Thomas Carlyle’s Change and Ambivalence*
Wang Songlin
Faculty of Foreign Languages, Ningbo University
818 Fenghua Road, Jiangbei District, Ningbo, Zhejiang 315211, China
Email: [email protected]
Abstract This paper discusses the ambivalence behind Carlyle’s change from
radicalism to conservatism, mainly by exploring the inner contradiction of
Teufelsdröckh, Carlyle’s semi-autobiographical figure in Sartor Resartus,while
citing Carlyle’s other writings to demonstrate how his early Calvinist family
background and his later outstanding years affected his appeals for social order
as well as the Gospel of work as a remedy for moral degradation of his time.
The paper concludes by suggesting that in the heart of Carlyle’s change and
ambivalence dwells the agony of a prophet of modernist consciousness who was
acutely wary of the potential chaos, contradiction and even the absurdity far beyond
his era.
Key words Carlyle; change; ambivalence
Author Wang Songlin is Professor of English at Ningbo University, China. His
research interests cover Victorian literature and culture. He is currently a visiting
scholar in English Department, Edinburgh University.
Although the first generation of what we call “Victorian” authors were born early
in the nineteenth century, and were active in its first two decades, their intellectual
roots are traceable back to the eighteenth. Carlyle, Mill, Newman, Macaulay all
grew up under the shadow of French Revolution of 1789 and later, as well as the
Napoleonic Wars ( 1803-15) which were changing the maps of Europe. They were
all of them, in different ways, children of an age of change and revolution, and this
was to be crucial in their work.
Many of Carlyle’s contemporary writers were quite conscious of the social
transition of their age.1 Bulwer-Lytton perhaps articulated most clearly such a
transition, he said:
We live in an age of visible transition — an age of disquietude and doubt，
of the removal of time-worn landmarks and the breaking up of the hereditary
elements of society — old opinions, feelings — ancestral customs and
institutions are crumbling away, and both the spiritual and temporal worlds
are darkened by the shadows of change. The commencement of one of these
epochs — periodical in the history of mankind — is hailed by the sanguine
as the coming of a new Millennium — a great iconoclastic reformation, by
which all false gods shall be overthrown. To me such epochs appear but as
the dark passages in the appointed progress of mankind — the times of great
unhappiness to our species — passages into which we have reason to rejoice
at our entrance, save from the hope of being sooner landed on the opposite
side. ( 318-19 )
None was, however, more affected by change than Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881),
born in a humble working-class environment in South-West Scotland, the product
of stern Calvinist Christian parents, who worked his way through school and
university, through an early writing career in Edinburgh to his move to Chelsea in
1834, and eventually to world renown as one of the Victorian Age’s most significant
essayists, historians and social thinkers.
I
Carlyle’s early life was spent in this age of tumultuous change, change in Europe, in
Britain undergoing the throes of the Industrial Revolution and the social upheaval
which accompanied it, and in Scotland where he witnessed a great literary age after
the death of Burns and the full popularity of Sir Walter Scott. His early years in
Ecclefechan instilled in him a world-view and a work ethic which were to remain
with him, in whatever modified form, to the end of his days in London. His village
life was still that of farming and small business, his University years introduced
him to city life in Edinburgh, and his holiday walks and travels introduced him
to the industrial landscape of Scotland and England which were transforming the
country. He came to see the working class poverty which was to strike Engels in
Manchester and Liverpool,2 and which he came to experience in the early years of
his marriage when he and his wife lived in their moorland farmhouse with almost
no money at all. From very modest beginnings in London he rose to eminence,
to mixing with high society as well as a vivid cross-section of the literary and
intellectual life of his time and of Europe, but he never lost touch with those early
years when (unlike many of his contemporaries) he had not enjoyed the privilege or
money, but had shared the basic working conditions of the working class.
