
readers to the position of romantic irony. Like Carlyle himself, readers of Sartor Resa
acting as romantic ironists,
must begin skeptically. [They] must acknowledge the limitations of [their] own finite
consciousness and of all man-made structures or myths. But even as [they deny] the
absolute validity of [their] own perceptions and structuring conceptions of the
universe, even as [they] consciously deconstruct [their] mystifications of the self and
the world, [they] must affirm and celebrate the process of life by creating new images
and ideas. Thus . . . romantic ironist[s] sustain [their] participation in a creative process
that extends beyond the limits of [their] own mind[s]. [They] deconstruct [their] own
texts in the expectation that such deconstruction is a way of keeping in contact with
a greater creative power. (Mellor 5)
58
As Cl
de M
It is
Schleg
Critic
case f
ends
himse
and, a
As Pe
gener
(312).
we ou
Produ
it,in
thy h
the N
For ac
What
that M
vitalit
a seed
as a B
Carly
or fo
their
to ne
Notes
!See, for instance, Rundle, who discusses the ways Carlyle "transforms a poetics of authority into a poeti
of devotion [to active reading]" (21), and Baker, who argues that Carlyle's method is to substitute traditio
"straight" rhetorical persuasion with "maieutic" persuasion - persuasion "which acts as a mid-wife to help brin
forth the reader's own understanding of the Clothes Philosophy" (220). For a detailed explanation of the ways
which Carlyle rebels in Sartor Resartus against the rhetorical conventions of his day, see Beirnard.
Works Cited
Baker, Lee C.R. "The Open Secret of Sartor Resartus-. Carlyle's Method of Converting His Reader." Studies
Philology 83 (1986): 218-35.
Beimard, Charles A. "Rebelling from the Right Side: Thomas Carlyle's Struggle against the Dominant Nineteen
Century Rhetoric." Studies in Scottish Literature 22 (1987): 142-56.
Benjamin, Walter. Understanding Brecht. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: Verso, 1992.
Brecht, Bertolt. Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht. Ed. and trans. Eric Bentley. New York: Grove, 1961.
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 190
Odyssey, 1937.
Dale, Peter Allan. u Sartor Resartus and the Inverse Sublime: The Art o
and Symbol. Ed. Morton W. Bloomfield. Cambridge: Harvard U
Mellor, Anne K. English Romantic Irony. Cambridge, Massachusett
Rabb, J. Douglas. "The Silence of Thomas Carlyle." English Languag
Rundle, Vivienne. "'Devising New Means': Sartor Resartus and the
(1992): 13-22.
Ryals, Claude de L. A World of Possibilities: Romantic Irony in Victonan Literature. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1990.
60
Selective Affinities: Carlyle, Goethe, and the French Revolution
Author(s): David R. Sorensen
61-73
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:48 UTC
Se
Ca
by
Carlyle a copy of a review he had recently written of John Daniel Morrell's An Historical
In Carlyle andandFebruary Cňticalof thea copySpeculative
Cňtical View 1847 ViewPhilosophy
of the a ofreview
Europeof inprominent the Speculative
the Nineteenth Century he had Scottish recently Philosophy churchman written of of Thomas John Europe Daniel Chalmers in the Morrell's Nineteenth (1780-1847) An Historical Century sent
(1846-47). Carlyle was probably amused by the Teufelsdröckhian title of the work, but he
resisted the temptation to satirize Morrell's efforts in his long and respectful reply to the
elderly Scottish theologian. Instead, he sided with Chalmers' criticism of German Transcen-
dentalism, and diagnosed the movement as a symptom of the modern "diseasď of scepticism
"from which the healthy intellect of man seeks only, and must seek, to escapď ( Collected
Letters 23:164).
Morrell was one of the first writers to compare and contrast English and Scottish
systems of thought with rival Continental versions. In his study he aims to demonstrate "that
truth may be gazed on from many different points of view, each of which may have its
advantages as well as its defects." This flexible approach is apparent in his assessment of
Carlyle, whom he classifies as the "first and foremost among the idealistic writers of our age,"
and the man most responsible for imprinting "the German stamp" on "the philosophy of
England." Carlyle's writings "have not been so much borrowed from these [German]
sources," Morrell contends, "as inspired from them: . . . instead of sitting at their feet, we
should rather say 'that his soul has burned within him, as he has walked with them by the
way'" (l:xxi, 2:249, 250).
Chalmers shrewdly challenges Morell's classification of Carlyle as a "Germano-
English Metaphysician" (2:247). "[Carlyle] is the champion of Germanism, not in its letter,
but in its spirit," he argues. People rather than ideas kindle his soul and fire his imagination.
"They are not creeds, but men who are the objects of his idolatry, which, under the name
of hero worship, he renders alike to those of most opposite opinions, - " Chalmers states,
"as to Luther, Knox, and Cromwell on the one hand, or with equal veneration to the lofty
poets and transcendentalists of Germany upon the other." He then postulates that the
German emphasis on "making acqaintance with the knowing faculties ere we can know"
inhibits the very possibility of spontaneous heroic action and promotes scepticism.
Transcendentalism is not a creed that can permanently engage Carlyle's sympathies. "He was
a lover of earnestness rather than truth," Chalmers concludes, and there is nothing
necessarily "German" about "earnestness" (2: 273).
In his response Carlyle warmly endorses Chalmers' assessment of his views, which
"on . . . many essential points" coincide with his own. German Transcendentalism provided
him with temporary shelter from "long years" of enervating scepticism, and enabled him to
61
"look abroad with

doubt, he abandone
the process of anal
aspects of Transcend
they "swallowed and
of experience. He n
21:164).
This "confession"
wished. Carlyle acc
lously symbolizes a
beings rationally per
different views. Us
evidence of the ph
of our reason and i
region of sensation."
the Finite in the Inf
an internal "divine
(Morrell 1:65, 66, 6
Carlyle is untroub
proudly to Chalmers
himself, "'I never t
authority remains in
ics" {Collected Lette
Carlyle's "innermost
"first and foremost
Letters 4:209) even
those of Schelling,
genius, Carlyle ef
outlook.
Carlyle was quietly aware that his mentor was being assailed by German and English
philosophers, theologians, essayists, and critics precisely because he had retreated from the
world in favour of "thinking about thinking." Eight months after he wrote to Chalmers, a
article appeared in Fraser's Magazine entitled "Goethe and His Critics," in which the author
addresses the charge that the poet was "utterly regardless of the public voice, livin
exclusively within his own mind, and finding there all the satisfaction which others derive
from a general acknowledgment of their merits" (490). Many English and Germ
commentators accused Goethe of making art into a religion that sanctified the dignifi
contemplation of timeless and beautiful forms. Art provided the pretext for "thinking abo
thinking," a posture that Carlyle elsewhere assailed as a denial rather than a "Confirmation"
of truth. Occasionally, Carlyle voiced the accusation himself. On an excursion with Emerson
to Stonehenge in July 1847, he spoke disparagingly of Schiller and Goethe's preoccupat
with 11 Kunst, ••• a great delusion" (Emerson 276).
From the outset of his German apprenticeship, Carlyle rebutted these criticisms of
Schiller and Goethe publicly, while he uttered similar complaints privately. Two Goeth
existed in his imagination: the first, a symbolic figure of redemption and salvation, who save
him from unbelief; and the second, an aristocratic ironist who strove, together with h
62
disci
histo
allow
prob
natu
tran
crea
Whe
L'All
redu
duri
stre
mesh
prop
of c
betw
appe
Goet
viewpoint.
But he was less impressed than he often indicated in his fulsome tributes to Goethe.
His very Scottish and English respect for detail led him to dissect the framework of this grand
vision. His diaries and letters are full of well aimed objections that amply betray his distrust.
He was suspicious of Goethe's other-worldly predilections and his cult of genius. The
promotion of self-awareness through art led to a retreat from untidy reality into purer
dimensions of observation and meditation. He believed that Schiller and Goethe's notion
of art privileged sensitivity, discrimination, and refined perception above action, duty, and
participation in society. As a consequence, the tragic and comic aspects of historical
behaviour became aesthetic abstractions, and human evil became explicable by an appeal
to barely decipherable organic patterns of growth and decay. From the serene summit of
the Goethean "Watchtower," life below resembled a kind of pageant designed to stimulate
the senses and enhance self-reflection.
Carlyle recognized the dangers involved in climbing to such distant perches. "Alas,
it is so easy to screw one's self up into high and ever higher altitudes of Transcendentalism,"
he remarks to Emerson in 1842, "and see nothing under one but the everlasting snows of
Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet . . . but whither does it lead?" (Collected Letters
15:57; 29 August 1842). He saw where it led at least in one notable English instance and later
satirized the results in his portrait of Coleridge in The Life of John Sterling (1851). What he
could not do was admit that the portrait was as pertinent to Goethe as it was to the " Maguś '
of Highgate Hill ( Works 11 :53V
Until he completed "Heroes," Carlyle felt obliged to conceal his doubts about Goethe
behind a veil of hyperbole. Any admission on his part that this "heroic bringerls] of the light"
(On Heroes , Works 5:158) might suffer from certain dark "delusions" would compromise
Carlyle's own conception of himself as an inspired messenger of a new faith. He often derided
his prophetic standing and laughed at his own pretensions, but he also enjoyed playing the
part of the neglected Jeremiah. By championing Goethe so lavishly, he avoided having to join
in the debate about this "godlike . . . Hero" (Works 5:157) that swirled around him. He could
63
remain above the c

self-critical to rep
from the aesthetic m
drive.
In his translations
Travels (1827), Carly
to dilute his aesthe
biography" of Goet
writer's ascent to th
illness, penury, an
how determined Ca
practical and earth
(1833-34), in which
antithesis of the We
(1795).
Carlyle's decision to write history was closely bound up with his resistance to Schiller
and Goethe's aesthetic doctrines. His appetite for the study of the past had been whetted
early in his career by his reading of Hume and Gibbon, whose ability to construct large
canvasses from a vast range of minutiae impressed him strongly. Notwithstanding their
philosophic prejudices, their narratives often teemed with the vitality of physical life. Hume
and Gibbon conveyed the same journalistic feeling for crowds, conversation, and place that
Carlyle admired in the novels of Defoe, Fielding, Sterne and Smollett, in Hogarth's drawings,
in Swift and Pope's poetry and prose, and in Boswell's biography of Dr. Johnson.2 Moreover,
they invested political debates with a sense of urgency by showing how these affected the
ordinary as well as the privileged.
Carlyle discovered a similar inclination in Schiller to capture life "from below" in his
historical works, but these efforts were compromised by his philosophical aims. Schiller
sought to unfold the progress of "Universal History," which consisted "of the history of
philosophy, of the arts, of custom, of commerce, and of politics," he told his friend Korner
in March 1789 (Correspondence of Schiller with Korner 2:17 ; 26 March 1789). He was eager
to prove that personal self-cultivation was the key to all human advancement and that
national boundaries and distinctions were barriers to this movement of intellectual and
spiritual liberation. Carlyle dismissed the notion as " Blarney i' in a notebook entry in 1823
(Two Note Books 36). Two years later in his biography of Schiller, he was more tactful. Wha
was absent from this theory of development was a sense of the importance of nation
idiosyncracies, and a respect for individual setting.
Typically, Carlyle failed to mention that Schiller's view of history was more grounde
in the social and political actualities of the past than Goethe's. The sage of Weimar disdained
"Universal History" because of its impractical teleology. He saw history in naturalistic term
and wanted to analyze its recurrent metamorphoses in the same way that he studied th
changing formations of rocks and plants. If such precision could not be attained in the stud
of the past, then it was the subject matter itself that was flawed. In his correspondence wit
Schiller, Goethe urged his young friend to contemplate more suitable methods of artis
expression, and to look beyond history for his material. Schiller was reluctant and told his
friend in 1798 that "freely invented [subjects] would be dangerous ground to me. It is quite
a different thing to idealise what is realistic, than to realise what is ideal, and this is what
64
has
26 M
Carl
favo
have
that
even
polit
own
But
Resa
his v
Goet
the
conf
obsta
from
3 Ma
refo
chan
the
a per
refle
In C
a soc
Grea
by a
But
envi
"the
dire
Carly
path
In an
conc
estab
Engl
poet
audience because he eschewed abstractions of human nature and wrote of the world that
he lived in with candour and fidelity. Carlyle warmly recommended him to Goethe and in
the same letter likened him to Schiller, who was also born in 1759. Cautiously advocatin
an aesthetic judgment of his own, Carlyle regretted that "neither of these two men, of who
I reckon Burns perhaps naturally even the greater, ever heard the other's name"
(Correspondence Between Goethe and Carlyle 123; 25 September 1828).
Carlyle's turn towards history in the eighteen-thirties reflected his disillusionment
with Schiller and Goethe's aesthetic theories, which for him now resonated with an air o
65
"attentuated cosmo
influential Characte
prophet's stature a
deferred to his au
conclusions that I ca
had seen too far, a
letter to Eckermann
6 May 1834), withou
her introduction s
Beautiful and the G
that are most fier
"with every state o
wide and prophetic
Carlyle himself wa
of reading French R
England and Franc
and he threw himse
spoke of the French
a clear voice could b
suddenly gained a d
opinion, enshrined
the ancien regime ,
dignified narratives
As Teufelsdröckh a
Historians, unless
Hapsburgs, . . . bu
The French Revolu
Whereas Carlyle reg
regretted it as the s
regime , Goethe mo
acted to protect and
journalism and saw
democratic life. Pre
to address the topic
form of re-enactme
alone served to rev
In 1827 Goethe rea
of this "golden net,
(Correspondence B
correspondent, who
of Scott's book in T
look additionally a
spirit prevails" (Cor
not have been refe
echoed Carlyle's own
the invention of th
and,
poin
lette
16 A
gran
flex
disti
the
of t
voca
secti
"mo
encla
"stri
that
Carl
perm
relat
histo
Whe
meth
Mar
règn
strea
alon
over
it, as
serie
muc
1802
Char
pref
cata
cont
from
geolo
of v
( Wo
cycl
inwa
Nept
new-made!" (Works 2:80).
Carlyle never ceased to pay polite homage to his "spiritual saviour," but as a historian,
his method and his viewpoint were inimical to Goethe's perspective. The differences are
clearly apparent in their respective handling of the Diamond Necklace episode. Goethe
chose to treat the scandal in a comic vein and in Der Gross Cophta (1791) shaped the
67
historical material a
premiere of the fiv
of the dangerous t
outlook. The final
recovered, and arist
strangely out of joi
Carlyle makes a
Goethe's "dramatic
wherein perhaps th
in artistic miniatu
"Diamond Necklace
in form or content
Collier (1785), whi
Printshops yielded t
songs, and the like
journalistic detritus
Carlyle, the Collier
Century'" (Works 2
In "The Diamond
dissoluteness and g
France (Works 28
describes how thei
quake." Unlike Goet
environment" tha
pervasive corruptio
public and private c
from a wide range
régime , and the ra
Goethe could not s
"inside" because he
to remain an observ
contemplation and i
study of the most
intersection of ideo
individuals sudden
of change. Wherea
folly, Carlyle saw it
historical fate.
Few of Carlyle's contemporaries realized the extent of his divergence from Goethe,
but there were notable exceptions. John Stuart Mill, himself a keen student of the French
Revolution, questioned the stability of Carlyle's allegiance to Goethe. The Italian revolution-
ary Mazzini, whom Carlyle greatly admired, doubted that his English friend was entirely
sincere in his worship of the German poet. But no one penetrated Carlyle's motives more
acutely than the young John Sterling, who on several occasions challenged the disciple of
Goethe to defend his "saviour's" teachings. In a long letter that he sent in May 1835, he
accused Carlyle of advocating a bland form of pantheism in Sartor Resartus, which negated
68
the i
orde
we f
of D
a hea
11:116).
In his reply Carlyle denied being either a "Pantheist [or] Pottheist," and echoed a
Goethean phrase proclaiming the mysteriousness of the Creator {Collected Letters 8: 136-37).
But Sterling had touched a delicate nerve, and Carlyle was obliged to conceal his discomfort.
Sterling later fictionalized a debate between Carlyle and Goethe in "The Onyx Ring" (1838),
which Carlyle read in Julius Charles Hare's edition of Sterling's Essaysand Tales (1848). The
dispute between Collins (Carlyle) and Walsingham (Goethe) revolves around the topic of
truth in art, and how it should be represented. Surveying the ruins of a country church,
Walsingham proposes to "'round the whole into a little Grecian tragedy.'" "'Why do anything
of the kind?"' retorts Collins, "'It might be worth while to know what really happened . . .
Truth, man! truth is the only true poetry'" (Sterling 2:541-42). Not surprisingly, Carlyle's
marginal annotations in his volume of Hare suggest his displeasure at having to encounter
again the real "Facts" about himself and his oracle. Sterling had exposed the insincerity of
both the prophet and his disciple.4
In his greatest work of history Carlyle frequently resists the Goethean temptation to
subordinate his sources to an evolutionary pattern. Paying homage to his Weimar "Father,"
he does try to read events symbolically, divining in them some naturalistic parallel. But his
"Goethean" pronouncements are curiously irrelevant to his main focus, which is the
description of the people who generated the Revolution, and the physical world they
inhabited. One Victorian critic immediately detected a discrepancy in the book between
Carlyle's cosmetic transcendentalism and his journalistic methods of reporting. The
Coleridgean writer John Heraud wrote incisively of Carlyle's peculiar relation to Goethe. On
the surface at least, The French Revolution seemed to be a disciple's tribute to his messiah.
The "idolatry" that Carlyle exhibits toward Goethe in previous essays is "too much seen in
the history before us" (86), Heraud complains. Goethean epigraphs are placed at the
beginning of each volume and Goethean allusions abound. Reminiscences of Goethe are
introduced gratuitously at various stages in the narrative. "[T]he most careless reader," he
notes, "would rightly wonder at the reason of their introduction by any other author than
one so devoted to Goethe, as the master of his mind" (87).
Superficially at least, Carlyle the historian looks at the past as if he were seeing it
through the eyes of Goethe. According to Heraud, he is a poet who cultivates the scientist's
"sublime point of indifference" (95). He considers events poetically and prophetically, "not
in relation to time, and time-interests, and opinion, but in correlation to eternity" (93). For
him, "every fact is esteemed as declarative of the laws by which man's being is what it is,
and acts and suffers as it does" (100). Carlyle illuminates the Goethean inner sense of history
by dramatizing the attempts of individuals to realise their powers and linking these
symbolically to the evolution of natural phenomena.
But Heraud also concedes that if his aim was to write a Goethean history, Carlyle has
failed. His style is boisterous, his narrative tone, frenetic, and his description, relentless. The
calm voice of the "poet-scientist" is seldom heard, and in any case, there is little opportunity
for dispassionate analysis amidst the clamour. Carlyle repeatedly gives precedence to
69
verisimilitude over
dissertations and c
dramatically, or epic
the craft seriously.
referring to authori
most correct histor
Heraud's fertile an
himself from the s
it never could who
participate in a pe
struggled to manipu
past denied and con
regarded stubborn
that he might deduc
of nature, yet he r
personal. For him, d
stoical irony.
Carlyle was Whigg
their predecessors
"'Conversation'" ( Wo
only be the immed
the lost voices of o
present, uniting him
Schiller and Goethe
rather than an end.
he derives the insp
philosopher Siegfrei
process. "Art fulfil
of the historian's pu
depth of his under
For Goethe, histor
perfection either o
synonymous). In hi
events, which offe
chaotic, violent, and
admitted, Goethe's i
the same morpholog
rumours of war, t
working out its cour
(68).5 And the even
Revolution. The "E
achieved through t
If few of his cont
the English discipl
thought Carlyle's re
this century, Carl
70
achi
Carl
some
react
and f
for s
was
To h
auth
expo
dang
its p
in m
corr
amon
Theo
Carl
conse
of th
subje
actualities of their "local environment" looks less defensible now than it did to earlier readers.
But English and American readers of Carlyle who ignore this trend in Goethe
scholarship also overlook a central aspect of the Scotsman's own intellectual development.
Goethe's influence was always a mixed benefit to him, particularly as a historian. There were
limits to how far he could identify with a man who, when confronted with the human carnage
of the Prussian retreat at Sainte-Menehould in 1795, addressed his attention to "an
experiment on the 'cannon-fever'" {The French Revolution , Works 4: 55).9 If Goethe inspired
Carlyle to revere nature and natural force, he also unwittingly led his friend to identify this
power with righteousness and historical destiny, and to deify individuals who supposedly
embodied it. Goethe's disdain for the political arena reinforced Carlyle's antagonism to
reasoned debate and increased his desire for transcendent solutions. Carlyle never lost his
Grub Street feel for the importance of locality in history, but too often he cluttered his vivid
narratives with peripheral "divinations" of metamorphosis and evolution. When he kept his
ear to the "Conversation" of history, the Goethean influence receded, and the past emerged
as a vital human presence.
St. Joseph's University
71
Notes
Tor an elaboration of this argument, see my article on Carlyle and Coleridge. Although he could neve
openly criticize his "spiritual mentor" Goethe in direct terms, Carlyle often took the opportunity to blame Coleridge
for vices that he privately attributed to Goethe.
2In separate articles on Johnson and Gibbon, I suggest the extent of Carlyle's loyalty to certain eighteent
century writers. Later figures such as Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Cobbett appealed to him precisely because their
art mirrored their proximity to a specific "environment."
3Charles E. Passage provides a synopsis of the play, which has not been translated into English. W. Danie
Wilson analyzes Goethe's resistance to the Revolution and his identification of hunger with artistic corruption
a number of his plays, but does not mention Der Gross Cophta.
4 A s Mark Cumming rightly observes, Carlyle could not have been pleased by Sterling's representation of him
as Collins. The "Onyx Ring" deserves further analysis for what it reveals about Sterling's understanding of Carly
interest in history.
5Peter Gay perceptively shows how Meinecke's loyalty to Goethe compromised his own political principl
during the period of the Weimar Republic. Fritz Stern explores the influence of the Goethean notion of culture
German education during the nineteenth century, and links it to the political apathy of the ruling elite.
6Donald Stone ignores the problem by underestimating the political repercussions of Goethe's commitmen
to self-culture. David DeLaura offers a more incisive analysis, and demonstrates the impact of Goethean ideals
Arnold's cautious appraisal of Bildung.
7L.M. Findlay tends to overlook Carlyle's political convictions, but his comparison between Carlyle and Pau
de Man is revealing. Marc Redfleld provides further insight into de Man's own perspective. In a manner similar
Findlay, Scott Simpkins makes a convincing case for the deconstructive aspect of Sartor ' but again, he does n
remark on the "descendental" direction of Teufelsdröckh's career. K.J. Fielding provides what is absent in both
essays. He treats Carlyle as a serious authority on revolutionary action and demonstrates the profound influen
that he exerted on the Young Ireland movement.
8Like Carlyle, both de Man and Eagleton are critical of Schiller's attempts to aestheticize Kant's philosophy
and render it politically inoffensive. Adorno too assails the "Kultur" ideal and exposes the class pretensio
underlying its stress on dignity and balance. But the consequences of using art to promote ideals of communit
are well documented by Paul Guyer in his response to this line of criticism (19-23).
9Burdened by theoretical nebulosities, Mary Desaulniers misses the irony of this passage, which surely wou
have appealed to de Man (92). Carlyle hastily removes the "World-Poet" from the scene and retums, with an evid
air of relief, to a description of the battle.
Works Cited
Adomo, Theodore. The Jargon of Authenticity. Trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. Evanston: Northwestern
UP, 1973.
Austin, Sarah. Characteristics of Goethe, From the German of Falk, von Muller. 2 vols. London: Effingham, Wilson
1833.
Carlyle, Thomas. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ed. Charles R. Sanders, K.J. Fielding. Clyde
de L. Ryals, et al. 24 vols. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1970-.
Chalmers, Thomas. Rev. oí An Historical and Critical Viewof the Speculat

