Robert Huntington Fletcher‘The Condition of England’: Carlyle and Dickens
The disconcertions and anomalies of early Victorian Britain are nowhere more trenchantly examined than in the pamphlets, essays, lectures, and books of its most noisy and effective critic, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Carlyle was a late product of the Scottish Enlightenment, and of the culture which had made the
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Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802) an intellectual force to be reckoned with beyond the borders of Scotland. The power and effect of his own writings do not, however, derive exclusively from the classical rationality of late eighteenth-century Edinburgh philosophy. Carlyle’s fundamental debt to the rhythms and the confident, prophetic utterance of the Bible is profound, as is his sense of himself as a latter-day Jeremiah, endowed with the urgent accents of a Presbyterian pulpit. He was also exceptionally well read in modern German thought which was already exerting a powerful cerebral influence over the literatures of other European nations. His own Life of Schiller was published in the London Magazine in 1823-4 and his translation of Goethe’s seminal novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship appeared in 1824.
When, in 1834, Carlyle settled in London he was seeking a broader metropolitan base, and a wider audience, for his increasingly urgent commentaries on the times. The year before his move he had begun the serialization in
Fraser’s Magazine of his perplexing fiction, Sartor Resartus, a work which combines a theorizing German central character with a mediating, and explicitly English, editor. Much earlier in his career he had aspired to a fiction which would speak ‘with a tongue of fire — sharp, sarcastic, apparently unfeeling’ but which would nevertheless convey the central precepts of his philosophy: energy, earnestness, and duty. Sartor Resartus (‘The Tailor Retailored’) realizes that ambition in the form of a reflexive discourse moulded around a learned study of the philosophy of clothes.
Carlyle’s English editor describes the nature of this tract as made up of two undemarcated parts and of ‘multifarious sections and subdivisions’ in which each part ‘overlaps, and indents and indeed quite runs through the other’. It is like ‘some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded’. The style in which it is written embodies this