Thomas+Caryle,+Sartor+Resartus

Thomas Carlyle was born on December 4, 1795, in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, Scotland. An influential and often controversial social critic, he is widely regarded as one of the most prominent figures in the religious debates of the Victorian era. The Oxford DNB lists him as “author, biographer, and historian,” although he is also described as a philosopher and social reformer (Kaplan). According to the editors of the Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose, Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, his unusual writing style has more recently been given the term ‘Carlylese’ to describe his “Teutonic phrasings” and “debt to Germanic thought” (Leighton and Surridge 354). Indeed, much of his work is translations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His parents were strict Calvinists, a major branch of Protestantism, and his religious upbringing had a profound influence on him later in life. Literary critic Elisabeth Jay suggests that “He had required the combined forces of German Romanticism, and a move from Lowland Scotland to literary London, to shake off some of the Calvinist shackles of his childhood and to alert him to the importance and the near impossibility of obtaining ‘a foothold outside time’ from which to critique nationally rooted beliefs” (Jay 356-357). Religious beliefs in the Victorian period experienced a radical shift, and the time in which Carlyle was writing was marked by a widespread loss of faith in traditional Christianity.

H.E. Marshall, introducing writers to children in his 1909 book, //English Literature for Boys and Girls,// notes that Carlyle’s parents sent him to school in Annan, where he was an outcast, and was bullied to such an extent that he left after three years (Marshall 633). He went on to attend the University of Edinburgh, and became a mathematics teacher, only to return to the university from 1819-1821, where he had a crisis of faith that led him to write //Sartor Resartus// (Kaplan). It was //Sartor Resartus// and //The French Revolution: A History// (1837) that would establish him as the “Sage of Chelsea:” a bohemian, radical intellectual who was controversial for his heavily satirical writings. In 1821, he left the clergy to pursue the career of a writer. He attempted to write novels, but rejected the genre for essays (“Thomas Carlyle”). The tourist website Dumfries and Galloway notes that his first unsuccessful attempt at fiction was a novel called “Cruthers and Jonson,” and he translated Goethe’s //Willhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship// before abandoning the form of the realistic novel to develop a new form of fiction, which we get in //Sartor Resartus// (“Thomas Carlyle”). During this time he wrote a number of essays on German literature as well as the influential //Signs of the Times and Characteristics//, though, as the introduction in the Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose suggests, he made most of his money from lecturing (Leighton and Surridge 354).

Carlyle married Jane Baillie Welsh in 1826, who provided a house with her estate, Craigenputtock, where they lived on and off for 40 years before her unexpected death in 1866, which prompted him to write the self-critical “Reminiscences of Jane Welsh Carlyle” (“Thomas Carlyle”). After his death in 1881, J.A. Froude published material suggesting their marital unhappiness, including “Reminiscences,” and //Life of Carlyle//, which postulated that their marriage remained unconsummated (Froude 21-24). Carlyle began writing //Sartor Resartus// (translated as //The Tailor Retailored//) in 1831 at Craigenputtock, and it was first published in //Fraser’s Magazine// in 1833 (“Thomas Carlyle”). Semi-autobiographical, it follows an unnamed editor’s attempted biography of its fictional protagonist, Diogenes Teufelsdröchk, a German philosopher of clothes. //Sartor Resartus// is heavily satirical, and its form belies the irony, as Carlyle is “clothing” his own biographical details through its scathing satire. In this sense, it is semi-fictional, as Professor Teufelsdröchk is bullied, and controversial for his ideas, like Carlyle, but it is all filtered through the nameless editor.

//Sartor Resartus// has utilitarian underpinnings, an idea coined by John Mill and associated with Marxism and communism in its ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number of people’ principle, as well as biblical overtones, and it offers a scathing critique of commercialization and the idea of capitalism as religion. It outlines a religious awakening, which was later thought of by philosophers at the end of the 1800s as the existential crisis, through its three key chapters: “The Everlasting No” of refusal, the “Centre of Indifference,” and “The Everlasting Yea” of acceptance. Chapter 7, “The Everlasting No,” is characterized by the spirit of unbelief in God: “Thus had the EVERLASTING NO (//das ewige Nein//) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME; and then was it that my whole ME stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest” (Carlyle 387). “The Everlasting No” represents a complete rejection of faith, a controversial notion in 1833, but Carlyle builds on a tradition of texts that involve a religious awakening such as Goethe’s //Faust// and Milton’s //Paradise Lost// (which he directly references [356]). The “Center of Indifference” (Chapter 8) suggests that one has to be indifferent before they can have faith: “This,” says our professor, “was the CENTRE OF INDIFFERENCE I had now reached; through which whoso travels from the Negative Pole to the Positive must necessarily pass” (Carlyle 363). Chapter 9, “The Everlasting Yea,” is characterized by //The Nuttall Encyclopedia// as “the principle that there is no such thing as faith in God except in… [uncompromising] antagonism against the spirit opposed to God” (Wood). Carlyle writes: “On the roaring billows of Time, thou art not engulfed, but borne aloft into the azure of Eternity. Love not pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved: wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him” (Carlyle 367).

Carlyle’s thought can be summarized by a movement from rejection in “The Everlasting No” to indifference at the “Centre of Indifference” and finally to acceptance in “The Everlasting Yea.” According to //Sartor Resartus//, this is how a religious awakening has to occur. However, Carlyle’s //Sartor Resartus// is satirical, and his description of paradise in “The Everlasting Yea” reinforces the critique of religion he presents us with and anticipates something more like the existential crisis.

Why does Carlyle capitalize some words and not others? What is a ‘Carlylese’ word to capitalize? OH/Engl387/Fall2014/UVic

Works Cited

Carlyle, Thomas. “From //Sartor Resartus//” The //Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose 1832-1901//. Ed. Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa A. Surridge. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2012. 354-69. Print.

Froude, James Anthony, Georgina Margaret Froude, and James Fitzjames Stephen. //My Relations with Carlyle//. London: Longmans, Green, 1903. //Archive.org//. 1903. Web. 30 Oct. 2014.

Jay, Elisabeth. "Spirituality." //The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature//. Ed. Kate Flint. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 356-57. Print.

Kaplan, Fred. "Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881)." //Oxford Dictionary of National Biography//. Oxford University Press, Oct. 2008. Web. 30 Oct. 2014.

Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, and Lisa A. Surridge. Headnote to "Thomas Carlyle." Introduction. //The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose 1832-1901//. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2012. 354. Print.

Marshall, H. E. "Carlyle - The Sage of Chelsea." //English Literature for Boys and Girls//. New York: F.A. Stokes, 1909. N. pag. Print.

Wood, James. "Everlasting Yea, The." //The Nuttall Encyclopedia//. London: Frederick Warne & Co, 1920. Web. 29 Oct. 2014.

"Thomas Carlyle." //Dumfries and Galloway//. Dumfries and Galloway, 31 Mar. 1998. Web. 30 Oct. 2014.