Century , by John Daniel Morrell. North British Review 6 (1847): 27
Cumming, Mark. "Carlyle and Goethe in Sterling's 'Onyx Ring.'" Carly
DeLaura, David. "Heroic Egotism: Goethe and the Fortunes of Bildung in
72
von G
Lubb
de Ma
Desaul
Mont
Eaglet
Emers
12 vo
Fieldi
Joach
Findla
81.
Gay,
"Goet
Guyer
Hazlitt
Howe
Herau
Kracau
Meine
Kegan
Morre
Centu
Passag
Redfì
Schill
Lond
and Other Contemporaries. With Biographical Sketches and Notes

Richard Bentley, 1849.
Simpkins, Scott. "On Carlyle's Sartor Resartus." Semiotica 91 (1992): 15-
Sorensen, David. "Carlyle, Boswell's Life of Johnson and the 'Conversatio
27-40.
Sterling, John. Essays and Tales. Ed. Julius Charles Hare. 2 vols. Lond
Stem, Fritz. "The Political Consequences of the Unpolitical German
Political Culture of Modern Germany. London: Allen and Unwin
Stone, Donald. "Goethe and the Victorians." Carlyle Annual 13 (1992
Wilson, W. Daniel. "Hunger/Artist: Goethe's Revolutionary Agit
Burgergeneral ." Monatshefte Sfa (1994): 80-94.
73
Carlyle's Subliminal Feminine: Maenadic Chaos in "The French Revolution"
Author(s): John Clubbe
75-88
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:48 UTC
REFERENCES
Ca
M
John Clubbe
Order is Heav'n's first law.
- Pope, An Essay on Man
Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin.

- Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
It needs a wild steersman when we voyage through Chaos! The anchor is up! Farewell!
- Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.

- Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
At the center of chaos theory is the discovery that hidden within the unpredictability
of chaotic systems are deep structures of order.
- N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos and Order
Chaotic unpredictability and nonlinear thinking . . . are just the aspects of life that have
tended to be culturally encoded as feminine. Indeed, chaos itself has often been
depicted as female.
- N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos and Order
Throughout and destroy societal institutions. More than an omnipresent leitmotif chaos, "the
Throughout and newestnewest
destroyBirth
Birth Theofsocietal of French
Nature's Nature'inorganic
waste s institutions.Deep"
Revolution waste isinorganic
(3:260), More Carlylea permanent
for Carlyle than insists Deep" an upon omnipresent (3:260), the is potential for leitmotif Carlyle of chaos a chaos, permanent to erupt "the
condition of existence. As society descends into chaos, it throws off every constraint. In The
French Revolution Carlyle chronicles three major descents into chaos: first, in the storming
of the Bastille; second, in "The Insurrection of Women" when the women of Paris march
upon Versailles; finally, in the Reign of Terror of 1793-1794. During the Terror - when the
chthonic elements "burst forth . . . from their subterranean imprisonment: hideous, dim-
confused," when France's "Twenty-five millions" rise in "Pythian mood" - chaos appears to
achieve a final triumph (3:31, 238).
But the triumph is only apparent. Already at the beginning of his history Carlyle has
told us that, once the mad forces of chaos have exhausted themselves, we shall discern "new
Powers . . . fashioning themselves" (1:16). These new Powers, "struggling . . . [and] writhing
75
and chafing
associated wi
Insurrection
understandin
Carlyle's lifel
attitude toward women.
A century and a half after Carlyle wrote his history, scientists - mathematicians and
physicists chiefly but meteorologists and biologists as well - have restudied and found new
meaning in chaos. Until recently, scientists deemed puzzling or ominous what the historian
of modern chaos, James Gleick, author of the influential Chaos: Making a New Science
(1987), the first study to chart the field, terms "the irregular side of nature, the discontinuous
and erratic side" (3). The situation changed dramatically once these scientists "realized that
chaos offered a fresh way to proceed with old data." The modern interest in chaos has, in
Gleick's view, led to an "altered sense of nature's possibilities." The "disorderly behavior"
inherent in chaos, he claims, actually acts as "a creative process." The meteorologist Edward
N. Lorenz, for example, has found unpredictability in chaos, but he has also found pattern.
This awareness of cause and effect, however distant each may be from the other, has led
to what scientists call "the Butterfly Effect," namely, to give an extreme example, "the notion
that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in
New York." A number of scientists now regard the emergent science of chaos, after relativity
and quantum mechanics, as "the century's third great revolution in the physical sciences"
(Gleick 304, 53, 43, 44, 8, 6).1
Literary awareness of chaos intuitively preceded its scientific codification. Gleick
prefaces his chapters with epigraphs from literary works that take on chaos: Wallace
Stevens's poem "Connoisseur of Chaos," Marlowe's Dr. Faustus , Melville's Moby-Dick.2
When Melville in Moby-Dick declares - "the classification of the constituents of a chaos,
nothing less is here essayed" C Moby-Dick 117; Gleick 301) - his words might serve modern
chaos theorists as a battle standard. Gleick's analysis of the emerging science of chaos but
gives a local habitation and a name to what Carlyle had intuitively grasped long before: that
in a universe where every element is intimately and inextricably intertwined with every
other, chaos serves as both a precursor and a seedbed of cosmos (e.g., Works 27:88).
In Nature's Chaos (1990), an essay written to accompany Eliot Porter's dazzling
photographs of chaos in nature, Gleick explains how, within apparent chaos, nature reveals
meaning and structure. "The essence of the earth's beauty lies in disorder," he finds, "a
peculiarly patterned disorder. . . . Researchers have found a new understanding of wildness
in the study of chaotic and complex systems." Through this study "seeming irregularities"
in nature "can be contemplated, sorted, measured, and understood" (Gleick, Nature's Chaos
14, 25).
Chaos theory can also help explain urban life. "An urban planner learns that the best
cities grow dynamically, not neatly," Gleick observes in Nature's Chaos , "into complex,
jagged, interwoven networks, with different kinds of housing and different kinds of
economic uses all jumbled together" (16). Anticipating Gleick here were Jane Jacobs's
seminal books on cities. Even before the rise of chaos theory, Jacobs had intuited chaos's
76
sign
for
is t
inef
life.3
It remained for N. Katherine Hayles, trained in both science and literature, to apply
the insights of modern chaos theory to literature. "Within the Western tradition," she
observes in Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990),
"chaos was associated with the unformed, the unthought, the unfilled, the unordered" (19).
In Hesiod's Theogony chaos is "that which existed before anything else, when the universe
was in a completely undifferentiated state"; God in Paradise Lost11 creates the world not out
of nothing but out of Chaos" (19). By the early nineteenth-century the view of chaos as an
unformed void began to be replaced by the view of chaos as an antagonist to order. Poe's
tale "The Fall of the House of Usher" reveals, for Hayles, "order and chaos . . . bound together
in a dialectic. The more energy expended, the more certain the collapse into fragmentation
and chaos" (21).
Chaos also serves as a seedbed for art. Michel Serres (cited by Hayles) finds many
of Turner's paintings inspired by "a vision of a turbulent, chaotic, immensely powerful
energy" (22). An artist she does not cite is Jackson Pollock, whose intricate, interlaced,
apparently chaotic paintings astounded the post-World War II art scene. Implying in their
design an underlying order, they appear to anticipate modern scientific interpretations of
chaos. These figure centrally in Tom Stoppard's recent Arcadia (1993), the dialogue of which
is "proleptic of fractal geometry and its metaphysical implications" (Graham 317). Although
Hayles forgoes musical examples, chaos has an equally vital and creative role in music.
Charles Ives's Universe Symphony (191 1-1951), deliberately left unfinished by the composer,
has its underlying pattern embedded in the chaos of his creative vision - or so claims Larry
Austin who, after years of herculean labor, recently completed it. Austin found the
apparently chaotic fragments sufficiently revealing of Ives's intent that he could deem his
recreation "a 100% Ives composition."4
In regard to literary examples of chaos, Hayles differentiates between "texts that see
chaos as a void from which something can emerge and those that see chaos as a complex
configuration within which order is implicitly encoded" (25). In The Education of Henry
Adams chaos as void wrestles order for control of a fragmenting universe, whereas in Doris
Lessing's The Golden Notebook "order is implicitly encoded" in chaos. A work comparable
to Lessing's in this regard, a work that emerged out of the profound creative chaos within
its author, is The French Revolution.
II
Explicit or immanent in Carlyle's major writings lies the conflict between chaos and
order, or (to use his term) cosmos. Structure obsessed Carlyle: his mind, it has been said,
"had a centripetal tendency toward unity" (Young 110). Within his being, as the Victorian
scientist John Tyndall once put it, he possessed a "range of life wide enough to embrace the
demoniac and the godlike" (361). Thinking and writing about chaos and cosmos helped
Carlyle make sense of the world and of himself. Writing The French Revolution corresponded
to the conflicts within his deepest being. As he worked on his history, Carlyle remade himself
77
daily, for the writin

he wrote Emerson in
tumbling and falling
enabled him, tempor
within himself.
To contemporaries who struggled with their own inner chaos - among them,
Tennyson and Thackeray - Carlyle extended heartfelt sympathy. Thackeray he once
described as "very uncertain and chaotic in all points"; Tennyson he said carried "a bit of
Chaos about him, . . . which he is manufacturing into Cosmos! ... his way is thro' Chaos
and the Bottomless and Pathless" (Slater 496; Collected Letters 18:168, 169). Thackeray and
Tennyson had to wrestle with their demons just as surely as Carlyle had to wrestle with his.
The roots of Carlyle's obsession with order lie deep in his upbringing. Like other
children of strongly religious Scottish households, he underwent training "in habits of order
and industry, in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something and to produce
something in the world."5 Childhood immersion in the Bible inculcated in the young Carlyle
the dynamic of chaos and cosmos. God in Genesis creates out of chaos the earth, the
sun, the planets, all living creatures including, finally, man. Subsequently He assigns
numbers to the tribes of Israel. By these and other acts He brings order to what before
had been inchoate. Within chaos then lies potential creativity. The Great Chain of
Being posits a universe divinely ordered in which every creature has its place. John
Wesley's hymn "O God, Thou bottomless abyss" envisions the creativity lying within
the abyss (Purkis 149). At Edinburgh University readings in Shakespeare, Milton, the
Aeneid , the histories of Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon revealed to the young Carlyle how
literary art could control and make chaos into cosmos. Though chaotic in its nature, creativity
(he discovered) was a dynamic, not a static, force. To become a writer he knew he would
have to wrestle with chaos within and without - and upon it impose order. Increasingly, he
came to realize that any order established could not be permanent, that churning underneath
it in fact lay chaos.
A journal entry of 1825 expresses this inevitable and necessary interaction between
chaos and cosmos: "But even a chaotic world must have some Point; . . . there is no pure
entire Confusion and Discord, but all such presupposes its Contrary, before it can begin"
{Two Note Books 114).6 Such interaction Carlyle conceived in terms of palingenesis, the idea
(as Charles Frederick Harrold puts it) of "the world as a Phoenix ever renewing itself by a
resurrection from the ashes of time's destruction" (111). "The huge formless Chaos is here,"
Carlyle informed Goethe in December 1829, addressing him in language explicitly biblical;
"but no creative Voice to say 'Let there be Light,' and make it into a World" {Collected Letters
5:50). Life for Goethe, Carlyle knew, represented the subduing of chaos by cosmos; in fact,
Goethe's conquest of his own internal chaos constituted, in Schiller's view, the controlling
motif in his life. Carlyle concedes that he has not yet found cosmos himself, but, as G. B.
Tennyson has noted, such a focus was already forming within him {Sartor Called Resartus
128). 7
By the early 1830's Carlyle had come to realize that epic history would be his major
mode of expression and that the conquest of chaos by cosmos would constitute for him a
main theme - perhaps the main theme - of his epic endeavors. In 1832 he characterized
Ebenezer Elliott's long poem The Village Patriarch as a modern epic because its hardworking,
resourceful farmer Enoch Wray had the makings of an epic hero. "No Ilion had he
78
des
min
had
gra
cha
con
real
In
bet
Phi
nat
end
aff
tha
Wil
tho
our
Ill
Car
boo
ent
anc
gra
str
his
The
the
chao
Let
"wi
inex
is T
moment to manifest themselves.
The Revolution fascinated Carlyle because it represented a volcanic explosion of life

and energy. Hovering beneath the surface of self and society lurk anarchical forces. "Our
whole being is an infinite abyss, overarched by Habit, as by a thin Earth-rind, laboriously
built together." "Every man," Carlyle insists, "holds confined within him a mad- man." Society
is "'the standing miracle of this world'" (1:43). Its creation had been a miracle, and given the
anarchical forces within every human being, it is a miracle it holds together at all. Unexpected
eruptions of chaos can shatter at any moment traditions of behavior and social structure that,
inevitably, are precariously held in place. The French Revolution constantly reminds us how
near these chaotic forces lurk. When our "thin Earth-rind" - that is, the political and social
organizations that gird our temporal destiny - undergoes an upset, there results "waste wild-
weltering chaos" (1:44).
79
By 1789 the French

Once the people pe
waned and skeptic
anarchical situati
nature of man will
itself, yet with all
believes, is "a spect
one of his genuine
endeavor, for in the
today's chaoticians,
IV
On October 5, 1789
out to Versailles to d
itself for Carlyle m
refers in "The Insurrection of Women" to the women of Paris as "menads." His maenads draw
upon the maenads of Greek mythology, human Bacchantes, women inspired to orgiastic
fury in the celebration of Dionysus through song, music, and dance, women who in their
frenzied raging represent the bursting-forth of primal instincts.
Why does Carlyle devote such extended scrutiny to the march to Versailles? Most
historians of the Revolution slide over it: Georges Lefebvre allots it two sentences; Simon
Schama, ten pages.10 Carlyle gives it seventy. No doubt the maenadic march challenged
Carlyle's pictorial, dramatic, and narrative powers. Furthermore, he thought the Insurrection
of Women had far greater historical importance than "many wearisome bloody Battles"
(1:297). Rendering it with "loving minuteness," he makes one of the great set pieces of his
history.
Seventy pages allow Carlyle to portray, with Carlylean amplitude and from his usual
point of view, the chaotic and irrational as an essentially female phenomenon. He intends
to make a statement about the position of women in the scheme of things. For Carlyle, it
seems, women are chaotic beings who in turn foment chaos. Of his major depictions of
chaos, only in the maenadic march do women dominate the scene. Such a presentation of
women, if the whole picture, appears to imply on Carlyle's part hostility to women and their
historical role. The usual interpretation is that Carlyle is misogynistic and hostile to women.
But is the usual interpretation correct? Is it the whole picture? Such misogyny and hostility,
if true, would gravely distort his account of the Revolution. It would also foreshorten his
understanding of heroism - and of humanity.
The stereotypical Victorian image of woman was that of passive helpmeet to man.
Most members of the Victorian middle-class, female as well as male, would have endorsed
this view; in fact, as much as anything, it was shaped by what one contemporary observer
called "the great masculine mind of Carlyle."11 In "Voltaire" (1829) woman (Carlyle writes)
was "given to man as a benefit, and for mutual support; a precious ornament and staff
whereupon to lean in many trying situations" ( Works 26:434). Like other contemporary male
historians, Carlyle reflects in such statements both popular ideas about women in his day
and the patrilinear forms and structures of the past societies he investigated.
Carlyle often denied women equality. Before marriage he tells Jane Welsh that uthe
80
Man
he d
shr
was
Carl
wri
prim
wor
asso
Fem
lack
crea
Did
Sus
of p
of
wom
inv
und
( W
pass
can
Rob
Evi
per
mas
tow
high
odd
own
Car
stru
than
wom
that
Insu
fem
achieved narratives.
At one point in Chaos Bound Katherine Hayles wonders why James Gleick's Chaos
Making a New Science "has no women in it." "Chaotic unpredictability and nonlinear
thinking," she writes, "are just the aspects of life that have tended to be culturally encoded
as feminine. Indeed, chaos itself has often been depicted as female." Why does Gleick (sh
wonders), while validating chaos as a scientific concept, find "it necessary to expunge th
female from his world?" (171, 173). 14 Gleick will have to answer for himself, but for Carly
the question is moot. In probing his own feminine chaos he includes the very elements
Hayles finds lacking in Gleick's perspective. Carlyle in his depiction of chaos in The French
81
Revolution in no w
malgré lui , he put
Carlyle assigns the leading role in "The Insurrection of Women" to Demoiselle

Théroigne, the most visible of the Parisian maenads. He had introduced her in the procession
of May 4, 1789, when representatives of the three Estates converge on Versailles. "Pike and
helm lie provided for thee in due season," he wrote there; "and, alas, also strait- waistcoat
and long lodging in the Salpêtrière!" Telescoping time, he takes a long view of her career,
backwards and forwards. More wisely might she have remained, he implies, in her native
Luxembourg, married, and had children; "but it was not thy task, it was not thy lot" (l:l60).
Carlyle looks back to Demoiselle Théroigne's origins in Luxembourg, forward to her role
as chief maenad in "The Insurrection of Women," beyond to her being stripped and beaten
in the Tuileries for her Girondist opinions, further still to her twenty-three years of insanity,
finally to her death in 1817.
What renders Carlyle's method of characterization distinctive are not only the
expected flashbacks but what we may call flashforwards. Together with the flashbacks, the
flashforwards interpret a life upon whose present - Demoiselle Théroigne's moment in
history when "pike and helm lie provided" for her - Carlyle focuses intensely. Although she
incarnates for him the principle of chaos, chaos for Carlyle is not altogether a bad thing; in
fact, since it prepares for the reestablishment of cosmos, it is a good and necessary thing.
After all, a long line of epic female warriors - the Amazon Camilla in the Aeneid , Bradamant
in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Clorinda inTasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Britomart in TheFaeńe
Queene, even Cythna in Shelley's The Revolt of Islam - have preceded Demoiselle Théroigne.
Carlyle's Parisiennes are not only maenads, they are also "Judiths."15 He intends his
readers to recall Judith of the Apocrypha, a widow of some wealth, considerable beauty, and
irreproachable virtue, who by going out to the Assyrian camp, ensnaring the Assyrian leader
Holofernes, and hacking off his head saves her native city. In addition to being pious and
brave, Judith is of good heart, intelligent and shrewd, and is possessed of a sense of mission.
The Assyrians find her "not such a woman from one end of the earth to the other, both for
beauty of face, and wisdom of words" (1 1 :21). Judith, as Jeffrey L. Spear puts it, takes "morally
justifiable action when authority is paralyzed and the men overawed" (76). Hailed upon her
return as a heroine, she is told, "blessed are thou of the most high God above all women
upon the earth" (13:18). Admired by all, she lives out her days in glory.
But the Victorians saw Judith otherwise. "Destructive women in Victorian literature,"
John R. Reed has pointed out in his discussion of "Judiths" in Victorian Conventions, "are
signalled primarily by Old Testament and classical allusions, while good women are
compared to medieval personages" - Griselda, for example (37). 16 Though Reed does not
mention The French Revolution, relevant here is his discussion of Victorian Judiths who, in
behavior if not usually in name, include Edith Dombey, Estella in Great Expectations, Clara
Van Siever in Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset, Miriam in Hawthorne's The Marble
Fawn, and Ida in Tennyson's The Princess. Judiths, the opposites of Griseldas, Reed
characterizes as of "abrupt masculinity." They are childless, and their pride and arrogance
doom them to "eventual misery"; "violating her true womanhood . . . may provide a woman
82
wit
for
the
By
of
amb
Dem
her
of w
tha
his
pos
The
for
Ath
of g
Sim
Dem
Ver
sab
do
Sch
in i
wh
Rev
VI
Ush
pro
of t
to
rea
Wh
wit
In t
run
mar
dru
mae
By
the
to e
of a
fact
83
return three sacks

"though famishing,
because, whatever h
of females. They clu
controls maenadic
desirable.But it is
The Insurrection o
envisions the past
present. As he comp
allots Usher Maillar
Orpheus. To give hi
past; to give it res
Walter's eleventh-
Walter's "Crusaders
are females. He is in
but "Pragmatical O
history, Maillard mu
"actions," that is, h
Carlyle also comp
civilization. This c
maenads, unheeding
Orpheus that he is,
"sheepskin drum," h
music, which is harm
The true epic poet a
that he can only m
even historian Carl
mythic. His fame,
Rumor in Homeric
significance will not
Though Carlyle b
words as insistently
his words, as insist
the still higher Orp
the divine Music of
to the music of Orp
of mankind, includ
everyone is a poten
others aware of thei
was no city ever bui
"no work that man
produces rhythm b
approaches but doe
VII
84
Bef
Hen
and
Hen
(ap
be.
Th
man
Soo
Wit
tha
sym
"pe
wo
lon
Fro
sub
Eve
the
for
the
and
Up
dru
fro
"in
wis
dish
view
mae
cha
Wh
Th
An
(1:3
Par
teac
has
rea
con
Art
art
The
ren
inc
transcendent World
is astonishing. It is a
at it whoso is of sh
It is human; it is a
in "The Insurrectio
chaotically feminiz
over negative. How
some level that it
collectively the cha
more than a Diony
human present. It r
no new world orde
Univer
Notes
*See also Lorenz's recent The Essence of Chaos.

2"Connoisseur of Chaos" begins:
"A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one."
By subsequently speaking of "the immense disorder of truths," Stevens's poem implies that chaos is one
of the basic laws of existence ( The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play , 166-68).
3See my "Jane Jacobs of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Toronto, Canada: Urban Survivor and Soc
Organicist," especially 327, 331. In Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce
Politics (1992) Jacobs alludes specifically to recent work on chaos theory (19-20), but an understanding of chao
has all along been implicit in her writings.
4Program notes to Charles Ives, Universe Symphony / Orchestral Set No. 2 / The Unanswered Question ,
recorded in 1994 by the Cincinnati Philharmonic Orchestra, Gerhard Samuel, conductor (CD: Centaur [CRC 220
5So - speaking of John Dewey - Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual Versus the City , 172.
'The passage is in quotation marks. Carlyle may be quoting an unidentified author.
7"At the root of Voltaire's best gifts," Carlyle observes in "Voltaire" (1829), lies "this very power of Orde
of rapid, perspicuous Arrangement" ( Works 26:447). In Voltaire's "remarkable Chaos," however, Carlyle does n
discern a "habitable Solar or Stellar System" (462). "In "Characteristics" (1831) Carlyle moves from the individu
to society: within our collective "Chaos of Being" consciousness needs both to control and energize the vital fo
presiding within the unconscious.
"Intimately tied to the chaos-cosmos conflict in Carlyle is his conception of the daimonic, derived chiefl
from the Greeks and Goethe. For Goethe, the daimonic, in the words of E. M. Butler, was a "random, incalculab
perverse and inscrutable element in life" (214).
9Carlyle after The French Revolution continued to seek historical subjects that allowed him to depict the
conflict between chaos and order. In Past and Present and Latter-Day Pamphlets , both written to deal wit
potentially revolutionary situations in England, he attempts to reestablish cosmos. Cromwell and Frederick glor
the realization of order in earlier societies: amidst the chaos swirling around Cromwell and Frederick, the idea
cosmos provides a focal point, one that implies future order. The conflict between chaos and cosmos continued
86
to r
imag
of C
Carl
wor
com
All
Tenn
of c
and
in it
xoTh
70. S
"Fra
12In
Dece
13F
Exte
"Hay
15 T
French sources.
l6In the Anglo-Saxon "Judith," however, the heroine is a most happy and rewarded heroine.
"Elisabeth Roudinesco valuably corrects both Carlyle and Schama by pointing out that Théroigne "was not
at the head of the women of the people. She did not march with the crowd, and she did not follow the convoy
of those who returned to Paris" (27). Subsequently, Théroigne "became the butt of the royalist press. She was
accused of every infamy, treated as if she were a whore, and her name was linked with any number of different
imaginary lovers. . . . Théroigne was thus represented as a sensual, libertine amazon, bloodthirsty and murderous
and with a taste for the low life" (28-29). This royalist commentary on Théroigne obviously influenced Carlyle's
depiction.
18In reality Maillard, as Carlyle recognizes here and elsewhere (3:31), was (unlike Théroigne) something of
a scapegrace. See J. H. Rose's note (l:299n).
19Lattimore trans. Virgil also introduced this simile early in the Aeneid.
20Cariyle, as Milton before him, offers Orpheus as an avatar of Christ: "Our highest Orpheus walked in Judaea,
eighteen-hundred years ago" ( Sartor 263).
Works Cited
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Ed. Ernest Samuels. 1918. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.
Bold, Alan. The Sensual Scot. Edinburgh, Scot.: Harris, 1982.
Butler, E.M. Byron and Goethe. London: Bowes and Bowes, 1956.
Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution. Ed. John H. Rose. 3 vols. London: Bell, 1902.
et al. 24 vols. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1970- .
87
Clubbe, John. "Jane Jac

University of Toronto
Emerson, Ralph W. The
Froude, James A. Froud
Gleick, James. Chaos: M
Graham, Peter W. "Et in Arcadia Nos." Nineteenth-Century Conte

Harrold, Charles F. Carlyle and German Thought: 1819-1834. N
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. New York: Bant
Hayles, N. Katherine, ed. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in L
P, 1990.
J. Scholnick. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1992. 229-50.

Jacobs, Jane. Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundat
Random, 1992.
Lefebvre, Georges. The French Revolution from Its Origins to 1 793 •
Lorenz, Edward N. The Essence of Chaos. Seattle, WA: U of Washingto
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Par
Newman, Francis. In Thomas Carlyle: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Jules
1971.
Pope, Alexander. An Essay on Man. The Poems of Alexander Pope. E

Purkis, John. The World of the English Romantic Poets. London: Hein
Reed, John R. Victorian Conventions. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1975.
Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Madness and Revolution: The Lives and Legends
Thorn. London: Verso, 1992.
Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New
Spear, Jeffrey L. "Filaments, Females, Families and Social Fabric: C
Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives. Ed
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1985. 69-84.
Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and
1972.
Tennyson, G. B. Sartor Called Resartus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,

Tillotson, Geoffrey. A View of Victorian Literature. Oxford, Eng.: Cl
Tyndall, John. New Fragments. New York: Appleton, 1899.
White, Morton and Lucia. The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas
York: New American Library, 1964.
Young, Louise M. Thomas Carlyle and the Art of History. Philadelphia
88
Racialism and the Politics of Emancipation in Carlyle's "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger
Question"
Author(s): Jude V. Nixon
89-108
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:48 UTC
REFERENCES
R
E
"O
sustained debates by Victorians over the "Negro Question" provided the nineteenth
In sustainedcentury
centurya "well-defined
Colour, a "well-defined
stereotype ofdebates
blacks.Class and bytoVictorians
" Attempts construct athe"contrast
stereotype
of blackVictorians over of , blacks." Douglas the "Negro Attempts Lorimer Question" to asserts construct provided that a "contrast the the spirited nineteenth of black and
and white" meant to show that "Africans and their New World descendants," most of them
illiterate, newly-emancipated slaves, were at the "opposite ends of the racial spectrum from
the pale-skinned natives of the British Isles." The Victorians, Lorimer contends, saw the
Negro as "the photographic negative of the Anglo-Saxon," an image created to provide a
"clearer perception of their own supposed racial uniqueness from the inverted image of the
black man" (11). Victorians such as Emily Brontë and George Eliot illustrate the degree to
which Africanization and an accompanying myth of pedigree affected characters who do not
possess an Anglo-Saxon shade of whiteness. Ironically, this includes whites whose
pigmentation identifies them as something conspicuously other. When Catherine Earnshaw
returned to the Heights from her first visit to the Lintons, the civilized English inmates of
Thrushcross Grange, her first observation was how comparatively black Heathcliff was, a
physical difference she had not previously entertained, and one she now associates with
behavioral, and quite likely moral, abnormalities: "'Why, how very black and cross you look!
and how - how funny and grim! But that's because I'm used to Edgar and Isabella Linton.
. . If you wash your face and brush your hair, it will be all right. But you are so dirty!"' Fearing
contamination from his now diseased ("black") body, Catherine "gazed concernedly at the
dusky fingers she held in her own, and also at her dress, which she feared had gained no
embellishments from its contact with his" (Brontë 67).
In a similar light, George Eliot's earthy Maggie Tulliver, with her "brown skin," black
and excessively thick hair ("makes her look like a mulatter"), standing alongside blond Lucy
Dean, was "like the contrast between a rough, dark, overgrown puppy and a white kitten."
Maggie's complexion consigns her to an inferior status within the racial hierarchy of the
nineteenth century. A concerned Aunt Pullet mistakenly assumes that educating Maggie will
diminish her sootiness. However, reading more correctly the politics of race, she remarks:
"'I doubt it'll stand in her way i' life to be so brown.'" So infuriated was Maggie with a society
that privileges things white and demonizes things black that, vowing to wage war against
both the ideology and culture of racism, she attacks what she believes to be the agent of
institutionalized racism - literary texts. Maggie renounces reading novels such as Scott's, in
which "the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness." She assumes personal
89
responsibility for
measure of revenge
bookish, curious, a
Corinne and failin
triumphant dark w
But as intriguingly
nineteenth-centur
unambiguously m
contrast, whether i
or Kitty Kirkpatri
racialist discourse
of his moral vision
the pursuit of what
with what keen obs
agenda: abolition, em
any genuine symp
justice. Thus, his "la
remain dubious ( W
embodies "the exc
sympathies of man
Carlyle's "aesthetic
exploring the auth
colonial territories"
Carlyle's invectiv
influenced by the r
as the Times and F
in the English Parli
essays, his racialis
on the Nigger Que
and in "Shooting N
Both essays candid
sanctity of work, t
production of con
demanding improve
War, a campaign o
In "Occasional Dis
reprinted as a sepa
in Carlyle's otherwi
to an unchanging a
headed by a feudal
within one person.6
and especially the li
at its zenith, assum
to the construction
Remove them or De
Or to put it the wa
90
is t
wh
alw
a d
fro
"Ch
unc
and
Col
tha
Car
con
as
"sc
bet
133
the
fel
. .
acc
eco
as
qui
lab
We
slav
mo
"fo
opp
lar
"Occasional Discourse" is a most uneven work. Fashioned after Sartor Resartus -
enigmatic, assertive, humorous, and bombastic - the essay opens with a preface query
the mysterious biography of its presumed author, an "Absconded Reporter" posturing as o
of Carlyle's countless authorial masks. Equally mysterious is the history of the delivery, a
undated address to a contrived audience at Exeter Hall, a familiar assembly for advoca
of emancipationist and other philanthropic causes.9 The essay derives from Dr. Ph
M'Quirk, although the preface, undoubtedly Carlyle's, reads as though it is the language of
Eraser's editor. Delivered not by the absconded Dr. M'Quirk, the essay was being paw
off to the magazine by M'Quirk's landlady, hoping to recover rental debts incurred by her
delinquent boarder. The essay arrives with "no speaker named, no time or place assign
no commentary of any sort given." Without accepting responsibility for the essay's "stran
doctrines and notions shadowed forth in it," more particularly its "peculiar views of the Rig
of Negroes," Fraser's accepted the essay at a "cheap market-rate." It does so aware of
fact that although the view it expresses is a minority one, "the Colonial and Negro Questio
is still alive, and likely to grow livelier for some time." Colonial expansion and bla
suppression, Carlyle admits, will continue to occupy a central place within the cultural and
91
political matrix of t
"Occasional Discou
presumed rights so
to establish those r
faith attempt at del
become the right o
freedom, to contro
quantity of produc
work God intends f
such labor; to increa
to satisfy white dem
only from indolence
of "What constitute
Seen from this per
autonomous parties
rather, it is one in
component of the
Carlyle's distrust o
relationship with b
to be an experimen
citizenship, a sense o
the State's dictates.
waste soil"; "the Stat
sugar from these Isl
as will bring these r
In effect, Carlyle
dispenses with a lin
which requires the j
In other words, Ca
relationships. How
ownership of hirelin
to debate the slave
accorded the rights
disposed of accordin
"our Twenty millio
then, Carlyle consi
ciple," "Christian Ph
because these organ
mechanically drive
material production
contingent the orga
Carlyle privileges th
nexus in a contractu
"if life last longer,
by hardship of any
92
ma
Car
"in
ma
slav
tha
the
rat
is o
You
but
are
the
is a
mo
Tha
not
not
"m
10:2
and
poi
ser
the
Bla
dem
har
inc
Rat
far
gov
and
for
is w
at
pen
onl
aid
for
gro
a la
a v
aga
Car
5>3
articulate their conc

toiling class which
in Chartism , how v
Discourse": "a genuin
classes intrinsically
wild inarticulate sou
unable to speak wha
what are the mights
remarks is the follo
barren lies the new
the sun; which as y
innumerable weeds
same crude subsoil i
influences, fruit th
Carlyle seems unable
"benevolent" patriar
(the "gods" in "Occas
chancery itself' (th
Parliament" [Work
endowed to admini
legitimate "propriet
"Occasional Discou
mony of whites ov
temporary better or
the best hitherto c
with" (Works 29:374
and entertaining a p
of Africa (golddigge
and as ordained as th
entertains black g
slave and man of le
contributed not a lit
In some of your lett

of the treachery and
from whom they lea
harmless people - bu
succeeding ones) to s
ignorant Natives soo
soon imbibed - upon
your country's [Eng
Indies - and even on
indeed of all Christ
Sancho does not exon

heightened depravit
too hasty in condem
94
mad
Bu
int
W.
mig
mo
Em
rac
Car
cou
tha
the
"Oc
chi
dem
mat
des
eff
Iris
typ
was
hit
not
int
ind
ani
vin
dis
he
nev
Mo
of
of
tou
to h
bas
eve
des
spe
beli
eve
of
... a
rise
and foul unwholesome desert thereby. . . . Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse,
95
indignation, Despair
day-worker, of eve as
all these are stilled, a
a man. The blessed g
is burnt up, and of so
196)
However rewarding the benefits, Carlyle's aggrandizement of agrarian labor ignores the
existing reality of the dehumanized condition of such labor and the scourge of serfdom of
a rural labor force cowed by poverty.16
Still, "Occasional Discourse" manifests serious moral and ethical problems: it evinces
no genuine understanding of or appreciation for disenfranchised blacks or the issues
surrounding black suffrage; it admits greater concern for the emancipation of indolence than
the emancipation of a people, confirming Carlyle's ethical dependence on the preliminary
act of self-obliteration; it mocks the ignominy of slavery; it devalues the human and assigns
inestimable value to consumer goods and raw material, forging, it seems, an inseparable
union between moral and material well-being; it hierarchicizes consumer goods equally and
shamelessly as it does race; it celebrates racial hegemony, romanticizes and applauds
imperialism; and it valorizes European conquest and decimation of indigenous peoples.
Other troubling moral questions remain. While a certain measure of happiness and self-
actualization might be found even in the meanest production, how is coerced labor
"virtuous," either for the captains of industry who compel it or for the dumb toiling class that
shoulders it? How can genuine happiness - readily dismissed by Carlyle for an ethic of
suffering - be enjoyed by an enslaved people? How is the biblical injunction that one who
refuses to work deserves not to eat, which Carlyle accepts, the same as compelling blacks
to work according to the dictates and solely for the benefit of whites? And how can working
in accord with one's faculty be decided exclusive of the worker? But perhaps most morally
disconcerting, more so because Carlyle makes great pretense to things spiritual and
humanistic, is the crass materialism on which "Occasional Discourse" is founded, the very
materialism Carlyle vehemently disavows, and the blatant imperialism it perpetrates. Edward
Said puts it best:
Carlyle speaks a language . . . anchored in unshakable certainties about the essence

of races, peoples, cultures, all of which need little elucidation because they are familiar
to his audience. He speaks a lingua franca for metropolitan Britain: global,
comprehensive, and with so vast a social authority as to be accessible to anyone
speaking to and about the nation.
Carlyle's " lingua franca ," which maligns "barbarous vulturous Choctaws" and privileges
"noble European Nineteenth-Century Men" ( Past and Present ), locates England, as Said
points out, "at the focal point of a world also presided over by its power, illuminated by its
ideas and culture, kept productive by the attitudes of its moral teachers, artists, legislators"
(310).
Perhaps the keenest insights into Carlyle's mind and writings come from William E.
Forster, who first met Carlyle in 1845, and in whose Yorkshire home the Carlyles spent three
restful weeks in the summer of 1847. Forster was a Quaker, political activist, Under-Secretary
for the Colonies, and the one chiefly responsible for nineteenth-century elementary
educational reforms and for spearheading Parliamentary debates on emancipation for slaves
96
and
a "r
of
sees
In
con
of
sym
(Oc
slav
arg
how
rel
pro
to
is s
the
eith
ties
to
of
Tim
to
Car
ow
Dis
ph
Qu
of
31
of
tion
tha
wic
a h
do
"be
wit
sco
mo
Fat
Jo
tyr
we
phi
Aw
97
Approximately twen
with paint" subsist
children, from wh
Ecclefechan rejoiced
a maker of books.'" W
of blacks is not that
opportunity, blacks
German prototype,
to become sages, wh
lack that vital "Saxo
Haddington gentry
ance, a bigotry Lo
individual" (17).22 Th
was waking from a
Learning that Carly
time. However, the
who new agreed to a
of the foul mood h
concluded that he
unrecognized geniu
Whittier sees grea
it aimed only at the
pists, whose efforts
his tirade might hav
revere humanity, t
writer of one article
exult to find himsel
by a writer of Euro
has given every refi
thought he saw in C
the poor and the wr
is woefully undone
eulogist of slavery,"
of the moral sentim
Carlyle's friends a
racialist attitude and
evolving argument f
sought to disassociat
calls the harshness
works") and feels,
one-eyed. His very l
or at any rate unbor
or makes it so migh
territory of some
idealist,
a degenera
believes that it is "t
98
the
mo
a r
wie
A l
Rob
fir
app
wit
eno
rel
mo
fall
Car
an
25
wis
my
app
he
bet
dec
ind
Car
Rob
he
Rob
to
fri
suc
Herculean successes.
Harriet Martineau, a zealous advocate for abolition and emancipation, was un

standably critical of the narrowness of Carlyle's moral vision.26 As one who worked ha
publicize Sartor Resartus and to arrange a series of lectures for Carlyle, Martineau reca
his "partial sympathy" and the "heart-warming" nature of his early writings - the biog
cal Carlyle and the Carlyle of Sartor Resartus especially. But she could not conceive of
being offered a professorship in moral philosophy at Glasgow:
What a funny idea is that of Carlyle being Moral Philosophy Professor, - a business
which requires logic so especially! What fatal rhapsodies would he have given instead.
... It seems, however, as if we must get a seraph down to undertake our Moral
Philosophy, - such a state as it is in between the old intentions, and the middle-time
expediency, and the still cloudy advent of new or (renovated) principles of a higher
order. I trust some genius is in the quarry of this or the next century, destined [then]
to present some ideal of Morals which we may recognize, tho' at present merely waiting
for it: but Carlyle is not that one, most assuredly. {Letters to Fanny Wedgewood 20)
The author of Critic

venerated. Though m
Martineau finds, is "
conceit, connected w
of beauty" in Carlyle
increase of "self-will and conceit."27
Charles Darwin provided a similar assessment. He was introduced to Carlyle over tea
on Sunday, 25 November 1838, by his older brother Erasmus, a close friend of the Carlyles,
especially Jane Welsh. Like Martineau, Charles Darwin took to Carlyle's personality ("One
must always like Thomas, & I felt particularly well towards him"), thought him "the most
worth listening to, of any man I know," chiefly because of how differently from other
Englishmen his mind worked, and recommended his Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. He
complained, however, of being "nauseated with his mysticism, his intentional obscurity &
affectation" ( Correspondence 129-155, 236). But Darwin was hostile to Carlyle's position on
race. Carlyle had avoided the company of the the few blacks at Edinburgh, the residents as
well as those at the university.28 Darwin, on the other hand, recalled with gratitude and
affection the "lessons for payment" in taxidermy he had received from an Edinburgh negro
who had traveled through South America with Charles Waterton, the eccentric English
pioneer of traveling naturalists. Much like Waterton, Darwin forged communal relationships
with blacks: "I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man"
C Autobiography 51). Thus, he was understandably distempered by Carlyle's racialist
assumptions, and especially bothered by the notion that a modern scientific mind, which
Kingsley claimed Carlyle possessed, could believe, retain, and worse yet propound
scientifically unfounded assumptions regarding race:
his views about slavery were revolting. In his eyes might was right. His mind seemed
to me a very narrow one; even if all branches of science, which he despised, are
excluded. It is astonishing to me that Kingsley should have spoken of him as a man
well fitted to advance science. ( Autobiography 1 1 3)29
Carlyle and Lyell trafficked in what might best be called racially ideological cross-
pollination. Having read Carlyle's early views on blacks, in Chartism for example, Lyell saw
blacks in American plantation societies precisely the way Carlyle had described them. His
return to England confirmed Carlyle's speculations. In effect, Carlyle's racialism shaped
Lyell's vision, and Lyell's racialist observations, in turn, corroborated the racialist ideology
that informed them. Lyell brought back to England much misinformation about the treatment
of American slaves. But as uninformed as he was about the racial topography of America
and the real living conditions on the plantation society of the American South, Lyell, from
the point of view of many English, was the harbinger of precious information.30 Victorians,
it must be kept in mind, formed their knowledge of foreign peoples almost exclusively from
written accounts, many of which were propaganda skewed to shape the ideology of British
readers. From these accounts, Lorimer observes, "more insular Englishmen absorbed the
racial attitudes of their countrymen overseas, but did little to reshape those impressions
to fit their own preconceptions and outlook." This recalls Trinculo's characterization of
native people, or the Miranda declaration that the colonized Caliban is from a "vile race."
Victorians, says Lorimer, "perceived the physical characteristics [and one might add all other
100
cha
(13
up
rep
("T
ind
cul
Wh
no
a p
lear
car
it)
cau
ins
of
to
the
months would assert in "Occasional Discourse." "The domestic and farm slaves whom we
saw," Lyell reported, "were a cheerful, often merry and lighthearted set; childlike, conce
boastful, but not a suffering class, when compared with what may be witnessed in Europ
and at home. They are uneducated, and not in the way of being improved or raised in sta
I had them often with me for days, and neither saw nor heard of ill-treatment."
Part of the intention behind such a guided tour involved developing sympathy
the plight of white plantation owners burdened by the ownership of slaves. Thus, "the ev
to the whites are innumerable. If poor, there is no place for them; if rich, they have to su
to the indolence and inefficiency of their slaves, to doctor them when ill, support them w
bedridden, guard against their being excited by Abolitionists, &c. Their children
corrupted by them, being made vain by flattery, spoilt by power." Lyell assumes a positi
hardly sympathetic to black suffrage: "When with the planters, seeing their kindness to
slaves, and feeling that had I inherited their estates, I should not well know what to
could not but feel that a London emancipation meeting, or a list of advertisement
Dickens, raked out of newspaper from all parts, would irritate and indispose me to e
myself in forwarding the cause of emancipation." Although Lyell's position underwent sl
modification five years later during his second tour of America (now endorsing educ
for slaves, humane treatment, and slave civility), he, like Carlyle, supported the South (c
the North "the fanatical party"), subscribed to the myth that the "worst evils of the sys
lasted as long as they did because of Northern intervention, an explanation of Sout
recalcitrance hardly tenable, and remained convinced that "people are too apt to forget th
very low platform of civilization from which the African starts" {Life, Letters, and Jou
62-69, 99-100).
Carlyle's racialist discourse and feelings about blacks, it seems to me, should
addition be read within an even broader context - Carlyle the man. His discourse mu
understood as a crude concoction of sincerity, ignorance, contradiction, semi-misanthrop
exaggeration, and conceit, all blended with a Dickensian eye toward caricature. Invo
101
in expunging "Man
Campbell as having
possessed a vulgar fa
filth and famine";
incurvated persona
. . does not tread bu
illustrating the kind
(Collected Letters 3:8
sweetness.
One senses in Carlyle a decided recklessness of speech and a cultiv

indifference to the feelings of others and to the opinions they might have
also immune to their criticism, except for when he assumes, with some brav
stance of the prophet alienated from his people, and for those brief m
expresses a tinge of anxiety about the damage "Occasional Discourse" might i
inflict on him. Wordsworth, Crabb Robinson tells us, cared little for Carlyl
French Revolution , but even less for his " inhumanity . . . there is a want o
with mankind." Robinson himself sees Carlyle racialism tied to his "exc
prides himself on exciting wonder, and does not care for exciting disgust." I
it" (566, 695). Carlyle admits that one of the qualities he valued in his father
placid indifference to the clamours or the murmurs of Public Opinion. For t
those that had no right or power to judge him, he seemed simply to car
satisfying himself "with altogether disregarding them" (Reminiscences 4
fondest affection for those to whom he felt close; but those for whom he had
care he held in great derision. Gavan Duffy's assessment of the causat
between Carlyle's provincial bigotry and knowledge about Irish affairs migh
his personal peculiarities and racial prejudice:
We had a long talk about Ireland, of which he has wrong notions, but not
feelings. ... He knows next to nothing, accurately or circumstantially, of Irish
He has prejudices which are plainly of Scotch origin, but he intends and desi
right, and when he understand the case, where could such an advocate
before England and the world!31
Carlyle fails to apply the very ethic he prescribes:
all battle is misunderstanding; did the parties know one another, the bat
cease. No man at bottom means injustice; it is always for some obscure distort
of a right that he contends; an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated,
wonderfulest way, by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more d
by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognizable. (Works
23)
In this passage, Carlyle, though failing to put this belief into practice, speaks much like
Goethe who situates the mark of literary greatness in a genuine ability to overlook individual
peculiarities in favor of the general characteristics of humanity.
Carlyle's numerous biographical acts, like those of so many Victorians, Pater's in
particular, were aimed obliquely at writing his own life, an enterprise he readily admitted
in a 26 September 1866 diary entry: "Writing, languidly, something which I call 'Reminis-
102
cen
Per
goo
and
{Re
bio
ma
dis
lie
of
( W
bio
"w
his
wo
Th
asso
cri
leg
and
Bio
wr
be
if o
has
so f
tha
rea
of
stat
con
selv
bal
us" {Works 3:27).
Ultimately, then, Carlyle saw life as an on-going contradiction. "To paint man's life,"
he continues in his essay on Scott, "is to represent these things," for such censure, such
disapprobation, "better," in fact, "than a good many praises," add color to an otherwise
colorless existence, a "beatified-ghost condition." Carlyle's wish, however, is that in this
universal struggle of giving and receiving offense, of "being found guilty of having said this
and that," he emerges from such "bonfires" without discernible scars, with only his beard
slightly "singed" {Works 29:29-31). However, Carlyle's strident racialist stance, not yielding
any ideological and sympathetic space to the humanistic correctives of friends, acquaintan-
ces, and admirers, did more than singe his beard; whether that stance has permanently
disfigured his face is still to be decided.
Wayne State University
103
Notes
'Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 12, 53, 112, 292. There is much in this novel to suggest that Eliot is attemptin
to present Maggie, that "small mistake of nature," as a victim of cultural and racial hegemony. Maggie's behav
and Africanized appearance refuse to conform to traditionally female and white norms; she is, as a result, alm
universally demonized in the novel. Unable to finish Madame de Staël's Corinne, Maggie insists not on raci
dominance but on racial balance, the creation of space for participants of all races and color: "'As soon as I cam
to the blond-haired young lady reading in the park, I shut it up, determined to read no further. I foresaw that that
light-complexioned girl [like a Lucy] would win away all the love from Corinne and make her miserable. I
determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness. I should begin
to have a prejudice against them. If you could give me some story, now, where the dark woman triumphs, it wo
restore the balance.'" Her wish is to avenge "'all the dark unhappy ones.'" Phillip suggests: "'Well, perhaps you w
avenge the dark women in your own person and carry away all the love from your cousin Lucy.'" To redress t
wrongs to Corinne and all other "dark unhappy" women, Maggie elopes with Stephen Guest, betrothed to h
blonde and fair cousin, Lucy. "But it isn't for that [the need for admiration] that I'm jealous for the dark woma
not because I'm dark myself. It's because I always care most about the unhappy people" (292-93). Perhaps n
coincidentally, Maggie is earlier reading Scott's novels where Scottish nationalism prevails and where, typically
the blond woman is the heroine. For more on this, see Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels 71.
2Leigh Hunt, a regular evening guest of the Carlyles, was of part-Negro ancestry. His family has a long histor
in Barbados. Kitty Kirkpatrick, whose shape, hair, and eyes were objects of Carlyle's infatuation, had more th
a trace of Indian blood.
^The three useful studies of Carlyle's racialism are Ian Campbell's "Carlyle and the Negro Question Again"
(1971), Gillian Workman's "Thomas Carlyle and the Governor Eyre Controversy" (1974), and T. Peter Park's
"Thomas Carlyle and the Jews" (1990). Despite their salient parts, the essays by Campbell and Workman, perhaps
reflecting their time, seem most committed to rehabilitating Carlyle's racialist and elitist character by situating it
within the larger context of the condition of England question and duty. Park's is most satisfying, perhaps because
his is not an apology for Carlyle. He is quite content to let Carlyle be Carlyle, as he in fact would have liked: "Carlyle
was notoriously a man of many, strong, and articulate ethnic, racial, and religious prejudices." Park, for instance,
finds Carlyle's attitude to Jews "very mixed," combining a "reverence for the Biblical Hebrews" (the prophetic bard,
like a Jeremiah), an antipathy to "stereotyped modern Jews or mythicized medieval Jewish money-lenders"
(perhaps like a Baron Rothschild), and regards for "individual Jews [like a Rahel Levin] whose personal qualities
struck him favourably" (1, 15). Park is most successful at problematizing racialism: that, indeed, it is often not shaped
by a single incident, but is, instead, a crude concoction of seemingly disassociated events, whose commonalties
include conceit, powerlessness, fear, and a poor self-image.
4For more on the influence of Fraser's in shaping Carlyle's racialist discourse, see Eileen Best's unpublished
dissertation, Carlyle's Late Racism: Its Religious, Cultural and Political Determinants. Reading over some 1834 "odd
articles" in Fraser's at the Athenaeum, Henry Crabb Robinson was struck by their "crazy" substance (440).
5One of the reasons Carlyle, a supporter of the South, was so strident in his hatred for blacks and averse
to abolitionists was that he saw the issue of slavery central to the war, and did not believe that such a cause was
sufficiently just . He also saw the abolitionist movement exacerbating the conflict. The efforts of revisionist historians
of the 1940s have not entirely succeeded in relegating slavery to the periphery of the war. Historians still maintain
that slavery and the future state of blacks in society were of causative importance. Frederick Douglass militantly
accepted that causal relationship, even extending it worldwide: "That this war is to abolish Slavery I have no manner
of doubt"; the "blow we strike is not merely to free a country or continent - but the whole world from Slavery -
for when Slavery fails here - it will fall everywhere. We have no business to moum over our mission. We are writing
the statues of eternal justice and liberty in the blood of the worst tyrants as a warning to all after-comers. . . . The
Abolition of Slavery is the comprehensive and logical object of the war, for it includes everything else which the
struggle involves" (Foner 3:333, 390). Even the noted Civil War historian, James Ford Rhodes, saw slavery as the
cause of the war, though he withheld singular blame from either the North or the South. On the politics of
emancipation, see Beveridge's biography of Lincoln; for scurrilous attacks on the abolitionists, see Claude Bowers,
Beveridge and the Progressive Era (562, 570-79). In one letter, Beveridge wrote: "What slavery actually was - the
essence or even the externals of it - has nothing whatever to do with my plan." Beveridge rejected the authenticity
of the claims in Uncle Tom 's Cabin : "I was born when the Civil War was reaching its red climax; and my father and
brothers were all officers in the Union Army. From earliest infancy I was taught that 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and the
speeches of Wendell Phillips, Sumner, and others like them, were the real truth. As a result, I have somewhat to
this day the notion, which I find on examination to have been absurd and wickedly false, that Mrs. Stowe drew
a faithful picture of Southern society and conditions. . ." (574-75).
104
6Th
cent
pret
desc
7Bla
8Ge
of "
his
solit
mis
( Re
9Of
diss
Hall
catc
10P
of t
nFo
the
fibr
12R
earn
Law
whe
cond
was
shou
wor
13W
men
HEa
do a
mea
able
black West Indian discontents.
15John Stuart Mill's rebuttal to Carlyle, "The Negro Question," was published anonymously in the next issue
of Fraser's. Mill provides a persuasive argument for the evils inherent in mindless labor and the moral value of
leisure.
l6On this myth of agricultural ease, see George Eliot's portrayal of Stonyshire in Adam Bede, the American
Edwin Markham's "The Man with the Hoe," a poem based on Jean-Francois Millet's 1863 painting, Man Resting
on the Hoe. For contrasting representations, consistent with Carlyle's glorification of work, and in particular
Victorian work, see the sculptures of Hamo Thornycroft, especially his Mower and Sower ; which capture the feeling
of the physical rather than the spiritual exhaustion of agrarian labor. As a member of the school New Sculpture,
Thornycroft was intent on re-presenting the classical tradition with a new and natural energy in modeling and
blending naturalism with idealism and symbolism. Perhaps the most balanced representation of agrarian labor
comes from Frederick Walker, the nineteenth-century English landscape painter, whose The Plough and The
Harbour of Refuge capture jointly the energy, intensity, and exhaustion of agricultural labor.
17Almost without exception, emancipationist observers noted Carlyle's complicity with West Indian planters
and Southern plantation owners. "The cause of the South," writes one observer in an 8 August 1863 Spectator article,
"has found a more formidable as well as a more consistent champion in the person of a writer whose greatness
gives consequence even to his random words. 'T.C's' dealings with the 'Nigger Question' have not been fortunate"
("T. C." 2344).
18Douglas Lorimer points out that "in order to justify British control over various indigenous peoples, the
Victorians . . . developed the ideology of the civilizing mission and the white man's burden which at one blow
sanctified British imperialism and reduced the indigenous populations to perpetual subservience" (13).
105
19In an extensive discu

Douglass expressed appre
world was exhibiting "pr
(Foner 3:398).
20Many supporters of black suffrage were critical of the sentimental, self-righteous, and insincere abolitionist,
but distinguished them from abolitionists who held a balanced appreciation of black suffrage and the national
interest. So intense was his antipathy to abolitionists that Carlyle did not believe there was such a thing as a moderate
abolitionist. Like many supporters of the South in the War, he saw abolitionists as creating a perception of self-
righteousness and moral absolutism. As such, they were connected to a kind of religious evangelicalism. They were
thus despised and thought to be extremists and fanatics. The "vital question concerning the abolitionists," according
to David Potter, "is not whether they were 'fanatics,' but first whether they were humanitarians in a broad sense -
that is whether the dynamic of their antislavery was an outgoing concern for the welfare of others or a neurotic
impulse to find outlets for psychological problems of their own" (108). Douglass appealed for the active
involvement of blacks in the cause of abolition. However, while he strongly supported the abolitionist movement,
he remained ambivalent about militant or non-aggressive abolitionism. He seems to maintain that either might be
effective, given the particular situation (See Foner 1:314-20; 2:22, 437-39, 487-88; 4:166-69).
21For a brief treatment of the way race plays out in literary creativity, see Appiah 282-87.
22Carlyle's hierarchization of race approximates his view of the place of women in the social chart. Six months
before his marriage to Jane Welsh, Carlyle announced his position on male dominance, a position as divinely
ordained and as intractable as white dominance of blacks. Missing is Carlyle's characteristic humor, more so because
the passage admits his inability at sexual performance and logically, then, his pronouncements against phallus
worship: " The Man should bear rule in the house and not the Woman. This is an eternal axiom, the Law of Nature
hlerself wlhich no mortal departs from unpunished. I have meditated on this malny long] years, and every day it
grows plainer to me: I must not and cannot live in a house of which I am not head las he cannot live in a world
without white hegemony]. I should be miserable myself, and make all about me miserable. Think not, Darling, that
this comes of imperious temper; that I shall be a harsh and tyrannical husband to thee. God forbid!" Rather, Carlyle
will be a benevolent dictator, equipped with a "benevolent whip" the same whip, presumably, held ready for
indolent Blacks. The whip ironically objectifies Carlyle's feelings of disempowerment. "It is the nature of a woman
... to cling to the man for support and direction, to comply with his humours, and feel pleasure in doing so, simply
because they are his; to reverence while she loves him, to conquer him not by her force but her weakness, and
perhaps . . . after all to command him by obeying him" (Collected Letters 4:69). While Carlyle hated being dependent,
he recognized no moral inconsistency in making others dependent, because he presumed that it is divinely ordained
that some should be masters and some slaves.
23 Collected Letters 23:215. Jane, on the contrary, was dismissive of class distinction. Her close frien
Geraldine Jewsbury, recalls the academic assistance she welcomed from a poor schoolboy: "he was quite a p
boy, whilst Jeannie was one of the gentry of the place." Typical of Jane Welsh, "she felt no difficulty, and they we
great friends" (Reminiscences 37). One wonders if in providing this anecdote for the Reminiscences Geraldine w
purposely noting a striking corollary to Jane's friendship with Carlyle. While Carlyle extolled the aristocracy as "the
best of English Classes," Jane, on the contrary, preferred "individual specimens" (80).
24The kind of malignant influence Whittier warns of is evident in a May 1866 Blackwood's article, entitle
"The Negro and the Negrophilists," an essay that would have been more appropriately called "The Negro and th
Negrophobes." Written, it seems, by an Englishman transplanted into the Confederate cause, this essay clearly
shows traces of both the diction and ideological influence of "Occasional Discourse." In this early account
rendering blacks, conspicuous by their very color, invisible, the essay renders blacks unworthy of the spillage
white blood, advocates "paternal despotism" of whites over blacks, invokes Carlyle's "Mumbo Jumbo" and "nigge
terminologies, compares blacks to horses, assigns only a subservient role to blacks, renews charges of bla
indolence and cultivation of the singular pumpkin, prescribes the extermination of blacks who refuse to work, a
insists on a God-given and natural right of whites to dominate disempowered blacks. In spite of these attacks,
is hard to judge the essay's real sympathies, given the chronicling in the last four pages of a wide variety of unjustifie
white hostilities to blacks.
25I am grateful to Mark Cumming for directing me to the Crabb Robinson connection.
26Carlyle describes Martineau as someone "full of Nigger fanaticisms" (Reminiscences 118).
21 Letters to Fanny Wedgewood 26-27. Carlyle did not think much of Harriet Martineau's ideas. He disliked
her domestic novel Deerhrook (1839), and when she took ill remarked that her "meagre didacticalities afflict me
no more"; equally, "her blithe friendly presence cheers me no more" (Collected Letters 11:228).
2HWe know, for example, that at the very time Carlyle was chronicling the racial, biological, and cultural
inferiority of blacks in the West Indies and in America, James McCune Smith, an African-American student, took
106
his
Carl
over
29In
or c
in S
a pa
man
reca
adm
foun
thou
{Rem
Life
alwa
dou
bene
mig
Eras
to C
30C
suff
31C
of C
Works Cited
Best, Eileen L. Carlyle's Late Racism: Its Religious, Cultural and Political Determinants. Unpublished dissertatio
University of Colorado, 1978.
Best, Geoffrey. Mid-Victorian Britain: 1851-1875. London: Weidenfeld, 1971.
Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Newly Revised Edition. Ed. David V. Erdm
Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1982.
Bowers, Claude G. Beveridge and the Progressive Era. Cambridge: Riverside, 1932.
Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 19
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Ed. Hilda Marsden and Ian Jack. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1976.
Campbell, Ian. "Carlyle and the Negro Question Again." Criticism 13 (1971): 279-90.
Carlyle, Thomas. Reminiscences. Ed. Charles Eliot Norton. London: J. M. Dent, 1972.
et al. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1970- .
Greenwood, FL: Penkevill,1986.
99. Rpt. New York: AMS P, 1969.

Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven, CT:
Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882. New
Cambridge UP, 1986.
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. Oxford: C
107
Foner, Philip S. The Life

Forster, W. E. "American
Himmelfarb, Gertrude.
Letters of Ignatius Sanch
Lorimer, Douglas. Colour
Leicester: Leicester UP,
Lyell, Charles. Life, Lett

MacKenzie, John M. "Th
Edwardian Times." Ma
Ed. J. A. Mangan and J
Martineau, Harriet. Harr
Stanford UP, 1983.
[Mill, John Stuart.] "The
"The Negro and the Neg
Park, T. Peter. "Carlyle
Potter, David M. The So
Reid, T. Wemyss. Life of
introduction by Valeri
Rich, Paul B. Race and E
Robinson, Henry Crabb.
Said, Edward W. Cultur
Seigel, Jules Paul, ed. T
"T.C. and the Slaves." T
Wedgewood, Julia. "A St
Welsh, Alexander. The H
Workman, Gillian. "Thom
Victorian Studies. 18.1 (
108
A Latter-day French Carlylean
Author(s): Ruth apRoberts
109-116
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:48 UTC
REFERENCES
A L
by R
in Carlyle. The author of The French Revolution of course commanded attention in

Carlyle's in his Carlyle.histime,
time,interest
as he stillasdidThein hethestill author inofdid1989.France
Bicentenary in of theof theTheFrench
The history is Bicentenary
reception reciprocated, French Revolution of to 1989. a degree, The of course history by the commanded of interest the French of attention the reception French in
of Carlyle through the nineteenth century has been well studied, in the work of Taine,
Michelet, and later Cazamian - to name only a few of many critics. G. Ross Roy at the
Centenary Carlyle Symposium at Mainz in 1981 gave a very useful overview of the
nineteenth-century phase. The French Revolution and Heroes had been translated early
(1865, 1867), but Sartorwas not translated until 1899 - perhaps because it must be the most
untranslatable. Thereupon, however, it became "part of the intellectual baggage of the book-
reading public" (Taylor 51, quoted Roy 320). 1 Sometimes the Dutch reinforced the interest
in Carlyle: Van Gogh refers to him frequently, and for him Heroes is a "beautiful little book"
(Carlyle 1993, lxiv). And then another Hollander, Meyer de Haan, apparently imported Sartor
into Pont-Aven, and Gauguin painted it in his well-known portrait of de Haan, where it
shares a table with Paradise Lost and some apples. Maeterlinck is said to have been interested
in Carlyle's ideas on the values of silence (Halls 46); and Debussy in his opera version of
Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande apparently plays on this silence. He says "je me suis servi
. . . d'un moyen qui me paraît assez rare, c'est-à-dire du silence (ne riez pas) comme un agent
d'expression . ." ["I have used a device which seems to me rather rare, that is, silence -
don't laugh - as an agent of expression."] (Lockspeiser 36). But Debussy was a devoted
Carlylean himself. For him, Carlyle is "a great novelist," or the "charming dyspeptique," and
Sartor Resartus is "that cruel breviary of humor." Sartor Resartus he especially loves, and
even imagines a missing chapter, which he will supply: "Des Rapports du Chapeau avec la
Musique" ["The Relationship of the Hat to Music"] (Debussy 127, 256, 259). So does Debussy
make Carlyle his own, with humor and style.
Another outstanding case is that of Marcel Proust. His devotion to Ruskin is better
known, but in a good new book, Robert Fraser studies Proust's close engagement with a
broad range of Victorians. Under rubrics borrowed from Ruskin's Seven Lamps he takes up
George Eliot, Hardy, Darwin, Wilde, Pater, and others, but the first of all is Carlyle, under
"The Lamp of Heroism." "Among Proust's closest early literary affinities was the writer who,
more than any other Victorian, had helped the French to interpret their own public past:
Thomas Carlyle" (26-27). He tells how the sole piece of art in Proust's room circa 1905 was
a photograph of Whistler's Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2 , the beautiful portrait of
Carlyle. In this stage Proust's facility in English, later so well developed, was limited, and
his text was Heroes and Hero-Worship in the French translation of 1888. The idea of the hero,
of vast human potential that might be realized in a variety of ways, seems to have been for
109
him a key idea that

"abounds with refe
Jean, "who for som
intellectual prostra
as if he had just rec
Proust attended som
Jean Santeuil does al
Dreyfus and braving
and Zola as "The Hero as Man of Letters" if there ever was one (38). Proust also rises to
Carlyle's praise of silence; he holds, he says in a letter, to "the maxim of Vigny: Only silence
is great, all the rest is weakness. . . . Let us return to the silence of which Vigny spoke and,
Carlyle so prodigiously celebrated" (42-43). Throughout, he "retained a strong affection" (31)
for Carlyle, so formative a presence in his early years.2 It is through Carlyle, one might say,
that Proust came to define himself.
But I want to direct attention especially to another French writer, who also defines
himself through - and in contradistinction against - Carlyle, a professor of German philoso-
phy and aesthetics at the Sorbonne, a Jew, a socialist, an activist, who published a book on
Carlyle in 1938. This is Victor Bäsch, born in Budapest in 1863, died in Lyon in 1944. Last
year, his biography was published in France - and we appreciate with Diogenes Teufelsdröckh
the value of biography, "the most universally profitable of all things," ever "humano-
anecdotical." His father was of a family of rabbis and doctors, a follower of Moses
Mendelssohn in his love of Judaism, and in his determination to reform it, to open it to
modernity. His father had two "cultes," said Victor Bäsch: that of Judaism to which he was
passionately attached though not practicing; and that of France, which he viewed as "the
saviour of the Jewish people, the liberator of all oppressed nations . . . , the liberator of
universal democracy." He studied in Vienna, and there took part in the revolutionary
activities of 1848; he worked as a journalist and was a friend of liberals, among them Ernest
Renan. The family moved to Paris when Victor was an infant. His feeling for France reminds
one of Heine's: "Freedom is the new religion . . . and Paris is the new Jerusalem" (. Reisebilder '
vol. 4, chap 11) - and that means freedom from anti-Semitism. Victor Bäsch shared with his
father this feeling for France and for Judaism and followed in his course of liberal thought
and political action.
At the Sorbonne, his studies focussed on German philosophy and aesthetics, with
doctoral theses on Kant and Schiller. After two years teaching at the University of Nancy,
he took up a position at the University of Rennes in Brittany in 1887, now a naturalized
French citizen, married and the father of a family, virtually assimilated; his children were not
given religious education, and his sons were not circumcised. There were sojourns at
Oxford, and his teaching included English as well as German. In his publications he helped
make German aesthetic theory current in France. Following Kant, he affirms the autonomy
of the aesthetic, "a place of harmony between the senses and the intelligence"; access to art
is by means of a " sympathie symboliquď or Einfühlung. Kant also inspires his politics: the
categorical imperative, that people should treat each other not as means but ends - this
shapes the "socialist engagement" of the man.
The city of Rennes in the last years of the century, it is to be remembered, was the stage
for the horrendous Dreyfus affair, when all France was put in a paroxysm, by the most appalling
anti-Semitism, and the most flagrant miscarriage of justice. Basch's biographer writes:
110
The Dre
hislife
his pas
emerge
Dreyfu
thirtie
Nazism
individ
The af
Semitis
insisted
Basch's associate Ferdinand Buisson exhorts the French in 1902:
There is a Dreyfus case, citizens, everywhere a laborer suffers, a child goes without
school, a worker is without defense, an old man without a refuge. (F. Bäsch 30)
And the Dreyfus case thus generalized shaped Basch's life. In this period was founded by
Bäsch and his associates the revered Ligue des droits de l'homme ( homme here includes
femme) which developed into the powerful international association still known today, one
of whose offspring is Amnesty International. For some years he was president of the Ligue ,
and always active in its affairs.
In scholarship, Basch's life was devoted to aesthetics and to the German philosophers
he loved, and he pleaded ceaselessly for the "good Germany," and at the same time he was
steadily activist in support of liberal causes. He and the Ligue espoused the Republican cause
in the Spanish civil war, deplored the inhuman treatment of Spanish Republican prisoners
in France and the support France gave to the Franco regime. Hitler and Nazism were for him
an outbreak of criminal insanity. When the Germans entered Paris in June 1941, his
apartment was confiscated, like those of other known anti-Nazis. Jews were denied civil
rights, and the name of Victor Bäsch led the list of university professors "cleansed" from the
University. Friends and relations helped to install the aged man and his wife in Lyon. His
son in despair committed suicide. Even as a refugee in Lyon he did not keep discreetly quiet,
but was among the protesters. The years of the Occupation were lived under constraint and
sorrow; he took some comfort from helping his grandchildren with their lessons, Latin
particularly. He developed some prostate trouble which entailed an operation that
weakened him severely. In 1943, the Milice of Lyon became newly efficient in their
cooperation with the Germans in searching out political enemies. In the evening of January
10, 1944, Victor Bäsch and his wife, ages 81 and 80, were taken from the Lyon apartment,
and considered too old for deportation, they were driven to a quiet street and executed with
two pistol shots. For being Jewish, and anti-Nazi.
One of the grandchildren he tutored in the bleak and constricted days in Lyon was
Françoise Bäsch, who became in turn a scholar of distinction and a professor at the
Sorbonne, where she has taught Anglo-American civilization with great success.4 Last year
she published, to critical acclaim, Victor Bäsch, ou la passion de la justice, de l'affaire Dreyfus
au crime de la Milice. It is from this that I have drawn the biographical information above.
It is a readable and important book taking its place - for one thing - in the present French
concern to investigate the degree of French complicity in the Nazi occupation. And it also
traces a remarkable career of scholarship, of teaching, of political action. I may have made
111
Victor Bäsch sound l

on the face for goin
something of a tyr
magniloquence, or w
traces the range of
practical aesthetics
Carlyle 1938; and a
alsacien" 1928, "Aid
for a while.
Why does a warm interest in Carlyle figure in the life of such a man? Perhaps some
readers will see right away - but of course. Nevertheless, I think it is interesting to review
Basch's discriminating critique. Many Carlyleans will remember the book. In his preface, he
grants that Carlyle may seem outdated, but as often with great writers, after some years of
literary "purgatory," they become due for resuscitation. One has to think of how especially
trying Carlyle's style must be for the French, but in spite of that, Bäsch writes, in spite of "the
longueurs, repetitions, grimacing gestures, discordant cries, contorsions, constant amertume,
these Pelions continually piled on Ossas, there is this prodigious eloquence." And Bäsch has
been struck by the actualité , contemporary relevance, of these writings. The perils of culture
Carlyle warns of are recognizable today, he says. The malady of our times is still the threat
of mechanism over dynamism, and Carlyle addresses the master problems of our time:
parliamentarism and selection of governments by numbers, the crimes of big industry and
the tyranny of money. He sees him in the great line of Emerson, Kirkegaard, Ibsen, Nietzsche
and Renan.5
The book, called Carlyle, l'homme et l'oeuvre, opens with seventy pages on the life.
He makes a succinct and just account, drawing on Froude, and the Note-books, and the
letters available then. He is sympathetic to Jane, describing her sufferings as her " Calvaire,"
and concludes that there was nevertheless genuine love between them. He remarks on
Carlyle's "innate disdain for the inferiority of women, even the most distinguished and
meritorious" - a point to note, I think. For Bäsch was not outstandingly vocal on women's
rights, though his Socialist principles were of course for equality. The Ligue, from its
inception in the nineties, encouraged female participation.
When he turns to the oeuvre, he writes generally of Carlyle's sense of literature: by
no means a mere divertissement, or decorative "art," but an earnest communion with the
reader, for the writer "a confession, to sound the depths of the self with a complete sincerity
. . ." (71). He was a lyric poet, one of the greatest of the English nineteenth century.6
He then traces out what appear to him as five key ideas, and calls them, in the mode
of Ruskin, Carlyle's five "lamps." One, the religious sentiment, and the vision of religion as
at base a social thing, and the great idea that the universe is the clothing of God. Two,
mathematics, which illuminate the understanding of Utilitarianism and Mechanism. Three,
the literary influences, chiefly German (and here no one was better qualified to appreciate
Carlyle's German sources): Hamann, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Tieck, the Schlegels,
Kant, Fichte, and Schelling; altogether to impose a new instrument, intuition, and recognize
the oppositions of synthesis to analysis, dynamism to mechanism. Four, the French
Revolution, and Napoleon, as a challenge to political and historical thought. Five,
Industrialism, how it is changing the world, and how it must be met. He then proceeds to
a systematic examination of the works, and throughout I have found him accurate and just.
112
He is p
Kant is
sensati
"that i
would
of thou
that sh
In the
philos
He ex
constr
works
time t
a good
put in
( sans
Victor
apothe
to dup
the "cu
towar
Freder
Carlyle
The b
insists
founda
mecha
ing of
human
our ow
of the
invinc
of the
insight
the be
actuall
of Vol
sound
the au
comme
at the
(247). C
He wo
should
Sensibi
source
function actually de
Basch's most seri
doctrine. This found
of Heroes : the doc
"mechanisms of dem
Rights of Man . . .
Napoleon, Bismarck
be chosen. How did
even after all the bi
they have been ind
systems: the power
is, as we often say to
Bäsch notes that
worked magnificent
inhabited lands, w
Worked magnificent
But for whose bene

captains of industry
. . . And there is th
propagates world-wi
attributed to parliam
popular sovereignty
Bäsch insists on C
at the condition of
Present , the Irish w
in the work house. T
we hear them as tho
Doubtless, democracy
with great leaders,
Mill, de Tocqueville
continued to reflec
suffrage. ... He see
1936, he remembere
a flagrant contradict
In his Carlyle book
One can find [in his w

ideology, amassed a
Carlyle shows how
plutocracy which -
"Plutocracy!" What a
now. Bäsch continues:
114
It is pr
Democ
"But th
force"
There
a polit
boldest
tempe
procee
Throug
to our
Carlyl
Carlyl
an und
Communion of Saints."
University of California-Riverside
115
Notes
JRoy speculates that the poets Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé may have been influenced by Carlyle, but
I have found no evidence. In all of Verlaine's voluminous correspondance (twelve volumes) Carlyle is mentioned
only once, in a letter to Whistler about the Carlyle portrait, and there is misspelled "Carlysle." DeBussy's taste for
Carlyle was first brought to my attention by my colleague Byron Adams.
apparently Proust came to feel that Carlyle represented le moi superficiel , while he wanted to develop le
moi profonde (50-51). Fraser observes that he would have found sustenance for le moi profonde in Sartor ; but this
he seems not to have become familiar with.
The translation here, as throughout, is my own.

^Victorian scholars will remember her study Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel
(trans. 1974), exploring the problematic relationship of fiction to reality at a time when Women's Studies were very
new. More recently she published Rebelles américaines: mariage, amour libre, et politique (Paris: Méridiens
Klincksieck, 1990).
5Basch notes that Izoulet-Loubatières dedicated his translation of Heroes in 1888 to Renan. But Renan himself
did not take to Carlyle; while the matter - the evolutions of religions - would have been congenial, the manner
was most probably offputting. (It is to be remembered that Renan was a friend of Basch's father.)
'The most noteworthy later study of Carlyle in French is Jacques Cabau's, of 1968. He considers Carlyle as
écrivain, as artist and poet, rather than in a history-of-ideas context. Thomas Carlyle ou le Prométhee enchaîné: Essai
sur la genèse de l'oeuvre de 1 795 à 1834. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968. Cabau includes an excellent
bibliography.
7Quoted, apRoberts, 14.
"There are two surprising errors in titles: "Signs of the Times" is constantly called "Signs of Time," and Latter-day
Pamphlets, Letter-Day Pamphlets. These serve to remind us of how attuned English ears are to the King James Bible, in
Carlyle's case especially of course; while foreigners, even those as familiar with English as Bäsch, will miss that resonance.
9"Au fond, il a professé un déisme qui était moins éloigné qu'il ne l'a cru de celui de Voltaire. Seulement, son
déisme à lui était soulevé par les grandes ailes de la poésie" (254). I quoted this passage in The Ancient Dialect 84.
10Basch does not address the alleged anti-Semitism of Carlyle, which is as much as to say he considers it
negligible. At one point he quotes Carlyle's hard words against the French, and counters this with his equally hard
words against the English, as though to suggest Carlyle doesn't hold back for any group. The anti-Semitic issue
is discussed by T. Peter Park, "Thomas Carlyle and the Jews," Journal of European Studies, 20 (March 1990): 1-21.
Works Cited
apRoberts, Ruth. The Ancient Dialect: Thomas Carlyle and Comparative Religion. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
Bäsch, Françoise. Victor Bäsch, De l'Affaire Dreyfus au crime de la Milice. Paris: Pion, 1994.
Bäsch, Victor. Carlyle, L'Homme et l'oeuvre. Paris: Gallimard, 1938.
Cabau, Jacques. Thomas Carlyle ou le Prométhee enchainé, Essai sur la genèse de l'oeuvre de 1 795 à 1834. Paris
Presses Universitaires de France, 1968.
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Ed. Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin, an
Mark Engel. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
Debussy, Claude. Correspondance 1884-1918. Paris: Hermann, 1993.
Fraser, Robert. Proust and the Victorians. New York: St. Martin's Press/London: Macmillan, 1994.
Halls, W. D. Maurice Maeterlinck: A Study of his Life and Thought. Oxford: Clarendon P, I960.
Kaplan, Fred. Thomas Carlyle, A Biography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1983.
Lockspeiser, Edward. Debussy et Edgar Poe. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1961.
Roy, G. Ross. "The French Reputation of Thomas Carlyle in the Nineteenth Century." Thomas Carlyle 1981, Papers
Given at the International Thomas Carlyle Centenary Symposium. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1983. 297-330.
Taylor, Alan Carey. Carlyle: Sa première fortune littéraire en France (1825-1865). Paris: Champion, 1929.
116
The Stupidest Novel in London: Thomas Carlyle and the Sickness of Victorian Fiction
Author(s): Hilary M. Schor
117-131
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:48 UTC
REFERENCES
T
Th
suggested, in an 1838 essay on Sir Walter Scott, that we pay literary men "by the
Thomas suggested, quantity
quantityCarlyle
they do they in an (do"Sirhated
not write" Walter1838Scott"not190)write"
to thefiction. essayhe("claimed
end, when Sir on From Sir Walter Walter the Scott" very Scott, beginning 190) that to we the pay of end, his literary when career, men he when claimed "by the he
"fiction, I think, or idle falsity of any kind, was never tolerable," ("Jesuits" 322), he continued
to repeat, with the indignation of the unjustly ignored, that "fiction is lying"; throughout his
career as the resident cynic, prophet, and truth-seer of Victorian letters, he fought what he
saw as the primary impulse of his age: the "trash-heap" of the modern novel. He called Jane
Austen's novels "dishwashings," Middlemarch "just dull," Pickwick "the lowest trash," and
Great Expectations "that Pip nonsense."1 His views, needless to say, have not prevailed:
contemporary readers, looking back at the period from the 1830s to the 1860s, roughly the
period of Carlyle's greatest influence, are likely to see novels everywhere; to identify the
age's greatest form of cultural production as that hybrid we know as "The Victorian Novel,"
the scribblings of Dickens, Gaskell, Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot. More than that,
with the deliberate perversity for which literary critics are known, we are likely to assert, with
a wave of the critical hand, that these novels are "Carlylean," that they share an ethos, a social
conscience, even a metaphysics with that cranky Scot, Carlyle.2
This perversity is of no modern invention, however: Victorian novelists across a wide
spectrum attempted to draft a reluctant Carlyle as their progenitor: Harriet Martineau
claiming that Carlyle "appears to be the man who has most essentially modified the mind
of his time" (Martineau 704); George Eliot that "there is hardly a superior or active mind of
this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle's writings" (Eliot 187-88); Thackeray
that it was Carlyle, interestingly, who has worked more than any other to give "art for art's
sake . . its independence."3 Charles Dickens, who seemed to personify for Carlyle
everything that was most jumped-up, merely fashionable, and histrionic about the cultural
scene around him, was a pathetically eager suitor in Carlyle's court, to be observed hanging
around him obsequiously at parties, eagerly acknowledging him in print, showering him
with presentation copies. At Dickens's death, Georgina Hogarth was to write to Carlyle,
saying "there was no one for whom he had a higher reverence and admiration," and sent
Carlyle one of the "walking sticks which he constantly used" (Ford 123). 4 Carlyle's humorous
indignation at much of Dickens's adoration is a matter of record - but so, oddly enough, is
his response to at least one presentation copy: after reading A Christmas Carol , with its
conversion of another cranky idea man, Carlyle "sent out for a turkey, and asked two friends
to dine!" (Thackeray, "Box" 149). We can skip over Jane Welsh Carlyle's horror at being asked
to stuff a turkey - something she had never done - but we might want to linger over the
117
image, as Thackeray
a day he had never
It is easy to move
relationship between
is complicated, hum
all, objections agains
not really worth mu
which reaches back
the form in which C
story-telling, the fe
terrify innocent rea
today that literary
that has prevailed,
consistency. Nor, a
so that even his equ
though it will retu
argument from the
flourishing of their
be hard to find a wr
so wide-spread as to
mantle for one's sho
To answer this qu
Carlyle and the Vict
what do I mean by
does not seem about
because we still rea
Doris Lessing, Marg
because NYPD Blue
them. Or I could ma
represents a pinnac
represented in all its
and our lives within
could adequately d
would all come to
difference would b
doesn't it, highly Ca
precisely what I do
else. I want to argue
Victorian novelists b
the material world
eviscerating of the p
was return you to
readers. And, I belie
of good, serious, m
other, of course, th
118
No
con
to
we
but
star
his
Vic
the
con
Th
rel
ma
pla
oth
Tha
of
wa
im
nov
eve
hav
* * ♦
Let me start, then, with Thomas Carlyle's 1832 es

contradictory views of fiction. Carlyle wrote this somewh
a reviewer for Eraser's Magazine, and it was (ostensibly
of that heroic author, Samuel Johnson. It is quite possible
the essay goes on for ten pages before mentioning Dr. J
loosely from the study of man to the nature of Biography
to an attack on the fashionable novel; it includes a lon
manuscript for a (fictional) Professor Gottfried Sauert
(springwurzeln, Carlyle claims, is a "sort of magical picklo
Lord Clarendon's History of the Rebellion which dwells on
Worcester, being given "a piece of bread and a great pot o
the owner of a "poor cottage" Charles came to along the w
which Carlyle glosses with the phrase "this then was a gen
year 1651," and which he claims as a moment in which
asunder, so that we behold and see, and then closes ove
The aesthetic this essay puts forward is that of the
historical/moral oblivion, which the true biography can r
the real wonder - and the wonder of reality - beneath, on
over again. As the essay begins, Carlyle announces "how in
know our fellow-creature; to see into him, understand his
119
heart of his myster

world altogether as
practically personat
"expand himself on
Looking with the ey

for each: feeling wi
life, even as with hi
to us; a mirror both
from which one w
discern the image o
cally lie under the
That "mirror" that

Gossip, Egoism, Per
like" which constitu
Speech" and "in all
Carlyle goes on to
song, and "what is
Biographies"; so to
teaching by Exper
the "whole class of
Poetry, in Shakesp
Novel." All these a
by an uninspired Ba
Life."
Here, unexpectedly
how? On the ground
only "find readers"
Themosl Foolish man

shall the authentical
by guess, know that
take even the narrow
say to himself, that
extant in London? N
opens. ("Biography
This logic works, of

actually resident, "
can never yet be cer
of all things, novel
Of no given Book, n
that its vacuity is a
replenish themselve
distressed Novelwrig
mortals; that this my
into whose still lon
120
som
wo
Th
as
wh
Ju
tri
on
Bu
fic
rep
fei
cal
som
con
He
Bos
Bos
'As
us
how
wo
"St
tha
utt
sm
her
of
ero
dif
do"
for
tha
It m
sta
wo
to
per
be
"fa
he
fol
all
of
121
oversight ; hallucin
splendor of the long
the Pen in these day
that make up the a
permanence? It is b
Nothing but a pitiful

ravenous hunger of
unfortunate persons
appear as some expa
looks pitiful enough
It is not that these p

of you" has a certain
shut up; full of gr
Instead, he intones,
but be placed in wha
shall actually see, a
one single soap-lath
tries honestly to th
At this point, we
it that makes literat
the self; the intrusi
only the "phantasm
literature great? It i
of belief, one that
doings therein." Wit
will offer not the p
supernatural secret
It might seem, the
circularity of self-
realist fiction. Sur
Middlemarch, wher
following her marr
retina," and once ag
and comments, "For
we call highly taugh
to be fully liberated
two of the finest
difficulty of repres
that Carlyle is most
But they suggest,
developed sense of
the beginning of thi
with and against C
suggesting: on the
realism can "depict"
122
me
of
How
am
sha
Pro
kno
thee
Th
ope
too
wit
Ga
pow
the
agg
of
lan
rev
her
die
over wages:
It is a pretty sight to walk though a street with lighted shops; the gas is so brilliant, the
display of goods so much more vividly shown than by day, and of all shops a druggist's
looks the most like the tales of our childhood, from Aladdin's garden of enchanted
fruits to the charming Rosamond with her purple jar. No such associations had Barton;
yet he felt the contrast between the well-filled, well-lighted shops and the dim gloomy
cellar, and it made him moody that such contrasts should exist. They are mysterious
problems of life to more than him. He wondered if any in all the hurrying crowd, had
come from such a house of mourning. He thought they all looked joyous, and he was
angry with them. But he could not, you cannot, read the lot of those who daily pass
you by in the street. How do you know the wild romances of their lives; the trials, the
temptations they are even now enduring, resisting, sinking under? You may be
elbowed one instant by the girl desperate in her abandonment, laughing in mad
merriment with her outward gesture, while her soul is longing for the rest of the dead,
and bringing itself to think of the cold-flowing river as the only mercy of God remaining
to her here. You may pass the criminal, meditating crimes at which you will to-morrow
shudder with horror as you read them. You may push against one, humble and
unnoticed, the last upon Earth, who in Heaven will for ever be in the immediate light
of God's countenance. Errands of mercy - errands of sin - did you ever think where
all the thousands of people you daily meet are bound? Barton's was an errand of mercy ;
but the thoughts of his heart were touched by sin, by bitter hatred of the happy, whom
he, for the time, confounded with the selfish. (Gaskell 101-02)
Gaskell's passage, with its passionate direct address to the reader ("he could not, you can
read the lot of those who daily pass you by") suggests Carlyle's sense that every on
pass on the street is a mystery; the list of those who pass John Barton is an outline of Vic
123
street culture: the c

Earth" who in Heave
And here, as in Carly
to another order of
imagination of reade
down of fictional e
of view. Precisely
biographer, in seein
nothing like him.
characters - and th
character it "saw th
Gaskell's method, h
of others, the charg
and not a partial, pi
John Barton's imagi
My second example
allows and dismisses
possibility is laid ba
Makepeace Thackeray
wrapper of the or
publication, shows T
his congregation a
more Carlyle's diatr
Thackeray will go
paragraphs;6 but far
his congregation is a
is holding forth on
say, "one is bound t
bells or a shovel-hat
an undertaking" (Va
other image which,
dressed in cap and
Thackeray went th
of Vanity Fair ; ju
Sketches of English
"showman," the "pu
and "a brother of th
Carlyle's biography
gathers much of the
closest thing to a he
mirrors way, to the
the "Becky puppet
giver - all in all, an
But she also enacts t
Take, as only one e
aging, bitter, terrif
124
her
hou
the
She
was
wh
fut
you
wom
ere
The
one
Mo
add
ask
ext
sel
mo
Car
tha
Its
do
Th
nov
to
awa
wh
aun
adv
the
Mis
car
the
eat
ign
the
a p
and
sure we were the hero.
The paradox which Thackeray confronts, and which I am arguing Carlyle exposed
as well, left Carlyle, and (I would argue) Victorian fiction in general, with only one
possibility - and that is, to reimagine not only realism, but the self. This is certainly a constan
aim of Carlyle's: in his important early essay "Characteristics," written in 1831 , the year befor
the "Biography" essay, he wrote, "The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick:
this is the Physician's Aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it"
125
("Characteristics" 5).
feeling of somethin
by suffering" (5).
Freedom into "Kno
from "Speculation"
conscious action;
unhealthy Virtue is
that we have a clear
had no conscience"
on being at all. Simi
only now, is man co
decline into conscio
Literature.
This paean to naive unconsciousness might seem to fit ill with all the attention to Self
that Carlyle invoked in the essay on biography, but it reminds us again of the unconscious-
ness of self, the absence of greed, narcissism, vulgarity; the removal of the "pitiful Image of
their own pitiful Self with its vanities, and grudging, and ravenous hunger of all kinds" that
most authors purvey in their fiction. Unconsciousness, the "sign of creation," is the sign of
"Mystery," that same sense of wonder fiction was to reveal. The true fiction, then, becomes
one that does the work of unconsciousness:
It is not by Mechanism, but by Religion; not by Self-interest, but by loyalty, that men
are governed or governable. . . . The genius of Mechanism, as was once before
predicted, will not always sit like a choking incubus on our soul; but at length, when
by a new magic Word the old spell is Broken, become our slave, and as familiar-spirit
do all our bidding. 'We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.'
("Characteristics" 47)
As Carlyle said of the logic-mills he described in a companion essay, "Signs of the Tim
(1829)," "Wonder, indeed, is on all hands dying out: it is the sign of uncultivation to wonder
In the deepest sense, then, his social program might be called one of de-cultivation.
But what can this mean, when the whole force of Carlyle's own central fictions, a
well as that of his program for fiction, was of cultivation; growth; realization of self, the enti
Victorian autobiographical narrative of progress; what George Levine was to call "the pattern
of the personal confrontation of the spiritual malaise of the century" (Levine, Boundar
17)? And what is the relationship of " deculti vation" to realist fiction, to the manifestation o
the wonderful in the world of fact?
Here we are actually suspiciously close to the novels of Charles Dickens and that odd
hybrid of realism and romance Edwin Eigner has named "the metaphysical novel." For
Dickens's novels, for all that they trace the growth of the hero's mind as assiduously as any
Romantic epic, trace as well (in recognizably Carlylean as well as Wordsworthian terms) the
fall of the spontaneous and organic self into the mechanistic, the logical, the artificial - or,
in Thackerayan terms, the lonely, the bitter, the peevish, the worldly, the selfish, the
thankless, the graceless. More than that, like Carlyle's essays, and like Gaskell's credo , they
reveal the world of spirit behind the world of matter - for we live in a realm in which
superficialities trap the garment of spirit, in which the worlds we could be to each other are
shut off, and shut out, and in which matter matters far too much. Like Carlyle's assertion that
126
we
tha
wit
He
of
dis
to
wh
hal
is t
of
Car
wor
wh
by
wo
Ye
fur
Nat
in
par
wis
of
wit
Bu
him
I am
thi
larg
thr
of
ind
bec
pro
Let
plo
Sar
anc
is j
ma
is "
cer
Bou
uni
Bu
uni
127
in fact, through the

of Boswell's Life acc
in Hard Times , Loui
be led almost to the
brings her to phys
at her father's feet;
for characters (marr
where she stares int
of Two Cities , Sydn
of one small, blond
"far, far better th
requires the sacrifi
walks the city near
novels seems to be t
These are not, precis
matter: books of pas
to the moment in w
toward spiritual gr
But perhaps that is
when Dorothea Bro
the moment when s
place among the hu
Louisa Bounderby, t
of a transformation
serial narrative, pa
stumbling sagas of E
error; with doubt an
world of spirit, to m
from ambiguity, co
So what is it I am
me borrow another
because it was "hi
uncertainties" (Lev
realism - as the dwe
doubts. In that view
fiction, that it is a p
brings the novel, in
recent scholarship h
so rigidly opposed u
than Mill, wished t
through fiction; I w
necessarily another
Here, as I conclud
why this re-invent
fragments and pos
Margaret Drabble's T
128
of
so
Vas
lik
"wh
to
end
her
air
her
litt
a s
for
the
a wall of Alexandra Palace:
One of the lions had been broken, since her last visit. She went up to it, to see closer.
It was hollow, the lion: shabby, weathered, crudely cast in a cheap mould. Half of its
head was missing. It was hollow inside. She peered inside the hole: there were two
concrete struts instead of intestines, and somebody had placed carefully inside it a
Coca-Cola bottle, a beer can, and a few old straws. She was glad there was nothing
worse. A few straws lay crossed before its noble feet. She remembered the beasts on
the gateposts at [her father's house]: elevated, distinguished, aristocratic, hand-carved,
unique, with curled sneering lips and bared fangs. She looked back at the shabby mass-
produced creature before her: it was one with the houses, the streets, the dog show,
the people. Half its head had gone. It was one of many. Somebody had written on it,
years ago, in red paint: SPURS, they had written, and the red paint had dripped and
run, spattering its heavy jowl like old blood. But it was a toothless lion, any boy could
draw on it. She peered at it, closely. It was grey, it looked as though it were made of
grey brawn - small specks and lumps of whiteness stood out in the darker background
diamond shaped flecks. She wondered what it was that it was made of - cement,
concrete, plaster. And the Palace itself. What a mess, what a terrible mess. She looked
back at it. It was comic, dreadful, grotesque. A fun palace of yellow brick. She liked
it. She liked it very much. She liked the lion; She lay her hand on it. It was gritty and
cold, a beast of the people. Mass-produced it had been, but it had weathered into
identity. And this, she hoped, for every human soul. (369)
What Drabble achieves in this passage is a powerful blend of the mechanical and the
spiritual, the moment when what is "comic, dreadful, grotesque," real, suggests something
beyond itself. Like Dr Johnson, speaking kindly to the woman of the town on the streets,
Rose Vassiliou is moving through the material world to the world of silence; of besmutched
reality, and the "utter darkness" of the world of wonder beyond. This is more than th
retelling of spiritual pilgrimage, of narratives of growth and maturity, even of the sexual
progress narrative equally at the heart of Victorian fiction. It is a story about story-telling:
about the cultural power of mass-production weathered into identity; of some possible
return of an authentic self, made and in-the-making, seen, however briefly, in the mirror o
the real. Carlyle's is a shadowy world of images half-glimpsed, of progress half-completed,
of transformations half-achieved; it aims at the social, but achieves only the individual;
strives for community, but can sustain connection only briefly; it desires wholeness, bu
129
comes at us in fragm
hope for the same t
like the novelists wh
to achieve a solid re
still, promisingly, o
Universit
Notes
!The first two quotations (on Austen and Eliot) are taken from Goldberg (14-15); he cites Francis Espinasse
Literary Recollections and Sketches (1893), 21 6, for the former, and Lawrence Churton Collins, Life and Memo
of John Churton Collins (1912), 44, for the latter. The other citations, also quoted by Goldberg, are from Frou
Life in London, 121.
2Of the many critics to do so, among the most perceptive are Goldberg and Levine (see below).
3From Gordon Ray, The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, (Cambridge, M
Harvard UP, 1946), Volume I: p. 396. cited in Charles Richard Sanders, "The Carlyles and Thackeray," in Carlyl
Fńendships and Other Studies (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1977), 234.
"The letter, quoted by Ford, is June 27, 1870.
5Carlyle, of course, did not offer an exchange of admiration with Thackeray's; he wrote in a letter of 184
"Dickens writes a Dombeyand Son , Thackeray a Vanity Fair, not reapers they, either of them! In fact the busin
of the rope-dancing goes to a great height." Quoted in Ford, 115.
^Tiis is noted in John Sutherland's edition, 881.
7Here I will echo not only many of the insights of George Levine's Boundaries of Fiction, but his semin
work on The Realistic Imagination, which remains true to its author's Carlylean roots. Of the many recent wo
of criticism on the nature of realism, I will cite only Elizabeth Ermarth's direction of our attention away from
significant detail" in Realism and Consensus in the English Novel, and Roland Barthes's recasting of the detail
"L'effet du reel," translated as "The Reality Effect," but also imaginable as "that realist 'thing.'"
8For a more sustained discussion of Dickens and the adultery plot, see my The Daughter Before the Law
Women , Property, Narration, Dickens (forthcoming, Cambridge UP).
^his essay was originally given as the "Strouse Lecture" at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and
wish to thank Professor Murray Baumgarten, who honoured me with the original invitation, and Margaret Gord
who made my visit so pleasant. I also wish to acknowledge the responses of the audience, in particular, Profes
John Jordan and Gordon Bigelow, and the unknown (to me) woman who asked the very intelligent question abo
Jane Welsh Carlyle's response to all this! The answer, I'm afraid, must be another essay. I wish also to thank J
Kincaid, for his insightful reading of an earlier draft of the essay, and Bob Newsom, whose provocative work
Victorian prose stands behind much of the work here, and whose conversation (as always) illuminated my thinki
130
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. "The Realism Effect." The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: U of Cal
P, 1989.
Carlyle, Thomas. "Biography." Cńtical and Miscellaneous Essays. Vol. 3. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. 32-6
Drabble, Margaret. The Needle's Eye. New York: Knopf, 1982.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Ed. Gordon H
Mifflin, 1956.
Ermarth, Elizabeth. Realism and Consensus in the English Novel. Pr

Ford, George. "Stern Hebrews Who Laugh: Further Thoughts on Car
A New Collection of Essays. Ed. K.J. Fielding and Rodger L. Tarr
26.
Froude, James Anthony. Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, 1834-1881. 2 vols. London: Longmans,
Green, 1882.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
Goldberg, Michael. Carlyle and Dickens. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1972.
Levine, George. Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968.
Martineau, Harriet. History of England during the Thirty Years Peace. L

Thackeray, William Makepeace. "A Box of Novels." Fraser' s Magazine
Critical Heritage. Ed. Philip Collins. London: Roultedge & Kegan Pa
131
Author(s): D.J. Trela
133-144
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:48 UTC
D.J. Trela
1995 saw one of the most significant years of Carlyle scholarship in decades. Two
bicentenary conferences occurred in North America, the first in St. John's, Newfoundland,
the second, the Victorians Institute conference in Columbia, South Carolina. While it will take
several years for the papers given at these conferences to find their way into journals and
books, the work presented at both was largely of high quality, was often presented by
younger scholars, and demonstrated repeatedly the vitality of scholarship on the Carlyles.
The spirit of the St. John's conference is wittily demonstrated in Mark Cumming's "Prepping
the Sage; or, Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Carlylean." Carlyle Studies
Annual 15 (1995): 7-11. Whether it was new information about the Carlyles, reports of
upcoming volumes in the Strouse Edition or the Collected Letters, comparative studies or new
readings of their works, both conferences provided a rousing fillip to further study and
scholarship and repeatedly confirmed the centrality of both Carlyles to an understanding of
the Victorian period. The first papers from the St. John's conference began to appear in the
last CSA, while more follow in this issue; work presented at the Ì Victorians Institute
conference will follow next year. One hopes this atmosphere of fresh, stimulating and
creative scholarship can be sustained until 2001 when Jane's bicentenary might cause more
attention to be paid to her.
In beginning my formal survey I must acknowledge, somewhat ruefully, that this
survey contains far more pieces from 1990 to 1993 that only came to my attention in 1996.
They will not be treated separately, but in the categories in which they would normally
appear. Readers as always are asked to forward abstracts, offprints or references to me care
of the School of Liberal Studies, Roosevelt University, Box 288, 430 South Michigan Avenue,
Chicago, IL 60605-1394; or e-mail at jtrela@acfsysv.roosevelt.edu.
Carlyle's part in the founding of the London Library is well known. The sesquicen-
tennial of that founding in 1991 was celebrated with a series of lectures collected as Founders
& Followers: Literary Lectures Given on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the
Founding of the London Library (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1992). Carlyle is the subject
of Noel Annan's lead essay (1-22). Unfortunately Lord Annan disappoints by rehashing his
observations of forty years earlier in "Carlyle." History Today 2 (October 1952): 659-65. Can
one plagiarize one's self? If so, Annan is guilty on many counts, not least of which is not
owning up to his "borrowings," as sentences and paragraphs are repeated verbatim from the
earlier work. The "new" essay misdates Carlyle's essay "Biography" to 1839 while it appeared
133
in 1832 and uses quot

(London: Nelson, 19
which Annan prais
political views, and
Annan's procedure h
Primary Works,
In primary texts,
four of The Collecte
July of 1847 to Dec
covers the Squire af
of 1848 and his vis
misprints; the annot
pleading or are ov
presentation are un
to my just-stated m
expanded overview
New Volumes in T
Papers, n.s. 8 (Edinb
the letters and their
insight into the Carl
refusal to admit he
in his address to th
primary record, the
that record once k
Additional evidenc
and the Americans
piece would be more
contacts with abou
trates primarily on
rhetorical excesses
Carlyle had many
probably towards "
scorned apparently f
wrongs nearer hom
While no new volu
should be made of
New Edition Withou
Festschrift für Hor
Völkel. "Scottish S
Gutenberg Univers
Oakman details the
provided "much mor
ever been available
collation still revea
sanitize it" (152). Th
134
"substa
One ne
by Cly
Studies
paragra
adminis
speak s
A wor
Despera
Sorense
comman
As a re
a good
bumblin
adds pr
say, ob
Century
Worth
Patrick
on the
page b
manusc
Of bib
volume
D.C.: B
not coll
volume
Worshi
biograp
is the s
a few p
Literary
1900B,
Treatm
Elizabe
History
absorbe
own wr
careful
often t
philosop
the stu
A solid
Clothe
emphas
utilizes Bakhtin's no
"cold carnival." Fel
authoritarian writin
any pretensions to a
know it definitive
reductionist tende
legitimate [a] . . . p
sparklingly writte
fine article on the
of Certainty in Ca
a model for how th
Another treatme
Jacqueline Bacon's "
of Life.'" Nineteenth
the reducing of one
proposition, widely
right Carlyle woul
"the 'fraction of li
dialectic between po
and fiction, and be
Carlylean hero" (3).
multi-vocal text, her
readers to destabil
Yet another fine,
Elfenbein's "The S
Literature and Cultu
with contemporary
critics like Sanders
Byron, as if he "we
Moore biography
Teufelsdröckh" in
"suggest[s] how Te
"importance of cul
forCarlyle the emb
One piece on Sart
Resartus : Carlyle's
(1994):46l-73. The ar
does little more than
itself is "sincere" a
One of the finest
"Carlyle's 'Chartism
Institute Journal 23
thought and the l
leadership void that
recur in Britain as a
view, be forestalled
136
Carlyle
philosop
involve
leader,
be seen
out of
a 'new'
Two p
overloo
May 199
pride"
traditio
of hero
autobio
and mo
as men
elemen
of actio
by Cro
Letters
and Jo
argues t
about the manliness of his endeavours . . . manifested itself in his intellectual attraction to
men of force and war." Further, in On Heroeshe "created ... a cultural role for aspiring male
writers" that consciously excluded women. Clarke gets Irving's birth year wrong (1792, not
1790) and, despite her discussion of Coleridge, omits C. R. Sanders's finely nuanced article
"The Background of Carlyle's Portrait of Coleridge in The Life of John Sterling." Bulletin of
the John Rylands University Library 55 (Spring 1973): 434-58. This piece on the whole treads
too closely to the Mazlish school of criticism (see below), though Clarke surely has a point
about Carlyle's contribution to the increased gendering of literature in Victorian Britain.
Past and Present i s represented by John Ulrich's fine study "'A Labor of Death, and
A Labor Against Death': Translating the Corpse of History in Carlyle's Past and Present ."
Carlyle Studies Annuali (1995): 33-46. Ulrich argues against Carlyle as a medieval revivalist
by stressing Carlyle's metaphors of recovery, the speculum and the camera lucida. "Far from
bringing back the dead, Carlyle offers us instead the past as utterly remote and other,
examinable in parts" only (44). The partial recovery of the past is intended primarily to
elucidate the present. Two articles Ulrich should have taken account of are Florence Boos'
admittedly defective "Alternative Victorian Futures: 'Historicism,' Past and Present and A
Dream of John BaW in History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism , ed.
Florence Boos (New York: Garland, 1992): 3-37, and Linda Georgianna's revealing "Carlyle
andjocelin of Brakelond: A Chronicle Rechronicled." Browning Institute Studies 8 (1980):
103-27.
Social and Political Views
A work of 1989 reissued in paperback in 1991 brings to this survey a signifi

contemporary critic of Carlyle who is also among the most neglected. The critic is
1 37
Hutton; his editors

Uncollected Writing
thirty-eight Spectat
from 18 November
as their Rector. Car
gigantic, vague and
new truths. The sec
literature as a paint
primarily because h
passions strugglin
discontent, with sh
on Carlyle would p
Two articles on Ca
quite good. The bad
Essays on Scottish L
Steven R. McKenn
rehashing of materi
(written in 1849 but
on Carlyle. Seigel's
through the prima
fortunately K. J. Fi
begins to enrich our
issues. This article a
Horst W Drescher
"Scottish Studies: P
Universität Mainz
addresses one of th
having been unremi
radical reformers
plausible. Men like
also not of the "gov
possessed a differen
commanding auth
independence" (135
of Carlyle's genuine
respected Carlyle w
passing that Jules S
and Ireland.
One depressing study in the dubious realm of psychoanalysis is Bruce Mazlish's

"Carlyle's 'Depressive' Vision of Industrialism" in Biography and Source Studies , ed.
Frederick R. Karl (New York: AMS P, 1994): 133-47. His total ignorance of the Duke-
Edinburgh Collected Letters is the first bad sign, but matters quickly deterioriate. Claiming
Carlyle suffered from 1819 to 1826 from "melancholia," Mazlish asserts this "depression . .
. was linked in [Carlyle's] subconscious to his judgment on industrial society; ... h
condemnation of mechanism was part and parcel of his melancholia, and took its rise from
it" (135). This tenuous connection is made in part by assuming Teufelsdröckh speaks fo
138
Carlyle
with in
psyche
Carlyle
passion
Mazlish
be critics.
Somewhat better is Michael Levin's chapter on Carlyle in his book The Spectre of
Democracy: TheRiseof Modern Democracy as Seen By Its Critics (New Y ork UP, 1992): 134-
53. Levin provides an intelligent summary of Carlyle's objections to democracy but tars him
with the fascist brush by chapter's end. He believed rulers could come from any class and
needed "to be both acceptable and accepted" to be effective (147). Democracy's mechani-
zation of the process of choosing leaders simply wouldn't work in the long run. This belief
Levin characterizes as "a kind of social rather than political democracy" (148). Yet Levin sees
a shift in the Frederick years which leads him into screeching overstatements: "In the final
balance Carlyle's emphasis on opportunity, consent and responsibility weighs less heavily
than his acclaim for any regime that crushed all (emphasis added) intimations of liberal
democratic pluralism" (153). It is nonetheless useful to put Carlyle's thought into an
intellectual tradition (Hegel, Tocqueville and John Adams are other authors covered) rather
than view it in isolation.
Murray Baumgarten provides a stimulating insight into Carlyle's view of knowledge

as a means to promote action in "'Useful Knowledge': Carlyle and Modern Critical
Categories" in in Literatur im Kontext - Literature in Context: Festschrift für Horst W.
Drescher, ed. Joachim Schwend, Susanne Hagemann and Hermann Völkel. "Publications of
the Scottish Studies Centre of the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz in Germersheim,
14 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992): 123-29- Baumgarten suggests that Carlyle made "his own
experience as an auto-didact into a social program" by making an important distinction
between "knowledge as inert compilation and knowledge as practice and activity" (127).
Books should not simply inform, but rather inspire readers to act. These views carry "a
religious force, appropriate to a generation of thinkers and doers who, unable to accept the
beliefs of their church, turned to education as a ways of inculcating its values in a secular
world" (129).
Two works treat Carlyle's attitude towards the arts. The first is a section in George
J. Leonard's Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace form Wordsworth to John
Cage( U of Chicago P, 1994): 79-98. Leonard argues Carlyle exercised a very broad influence
over his era. "Someone like Carlyle . . . comes to so thoroughly pervade a culture that he
enters the collective Weltanschauung ." Most "'cultured'" later writers appear "Carlylean, for
the culture they saw had been colored by the tint he gave their lenses" (83). Much of this
tint has to do with the new spirituality Carlyle propounded, a position in line with
Baumgarten's. The remainder of the article surveys Carlyle's generally hostile attitude
towards fine arts, the only exception being a reverence for good portraiture. In fact, Leonard
argues, Carlyle remakes a good portrait into an inspiring object of reverence or relic (96-97).
The second work is Paul Barlow's "The Imagined Hero as Incarnate Sign: Thomas
Carlyle and the Mythology of the 'National Portrait' in Victorian Britain." Art History 17.4
(December 1994): 517-45. Agreeing largely with Leonard's conclusion, Barlow argues that
"a mythology of the portrait came to be seen in relationship to the language of heroism
139
established by Carl
aesthetic for histori
Knox" ( Works 30:31
"of insight into the
Carlyle mis-identifi
pattern" and implici
of hero-worship m
founding principles
on Carlyle's 1854 le
Portraits," first pub
(1855) (see Works 2
demonstrating Carl
tively little.
Friendships and I
Two useful works
In "The 'Bog Schoo
Robert Morrison off
with emphasis on t
temperament. "[T]h
to an enduring preo
Similarly useful is
Thoreau," Carlyle S
Thoreau, since the tw
Emerson. Gravett po
correspondences bet
of clothes and the p
Shifra Hochberg
"Madame Defarge a
101. Hochberg here
"re-render[ed]" as
becomes a central f
A second, more d
in Angus Easson's p
in Reflections of R
Everest (London: R
cannibalism imagery
calls the novel "in
discusses Dickens's jo
expedition which a
decay and revolution
piece which nonethe
and Dickens, Micha
William Oddie's Di
1972). Goldberg at
a far more thoroug
140
Though
Meets M
81-96,
exclusio
Strouse
and No
passage
I find i
gender
sisters,
women
pleadin
A case
Brattin
Biograp
authore
due to
when the recontextualization makes nonsense of them" (105).
The Froude Controversy

Two items missed from previous surveys plus two published in 1995 provide a
quartet of insightful and stimulating writing on the issue of Froude's still-controversial
biographical and editorial efforts. The earliest is the late Elliot L. Gilbert's "Rescuing Reality:
Carlyle, Froude, and Biographical Truth-Telling." Victorian Studies 34 (Spring 1991): 295-
314. It is also the most speculative and least satisfying. Gilbert argues that Carlyle conflated
"the roles of historian and priest," making his writings into a kind of liturgy (296). The
historian assisted in "the conversion of dead matter into living tissue, of past into present;
to preside over a moment of transubstantiation, that moment when what has been mere
symbol of reality . . . becomes truth itself' (302). The writing of history thus becomes an act
of faith. Froude enters into the picture as a surrogate son, or second-generation priest/
historian "who would one day become [Carlyle's] official spokesman and his other self'
(307). This took place, Gilbert argues, during a series of "visitations" dating from 1861 to 1871
as Carlyle gradually handed autobiographical documents and interpretive authority over to
Froude. One of Gibert's most telling points is his statement that Froude was "not content
simply to describe Carlyle's biographical theories," but instead "demonstrates those theories"
(311).
The second piece, by Trev Broughton, "The Froude-Carlyle Embroilment: Married
Life as a Literary Problem." Victorian Studies 38 (Summer 1995): 551-85, takes a closer look
at the controversy that Froude's publications generated. Broughton sees these events as "a
struggle to renegotiate social distinctions." In the period up to 1903, Broughton argues, the
Froude controversy adumbrated "new relationships between representations of the Man of
Letters as husband, the surveillance of the middle-class marriage, and the regulation of
literary masculinity" (351, 352). Broughton is not so much interested in the facts of the Carlyle
marriage, as in the resonances of perceptions about the Carlyles, based on Froude's
interpretation, in the larger cultural context of late Victorian Britain. She slides rather quickly
into what appears to me to be a general acceptance of Froude's accuracy, but provides
141
significant insights
at a time of more in
in particular of wo
have been viewed as
and importance bec
Broughton's sec
Annual 15 (1995): 6
After summarizing
extensively on a re
Calling that work "e
literary and sexual
"homosocial desires
are also explored (7
writing, but unfort
Portraits of the Ca
Richard Sanders , e
Both Gilbert and B
Gilbert reinterpret
range of the contro
who tend to be an
perceptions about th
life, temperament a
in and reverberatio
Debate Over Biogra
Kristine Ottesen G
decidedly mixed ed
against Carlyle, po
discussion of the na
had known the Carly
together wrong. T
ambivalence in late
public property an
figures" (183). Clearl
controversy drawing
the essence of the
larger literary and c
Strouse Lectures
The first volume of Carlyle Studies Annual under Rodger L. Tarr's editorship score
a substantial coup in publishing six Norman H. Strouse Carlyle Lectures. Readers will know
that two earlier volumes of Strouse lectures were published by the McHenry Library at th
University of California at Santa Cruz under the title Lectures on Carlyle and His Era. The
first three lectures were by Carlisle Moore, "Carlyle and the Torch of Science," Rodger Ta
"'Fictional High-Seriousness': Carlyle and the Victorian Novel," and Chris Vanden Boss
"Preaching and Performance: the Rhetoric of Fictional High Seriousness in Carlyle
Dickens"; they appeared in 1982 in a volume edited by Jerry D. James and Charles
142
Finema
Strouse
include
"Gigant
Cromw
Special
art wor
availabl
Norman
Carlyle
Strouse
through
and ma
Ian
Cam
Carlyle
conclusi
from th
in the E
exagger
an imp
mood o
In "Car
a subjec
his crit
Carlyle
becomi
essenti
highly
that sy
system
be used
"absolu
natural
In "Dea
Anne M
letters
passion
Jane h
Carlyle'
to a dea
present
D. J. T
Primary
article
manusc
researc
143
the Historical Sketc

were likely suppre
publishing in the a
inflammatory con
published works. O
persuading these sa
D'Ewes, which Carl
"an inspired, insight
shortsightedness o
Carlyle's
own work
(80).
G. B. Tennyson,
most convincingly i
Reviewer, Carlyle t
Further, Carlyle wa
these roles (46). Ten
well-established, bu
Carlylean procedure
The single partial ex
"multiple perspect
more to the point
him a supreme rea
Michael Timko's
strikes me as the m
Carlyle is "writing,"
is always writing au
marked than in On
at proof are uncon
are told that "in 184
appeared" (55). Wh
essays of the 1820s
that the truth he wa
"never doubts, tha
omniscience, but
indeterminateness o
"Carlyle, it is clear
another statement t
personal involvemen
conceived and thou
Conclusion
Much of the scholarship surveyed here precedes the 1994-95 period this artic
intended to cover. WMe the Strouse lectures and the selection of papers from
bicentenary conferences do demonstrate that there's still life in study of the old boy, so
much of the independently published scholarship. It is perhaps the best birthday pre
Carlyle could wish for.
Roosevelt University
144
Review
Reviewed Work(s): The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle by Clyde de L.
Ryals and K. J. Fielding
Review by: Fleming McClelland
145-147
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:48 UTC
Reviews
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ed. Clyde de L. Ryals, K.
J. Fielding, et al. Duke-Edinburgh Edition. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. Vols.
22-24. $45/vol.
It is now twenty-five years since the first volumes of the Duke-Edinburgh Edition of
the Carlyles' letters appeared. My own acquaintance with the edition began in the late 1970s
when I was a graduate student toiling over my inkpot in compiling an edition of Thomas
Carlyle's verse, a work which I was fairly certain was pregnant with immortality. Nor, I now
discover, was I entirely mistaken in my belief, as the published version of The Poems of
Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle that Rodger Tarr and I edited a decade ago has found its
way into the annotations of these most recent volumes of an edition that has consistently
been commended as an exemplar of the highest practice of the art of editorial scholarship.
The symmetry is appealing to me, for our edition of the poems would hardly have
been possible without the abundance of information contained in the then-available
volumes of the Duke-Edinburgh Edition, information found not only in the letters
themselves, but also in the annotations to the letters.
Thus though previous reviewers have occasionally suggested that this edition of the
Carlyle letters might be somewhat over-annotated, I am not such a reviewer. For me, these
encyclopedic notes identifying persons, quotations, allusions, dates, and places, while
providing new information, discursive commentary on contexts, corrections of the previ-
ously published record, translations, and references to pertinent scholarship - these notes
constitute one of the extraordinary graces of the Duke-Edinburgh Edition. Here one
encounters a miscellany exhibiting such items as accounts of the Carlyles contained in letters
written by Amalie Bölte, whom the editors characterize as "almost a domestic spy at 5 Cheyne
Row" (22: ix); as the fact that anesthesia during surgery had been in use for a year in 1848
(22:201n3) and that the harmonica was a recent invention in 1844 (23:44n4); that the Sterling
Club controversy in 1849 (rather than simply J. C. Hare's memoir of Sterling) was what
motivated Carlyle to undertake his Life of John Sterling(185 1) (24:30nl 1); that Walter Raleigh
is alleged to have planted the first potato in Ireland (24:127n4); and that such a thing as an
edition of the Carlyles' poems exists (22:181headnote; 24:7n9). For the leisurely reader (and
what other kind of reader is likely to be reading these letters?) such notes provide pleasures
of their own. Nor should it be forgotten that it is the annotations to this edition of the letters
that supply the only texts presently available for unpublished portions of Thomas Carlyle's
journals.
The above notwithstanding, however, it is still the unique insight into quotidian
details of the Carlyles' lives preserved in the letters themselves that is the supreme attraction
of these volumes. The period covered by the present three volumes is July 1847 through
December 1849, and it is a time of both societal and private change. Public upheavals such
as an abortive uprising in Ireland and more successful ones on the continent (especially that
145
in France in 1848)
Carlyle to undertak
at the end of 1849
beginning to write
these were not h
controversy over f
of John Sterling a
Carlyle's defense of
led to a tour with D
I never dreamed of
Chelsea, Carlyle wr
as Reminiscences o
When one turns to
one finds that thes
1847 Emerson retur
their old friend (a
Carlyle's opinion ap
exchange with Fran
mad ones) that he h
who has (22:220). P
volumes also include
death of her moth
everything! . . . [Al
them on the tomb
make their final de
the Times ; the firs
Mitchell, the Carl
dismissed for drun
Francis Jeffrey for
includes births and
born, she who is C
his nephew Alexan
Anthony Froude him
the three volumes
a fixture in the ho
It will have to rem
autograph letters or
or disagreements t
well: differences o
mistranscriptions or
think that the fron
in 1849, must be
perspective of the
particular volumes
of the letters here
published in an inc
146
somet
partic
the 63
are he
clearly
charac
Fl
No
Simon
and N
In a d
his fri
He was
langua
noted,
Heffer
Carlyl
As a p
and sla
Carlyl
privat
allow h
as vita
the Du
demon
Heffer
valuab
of Car
of The
educat
rightly
conseq
The Le
politic
on his
emplo
cruelty
his su
against
Review
Reviewed Work(s): Moral Desperado. A Life of Thomas Carlyle by Simon Heffer
Review by: David R. Sorensen
147-148
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:48 UTC
somet
partic
the 63
are he
clearly
charac
Fl
No
Simon
and N
In a d
his fri
He was
langua
noted,
Heffer
Carlyl
As a p
and sla
Carlyl
privat
allow h
as vita
the Du
demon
Heffer
valuab
of Car
of The
educat
rightly
conseq
The Le
politic
on his
emplo
cruelty
his su
against
as the editors of th
and Irish revolutio
later generations o
individuals who tran
statistics, and econ
on outdated opinion
admiration of "the
husband's brutal n
might have recogniz
sentimental and lu
that she would hav
herself as a "wife of
including Jeffrey,
more plausible than
both instances she s
"prophetic" preocc
impact on Carlyle's
distrust of anythin
Curiously, Heffer's
with his efforts els
and obtuse as a hus
his reliance on Fro
accepts Froude's "Ca
the fact that nothin
embarrassed by livi
Heffer is keen to re
does not support th
to pray with his par
it cannot be remov
creed prompts Heff
while elsewhere he
Froude, Heffer cann
as F.D. Maurice and
to dismiss Heffer's
the fact that a journ
Carlyle's own rema
century politics and
in the spirit of its
David R. Sorensen
St. Joseph's University
148
Review
Reviewed Work(s): Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters by Lillian F. Shankman,
Abigail Burnham Bloom and John Maynard
Review by: Micael Clarke
149-152
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:48 UTC
Shank
Thack
William
teach
genius
(6). An
predict
"a writ
Thacke
have be
of edu
Anne
beginn
biograp
the let
readings.
The book was composed primarily by Shankman, and completed after her death
by the editors, Abigail Burnham Bloom and John Maynard. The most important component
of this book is two journals, some two-thirds of which have never been published (xii). The
first journal, written in 1864-65, conveys Anne's thoughts and emotions after the death of
her father. The second, written in 1878 for her niece, again recounts Anne's memories of her
father, but is less private, and more clearly an appreciation meant for others' eyes, a family
history in fact. In addition, the book offers a substantial selection of letters that are published
here for the first time.
Anny was the older of Thackeray's two surviving daughters, and because her
mother Isabella suffered from severe depression, while her father became every year a busier
and more celebrated novelist, she led a life that was emotionally both rich and impoverished.
Thackeray's mother, Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth, and her husband, the Major, took care of the
girls in Paris while Thackeray lived in London and made flying visits to his daughters when
he could. Anny's grandmother was a generous, loving woman, but also a gloomy, strict
disciplinarian, and when she began to force some of her beliefs onto the wilful and rebellious
Anny, a lonely, rootless, "child-sick" Thackeray decided it was time to bring his daughters
back to London - Isabella as always living nearby.
In 1846 Anny was nine, with a mind that Major Carmichael-Smyth described as
"thirsting for knowledge" (Gerin 24). Her letters from this period provide a window into the
life of an intelligent, motherless Victorian girl, who had thrust upon her the burdens of
adulthood. Letter 21 (1856), for example, recounts a trip to the theater followed by a more
serious account of nursing a sick grandmother. At first, nursing Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth was
a terrible ordeal, as Anny and Minnie (Harriet Marian) had had to forego a trip to Scotland
with their father, and instead, took turns sitting up with her, recording pulse rates and
temperatures and being "frightened at first with poor Grannies dreadful screams." But then
Thackeray burst in and with his adult knowledge of his mother, overthrew all the worries
and fears: Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth had been told she could eat only three grapes, but "poor
149
soul sh sent for Pa

the 3 grapes was al
them very nice & h
Passages such as t
merge into letters i
was no more than ei
my life crochetting
says it is far nobler
celebrated like the aforesaid Harriet" (43).
That longed-for profession began for Anne in I860, when, with Thackeray's
encouragement and a brief note of introduction, she published her first piece in Cornhill,
an article entitled "Little Scholars." From that time on, Anne was to write nearly every day,
and in her lifetime she published some twenty books as well as an extensive list of
introductions, prefaces, biographical sketches, and periodical essays, including essays on
Jane Austen, John Ruskin, Maria Edgeworth, and Charles Dickens.
That writing career is now being recovered from an obscurity caused by her father's
large shadow, and by biographers and critics such as Winifred Gerin and Carol Hanbery
MacKay. There is sometimes a fine beauty in these letters, as Anne's impressionistic,
somewhat satirical style foreshadowed the later writings of Henry James and Virginia Woolf.
One of her novels, Old Kensington , resembles Thackeray's Vanity Fair in its plot, but
according to Shankman's analysis, more deeply explores women's psyches as it allows the
Amelia figure to grow and develop into maturity.
Anne's role as bridge between her father and her niece Virginia Woolf has been
explored by Gerin, MacKay, and several others, and need only be alluded to here as a part
of the interest these letters and journals hold. Much of her work anticipates and perhaps
nourished the work of better known writers. One novel, for example, Miss Angel, is based
on the life of the 18th century artist Angelica Kauffman, and is in fact the tribute of one
serious, intelligent artist to another. George Eliot, when "fasting" from fiction, excepted only
"Miss Thackeray's stories, which I cannot resist" and "bits" of Trollope (166).
Four of Anne's novels have a spinster narrator, a Miss Williamson (son of William?)
and one of her more fascinating non-fiction pieces, published in Cornhill in 1861, is entitled
"Toilers and Spinsters" (title provided by Thackeray). This essay argues for work for
unmarried women so that they too may enjoy life's pleasures: theaters, concerts, parks,
gardens, books and the delightful pastime of giving one's opinions, whether foolish or wise,
just as bachelors do. She also recommends that clubs be established where women may
meet, dine, enjoy a glass of port, converse, or read (167). She asks finally that women be
granted "Eyes to see . . . and the power of being taught and receiving truth." She continues,
noting that it is "by being taken out of ourselves . . . we most learn to be ourselves and to
fulfill the intention of our being" (168).
These letters provide glimpses into the drama of a life lived by a more than usually
articulate Victorian woman. There is the familial view of Thackeray - for example of his
"misanthropy and disgust" at the noise of Brighton when trying to write, and of his being
"so sick of [novels] that [he] cant even read one without going to sleep," and his "long faces"
over the Oxford campaign bills (24).
When Thackeray died in 1863, Anne at 26 found herself alone and financially and
emotionally responsible for a mad mother, an increasingly fanatical grandmother whose
150
health
with f
Thacke
living
Shank
approv
he sai
wante
me" (105).
Anne's grief at losing her father mixed sorrow with jealousy, rage, guilt, and self-
reproach, emotions present but not always explained here. Even in the last days of his life,
Anne reflected, his absences from home drove her "almost out of my mind ... an absurd
jealousy and suspicion had seized hold of me" (128). The first journal is, as Shankman
describes it, "a book of sorrow, a receptacle of her self-incrimination, self-examination, and
self-revelation" (117).
Despite her sorrow, however, Anne emerges from this period with new strength,
and her story becomes increasingly interesting. One source of interest is her sister Minnie's
marriage to Leslie Stephen, and Anne's somewhat difficult relationship with him, and later
with his daughter by a second marriage, Virginia Woolf. The other is her own marriage -
at forty years of age - to a second cousin eighteen years her junior, a move that of course
occasioned some scandal, but that George Eliot approved.
There are frequent contacts with major figures of the age, George Eliot, Tennyson,
Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Darwin, Arnold, and Henry James.
Anne had a gift for warm friendships, and made the most of the legacy of friends that her
father left her. While she was capable of great loyalty, she was also capable of some asperity.
Of Carlyle, who had once called her father a Cornish giant, she wrote, "grim Thomas seemed
to disapprove of tall men and of many other obvious and inevitable facts" (262).
And just when one might expect Anne to settle into a quiet spinsterhood at the age
of forty, she grows more interesting by marrying her cousin Richmond Ritchie, a promising
young scholar at Cambridge who took a position as an India Office Junior clerk in order to
marry. She wrote to a friend that she loved him, "but not well enough to refuse him" (171).
The marriage seems not to have been entirely happy, but the two children born of it were
Anne's, "deep blessings coming after so much sorrow."
Later letters show important relationships with Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Her
friendship with Henry James deepened. His initial impression of "Miss T" and "her juvenile
husband" changed to admiration of "a woman of genius," with "the power to . . . trace the
implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern" (221; 225). Other letters
reveal concern about Virginia Woolf s health and spirits. These leave the reader with a sense
that the relationship was strained, that Anne was kinder to Woolf than Woolf is to her. For
example, Woolf wrote to Vanessa Bell that "My only triumph [in Night and Day] is that the
Ritchies are furious with me for Mrs. Hilbert [who is based on Anne]" (2 66). Anne, on the
other hand, writes to Leonard Woolf asking for the return of a book she had loaned to "dear
Ginia" : "What I want still more is a good account of her & news of her
(276).
Readers should be cautioned that the letters reproduced here represent Anne's
relationships with friends in a necessarily fragmentary way; much more is known about her
151
relations with Step

comment cited abo
presents previously
instead offers a va
Ritchie.
I have only one b

editorial apparatus
Thackeray Ritchie's
obviously, to ascerta
and introductions. H
and thorough, and w
the work is a valua
WORKS CITED
Gerin, Winifred. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Á Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP,
Micael Clarke
Loyola University of Chicago
The Letters of George Henry Lewes. 2 vols. Ed. William Baker. English Literary
Studies Monograph Series, 64-65. University of Victoria, British Columbia, 1995.
Vol. 1:295 pp. Vol. 2:280 pp. $32.50.
Much of contemporary George Eliot scholarship has been made possible by Gordon
Haight's nine-volume edition of The George Eliot Letters (1854-78). Included in this
collection are letters and journal entries of Eliot's partner of twenty-four years, George Henr
Lewes. This material is a source for scholarship on Lewes himself, but it was selected t
provide insight into Eliot's life and career, not to give a comprehensive and independen
view of Lewes. A great deal of available Lewes material was left out of Haight's collectio
and has remained unpublished. To supplement Haight's Letters and Rosemary Ashton
excellent G.H. Lewes: A Life Ç199X), we now have William Baker's The Letters of George Henry
Lewes. Especially when considered with these earlier sources, the Lewes Letters complica
our understanding of one of the nineteenth-century's most versatile and fascinating author
Baker writes in his "Introduction": "Of the 499 letters printed or summarized here only 53
have been previously published in their entirety and only 14 (but imperfectly) in Haigh
collection" (1:17). Baker corrects errors of transcription, restores omitted passages to already
published letters, and offers over 400 new Lewes letters, which he has gathered from archives
around the world. Given Lewes's central place in the London literary world from the 1850s
through the 1870s, these detailed accounts of business and domestic life should open u
new areas of research, not only on Lewes's life and mind, but also on a vital period o
nineteenth-century intellectual life.
152
Review
Reviewed Work(s): The Letters of George Henry Lewes. English Literary Studies
Monograph Series, 64-65 by William Baker
Review by: Nancy Henry
152-156
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:48 UTC
relations with Step

comment cited abo
presents previously
instead offers a va
Ritchie.
I have only one b

editorial apparatus
Thackeray Ritchie's
obviously, to ascerta
and introductions. H
and thorough, and w
the work is a valua
WORKS CITED
Gerin, Winifred. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Á Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP,
Micael Clarke
Loyola University of Chicago
The Letters of George Henry Lewes. 2 vols. Ed. William Baker. English Literary
Studies Monograph Series, 64-65. University of Victoria, British Columbia, 1995.
Vol. 1:295 pp. Vol. 2:280 pp. $32.50.
Much of contemporary George Eliot scholarship has been made possible by Gordon
Haight's nine-volume edition of The George Eliot Letters (1854-78). Included in this
collection are letters and journal entries of Eliot's partner of twenty-four years, George Henr
Lewes. This material is a source for scholarship on Lewes himself, but it was selected t
provide insight into Eliot's life and career, not to give a comprehensive and independen
view of Lewes. A great deal of available Lewes material was left out of Haight's collectio
and has remained unpublished. To supplement Haight's Letters and Rosemary Ashton
excellent G.H. Lewes: A Life Ç199X), we now have William Baker's The Letters of George Henry
Lewes. Especially when considered with these earlier sources, the Lewes Letters complica
our understanding of one of the nineteenth-century's most versatile and fascinating author
Baker writes in his "Introduction": "Of the 499 letters printed or summarized here only 53
have been previously published in their entirety and only 14 (but imperfectly) in Haigh
collection" (1:17). Baker corrects errors of transcription, restores omitted passages to already
published letters, and offers over 400 new Lewes letters, which he has gathered from archives
around the world. Given Lewes's central place in the London literary world from the 1850s
through the 1870s, these detailed accounts of business and domestic life should open u
new areas of research, not only on Lewes's life and mind, but also on a vital period o
nineteenth-century intellectual life.
152
The G
edition
whole
meetin
and sel
as a wr
and it
science
to his
record
Works
several
Comm
and fo
Baker
descri
Lewes
Smith.
are hel
and al
George
reprin
"collect
does in
Haight
and pa
centur
As wit
an Ody
person
by Ash
introd
one, w
short-l
Leigh H
even a
eventu
how p
the pl
paper
am so
(24 No
in Lew
bless y
in this
Agnes
153
1852) in which Lewe

appears in a letter
of Franz Liszt, whom
"run off' together.
The end of Lewes
beginning of the sec
Westminster Review
"my wife" and may
emphasis, giving us
birth certificate of
George Eliot would
impossibility of eve
" The Leader, Lonel
she recovering from
and intellectual inf
by his friend Hunt i
maturity resulting
himself behind, bu
The experience of
tone of authority in
in his professional c
Bulwer Lytton, wr
publisher of many L
an aristocrat, Lewes
1860s, he is a succe
needs the other" (1
status based on his
reveal his influence
Cornhill Magazine,
publisher of the Cor
a paid consultant for
the Pall Mall Gazett
peaked with the of
resigned in 1866 du
One of the most r
as he reached the h
attention to areas of
authoritative advisor
eminent scientists o
Problems of Life a
Lewes was consciou
was entirely self-tau
a mixture of pride
eminent scientific
literary alien, as for
treated by them as a
154
to him
Robert
"Be pat
of whi
insight
again t
extrica
kindne
(2:416)
The de
who h
in the
promp
Cambr
mass a
numbe
Lewes
and M
momen
of Mid
(1876).
an 187
was dis
how th
your a
North
seen" (2:470).
These letters show, as no published material has shown before, that Lewes never
made a complete break with his old self, but rather, through revisions of previous popular
works, maintained a balance between the popularizer and the specialist. In a new 1856 letter
to Blackwood, he rejects the idea of simply reprinting his series of articles, "Sea-side Studies":
"Now I am not disposed to write deliberate ephemera, elsewhere than in periodicals; one
may write ephemera believing or hoping they will be permanent, but not with a foregone
conclusion of their ephemerality!" (1:173). Instead, he proposes expanding and revising
the articles into a book which would be of "permanent interest": "Existing books are either
too slight & superficial for real use, or assume too much knowledge on the part of the reader;
the one class of writers forgets its former ignorance, the other class has not emerged from
ignorance & dare not venture upon details" (1:173). Even as he moved on to new things,
Lewes was continually revising his Biographical History of Philosophy. The first edition,
published in 1845-6, was followed by a second (1857), a third (1867) and a fourth (1871).
The changes were so substantial that by the time Lewes had finished the second edition, he
had repudiated the first. The Life and Works of Goethe also saw major revisions to the first
two-volume 1855 edition: there was a second one-volume edition (1864), a third edition
(1875), and even an abridged version called The Story of Goethe's Life (187 3). These revisions
have not been sufficiently attended to in criticism of Lewes's thought and writing. The insight
provided by these letters into how the revisions reflect his changing views, of how his past
155
was continually pa
impetus to textual s
his views from any
In terms of family
with his three sons.
George Eliot, while r
in Switzerland, and
have "a hug of my
perhaps making ev
and speculation abou
letters, the later y
company. Many of
recover their healt
Lewes writes to his
is delicious - then
- then breakfast -
stopped to kiss as
comfort in writing
and affection for "his wife."
William Baker has made tremendous contributions to Lewes scholarship, among

them founding and editing the journal George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies , the
primary source for new discoveries about and critical articles on Eliot and Lewes. In his
"Introduction," Baker writes that the letters "bring us closer both to an understanding of
George Henry Lewes - the fine stylist, the careful protector of George Eliot, the generous,
practical, and eclectic intellectual and family man - and to a fuller awareness of the rich,
diverse tapestry of Victorian life and letters" (1:38). Without doubt, this two-volume edition
of the Lewes letters is invaluable, and points the way for the next generation of Lewes
scholarship.
Nancy Henry
The State University of New York at Binghamton
Carlyle and the Economics of Terror: A Study ofRevisionary Gothicism in The French
Revolution, by Mary Desaulniers. McGill-Queen's University Press, x + 140. $49-95
Following a line of study developed primarily in several hooks by Marc Shell and by
Kurt Heinzelman's The Economics of Imagination , Mary Desaulniers proposes to read
Carlyle as a writer in whose texts we can see linguistic and economic systems interiorizing,
replicating, and reinforcing one another. This is the kind of book that attempts to cut away
gauzy layers of literary and socio-economic commentary on Carlyle and get - so to speak -
to the base of his operations. Desaulniers' effort seems to me at once exhilarating and a bit
premature.
Desaulniers' initial move is to define money itself, in its capacity to symbolize value,
156
Review
Reviewed Work(s): Carlyle and the Economics of Terror: A Study of Revisionary Gothicism
in The French Revolution by Mary Desaulniers
Review by: John P. Farrell
156-159
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:48 UTC
was continually pa
impetus to textual s
his views from any
In terms of family
with his three sons.
George Eliot, while r
in Switzerland, and
have "a hug of my
perhaps making ev
and speculation abou
letters, the later y
company. Many of
recover their healt
Lewes writes to his
is delicious - then
- then breakfast -
stopped to kiss as
comfort in writing
and affection for "his wife."
William Baker has made tremendous contributions to Lewes scholarship, among

them founding and editing the journal George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies , the
primary source for new discoveries about and critical articles on Eliot and Lewes. In his
"Introduction," Baker writes that the letters "bring us closer both to an understanding of
George Henry Lewes - the fine stylist, the careful protector of George Eliot, the generous,
practical, and eclectic intellectual and family man - and to a fuller awareness of the rich,
diverse tapestry of Victorian life and letters" (1:38). Without doubt, this two-volume edition
of the Lewes letters is invaluable, and points the way for the next generation of Lewes
scholarship.
Nancy Henry
The State University of New York at Binghamton
Carlyle and the Economics of Terror: A Study ofRevisionary Gothicism in The French
Revolution, by Mary Desaulniers. McGill-Queen's University Press, x + 140. $49-95
Following a line of study developed primarily in several hooks by Marc Shell and by
Kurt Heinzelman's The Economics of Imagination , Mary Desaulniers proposes to read
Carlyle as a writer in whose texts we can see linguistic and economic systems interiorizing,
replicating, and reinforcing one another. This is the kind of book that attempts to cut away
gauzy layers of literary and socio-economic commentary on Carlyle and get - so to speak -
to the base of his operations. Desaulniers' effort seems to me at once exhilarating and a bit
premature.
Desaulniers' initial move is to define money itself, in its capacity to symbolize value,
156
as a sor
human
exchan
sugges
assimi
influen
any cas
Carlyle
She be
disguis
econom
identif
fallen
utteran
by the
assimil
Gothic
symbo
interse
of pow
interpr
action.
shape t
articul
of the
"the G
as Got
Pamela
in Fred
The bo
Faust a
Desauln
them i
reader
French
lace" in
action
irony.
Faust's
and th
and sy
and red
since t
figure
rejects
into th
identifies the Go
superannuated lang
This subtle (perhap
the Gothic supports
for seeing an "econo
and prerogatives of
narrative he was to
French Revolution.
The centerpiece of this keenly intelligent book is the third chapter, "Economics and
Economy in The French Revolution" which, in the author's summary, considers "the Gothic
betrayal of body and text, the economic ramifications of the body politic, the 'representa-
tional' dynamics of the Eucharist, and the role of the reader as the political body within an
'act' of reading" (7). Following an argument set forth in Tilottama Rajan's The Supplement
of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (1990), Desaulniers
pursues the question of how Carlyle's reader acquires "body" (representation) in the text of
his history. We begin with the point that "writing is the coining of general equivalence, the
production of an arbitrary and abstracted third term, effected by the rupture of signifier and
signified. The reader as supplement recuperates this abstraction by returning it to a barter
economy of material expression. The reader 'activates' the text by returning the displaced
meaning to the word and the word becomes thing (or 'symbol' for Carlyle) in an economy
which bases its 'brotherhood' not on the aggregative principle of a contracted wager, but
on the 'brotherhood' of the incarnational text" (62). There seem to me altogether too many
interpretive engines - deconstructive, Marxist, performative - humming at once in Desaulniers'
analysis. Yet even if she has taken a longer way around than necessary, there can be no
question that she has made an extremely illuminating case for the way in which Carlyle's
probing meditation on the protocols of economic exchange enabled him to see how the
dispossessed could be repossessed in the intricate exchange enacted between author and
reader in a truly performative text. I would myself argue that it was Book III of Sartor ; rather
than "The Diamond Necklace," that actually prepared Carlyle for his great achievement in
constructing The French Revolution as a performance of community. This aside, I can only
admire Desaulniers' subtle, incisive, and exciting discussion of symbolic action in Carlyle's
historical narrative.
The next two chapters, each extremely interesting in itself, are much more like
pendants than sequences in Desaulniers' critical narrative. The fourth chapter, "Economics
and Economy in the King's Glorious Body," focuses on Carlyle's interest in both portraiture
and the body as sign to suggest how The French Revolution uses Rousseau's Social Contract
(with its emphasis on the body politic) as a counter-text. "Carlyle's manipulation of the
pathetic body in The French Revolutionunderscores the problematic status of representation
within the ailing French kingship. The glorious body of the King fails as a symbol of French
nationhood; yet the patriot's struggle to spawn a 'Revolutionary Prodigy' is equally
disastrous" (100). Desaulniers is guided in this chapter by Paul de Man's reading of Rousseau.
"De Man's metaphor of (mis)reading provides a seductive paradigm for Carlyle reading
Rousseau and for the (mis)reading of . . . political events ... as generation of history.
Ultimately the King's Body becomes a metaphor for the dissolution and unification of the
political body. In a parallel way, Carlyle's own language becomes the site at which allegory
and symbol are severed and coalesced" (8).
158
The fi
French
does C
shared
transc
ambiti
'recons
the re
expand
conceiv
relation
Indeed
have g
firmer
to its p
in Desa
of a C
J
U
Back Matter
Source: Carlyle Studies Annual, No. 16, Special Issue: Carlyle at 200 Lectures II (1996)
Accessed: 07-01-2020 09:48 UTC
Be s q
^ A Journal of the American Renaissance
■ ESQ: A Journal of the theory, literary history,

American Renaissance is and the history of ideas. A
devoted to the study of special
that feature is the publi-
circle of genius that took cation of essays reviewing
shape in nineteenth-centurygroups of related figures and
American literature. ESQtopics
fo- in the field, thereby
cuses upon midcentury providing a forum for view-
American romanticism but ing recent scholarship in
also extends throughout thebroad perspectives.
century to encompass its ori-
gins and effects. ■ ESQ publishes the work of
up-and-coming young scholars,
■ Articles include critical as well as such established
essays, source and influencefigures as Lawrence Buell,
studies, and biographical Linek C. Johnson, Carolyn
studies, as well as more Karcher, Emily Budick, and
general discussions of literary Merton M. Sealts, Jr.
ESQ is published quarterly by the Washington State University Press.

Address inquiries concerning subscriptions and advertising to the Circu-
lation Manager, Washington State University Press, Pullman, Washington
99164-5910. Effective with the 1993 volume year (Volume 39), subscrip-
tion rates will be 118.00 for individuals and $25.00 for libraries and other
institutions. Foreign subscriptions, excluding Canada and Mexico, should
add $7.50 U.S. currency to cover postage and handling.
Manuscript submissions should be addressed to the Editor, ESQ , Depart-

ment of English, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington
99164-5020. Contributions should conform to The Chicago Manual of
Style.
/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']
/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']

Carlyle Studies Annual - Number 16, 1996 PDF

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Carlyle Studies Annual - Number 16, 1996 PDF

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Front Matter

Carlyle at 200 Lectures II

Memorial University, St. John's,

Rodger L. Tarr (Illinois State University)

Anne Skabarnicki (Royal Military College of Canada)

Book Review Editor:

D. J. Trela (Roosevelt University)

Mark Cumming (Memorial University of Newfoundland)

Ann Greenseth, David Dean, Joe Tigan

Copyright © 1996 Carlyle Studies Annual

An equal opportunity/affirmative action university encouraging diversity

Carlyle at 200 Lectures II

Memorial University, St. John's,

Jane Welsh Carlyle: Letters, the Self, and the Literary

Constructing Reality: Jane Welsh Carlyle's Epistolary Narratives

Carlyle's Scotch Scepticism: Writing from the Scottish Tradition

The Cultural Revolution of Sartor Resartus

Selective Affinities: Carlyle, Goethe, and the French Revolution

Carlyle's Subliminal Feminine:

continued on next page

Racialism and the P

A Latter-day French Carlylean

The Stupidest Novel in London:

Years' Work in Carlyle Studies 1994-1995

Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism provides a forum for interpre-

The journal invites submission of original articles and notes,

Poe Studies is published twice a year by the Washington State

A Journal of American Women Writers

LEGACY is the premiere journal devoted exclusively to the rich

HIGHLIGHTS FROM RECENT ISSUES

rn PENN STATE PRESS

) To subscribe, write or call the Penn State Press, Journals Department,

Mark Cumming, Guest Editor

I would like to extend my thanks and appreciation to Mark Cumming

For the Romantic p

At the end of this document, in Thomas Carlyle's handwriting, is a comment. What

And now having bro

The coda to this ac

Oh dear me! how sh

1 This is illuminatingly demonstrated in Myers, 227-57.

2 See Pennington, Halsband, and the Letters of Anna Seward.

or amusing commentaries on her own or Carlyle's life, or on the status of Victorian

Little Lewis came th

I used to think these Lewises a perfect pair of love-birds

This passage illustrates two characteristics of Welsh

This first paragraph

This contains the c

of her wish provide

from Manchester. . . .You know his horror of having to

That . . . the door w

I do not accuse Mrs. Carlyle of intentional misrepresentation so far as I am concerned.

at once? If you ask she m

Jay, Elizabeth, ed. The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. Oxford:

nothing of the inf

carry with it no gre

Society is founded upon Cloth construed as an emblem or symbol signifying the

Fantastic tricks eno

This passage resona

philosophy are evide

Was man with his E

Time and again in "

'Stewart, "Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid," 11.

"Hamilton, "Philosophy of Perception" Discussions , 43.