Carlyle’s attitudes towards change were thus ambivalent, fluctuating
paradoxically from the radicalism of his earlier years to conservatism in his later
years. In “Characteristics” written in 1831 Carlyle realised that change was a
painful “necessary evil”:
In Change, therefore, there is nothing terrible, nothing supernatural: on the
contrary, it lies in the very essence of our lot and life in this world. Today
is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our Works and Thoughts, if
they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed,
is painful; yet ever needful; and if Memory have its force and worth, so also
has Hope. Nay, if we look well to it, what is all Derangement, and necessity
of great Change, in itself such an evil, but the product simply of increased
resources which the old methods can no longer administer; of new wealth
which the old coffers will no longer contain? What is it, for example, that
in our own day bursts asunder the bonds of ancient Political Systems, and
perplexes all Europe with the fear of Change, but even this: the increase of
social resources, which the old social methods will no longer sufficiently
administer? (Criticism of Thomas Carlyle 79)
Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus (first published in1833 in Fraser’s Magazine
in serialization form), is at a very important level a Bildungsroman, a hidden
autobiography through which Carlyle (in the guise of Teufelsdröckh) recounts his
youthful struggles to come to terms with existence. Book II of Sartor Resartus
is in a way an exhibition of Carlyle’s own existential uncertainty and his strong
aspiration for radical change. Like Carlyle, whose childhood was spent in reverence
for and obedience to his father and whose higher education left him susceptible to
the infection of religious doubt, and desolate after the failure of his first romance,
the central personage Teufelsdröckh feels sorrowful and dark in his youthful
years. Unable to “escape from his own Shadow”(121), Teufelsdröckh experiences
a spiritual nadir in the “Everlasting No” chapter, desperately feeling the universe
has become “all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, Even of hostility: it was one
huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to
grind me from limb to limb”(127). Like Carlyle himself, Teufelsdröckh suffers “an
eclipse of faith which precipitate in him the abject psychic torment” ( P.Rosenberg
58 ).It is not until he comes to Paris where he is shifted to the big world outside
him, to cities and towns, to the battlefield of Wagram that Teufelsdröckh feels he
has broadened his vision , stepped out of his own shadow and changed to be a “Child
of Freedom” and could meet and defy anything:
And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and
I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength,
a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was
changed:no Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed
Defiance. ( 129)
Professor Teufelsdröckh’s raging voice is that of Carlyle himself. The repetition
of the word “fire” indicates the fury and strong desire of a radical young man for
change as well as for spiritual purification. Immediately after his awakening from
self-doubt, Teufelsdröckh, in the “Everlasting Yea” chapter, realizes his heavy
dreams “rolled gradually away,” and he awakes “to a new Heaven and a New
Earth” ( 142).
Teufelsdröckh’s radicalism also finds expression in his attitude towards
transforming the old society and old customs. In Teufelsdröckh’s writings on the
philosophy and history of clothes, Carlyle uses clothing as a metaphor for the empty
forms of old custom and institutionalized society. Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy is “but
a continual battle against Custom; an ever- renewed effort to transcend the sphere
of blind custom and so become Transcendental”(196). Teufelsdröckh cynically
treats the old world as a “huge Ragfair” where he is suffocated by the raining of
“rags and tatters of old Symbols” (179).Teufelsdröckh, clearly aware of the “critical
condition” in which he is situated, strongly advocates the Garment of the old
society shall be “mostly burned”:
[We] are at this hour in a most critical condition; beleaguered by that
boundless “Armament of Mechanizers” and Unbelievers, threatening to
strip us bare! “The World,” says he, “as it needs must, is under a process of
devastation and waste, which, whether by silent assiduous corrosion, or open
quicker combustion, as the case chances, will effectually enough annihilate
the past Forms of Society; replace them with what it may. For the present, it
is contemplated that when man’s whole Spiritual Interests are once divested,
these innumerable stript-off Garments shall mostly be burnt; but the sounder
Rags among them be quilted together into one huge Irish watch-coat for the
defence of the Body only!” — This, we think, is but Job’s-news to the humane
reader. (178)
The radicalism of Thomas Carlyle’s early years is best exemplified in his
Reminiscences posthumously published in 1881. Carlyle was quite well aware of
his own radicalism as he recalled his youth. In his recollection of the approaching
George Fourth visit to Edinburgh, he expressed his disgust with the “ fulsome
loyalty” of all classes in Edinburgh and claimed himself a man of “ private
radicalism of mind ” (Reminiscences 173). In his reminiscence essay on Edward
Irving (1866), Carlyle records his tenacious opposition to Irving in terms of his
notion of Reform Bill and Christianity:
He[ Irving] objected clearly to my Reform- Bill notions; found Democracy
a thing forbidden, leading down to outer darkness; I, a thing inevitable, and
obliged to lead whithersoever it could. We had several colloquies on that
subject; on which, though my own poor convictions are widened, not altered,
I should now have more sympathy with his than was then the case. We also
talked on Religion and Christianity “Evidences,” — our notions, of course,
more divergent than ever. “It is sacred, my friend; we can call it sacred: such a
Civitas Dei as was never built before; wholly the grandest series of work ever
hitherto done by the Human Soul, — the Highest God (doubt it not) assenting
and inspiring all along!” This I remember once saying plainly; Which was not
an encouragement to prosecute the topic. We were in fact, hopelessly divided,
to what tragical extent both of us might well feel! (Reminiscences 309-310)
Campbell notes that the above passage shows Carlyle’s “sharp-focused moments
of insight into his own character and a sense of the moments of turning which
influenced him” (Campbell 2012: 9).The passage also clearly records Carlyle’s
willingness to accept what he understood as “Democracy” and his doubts of
Christianity, in contrast to Irving’s reserved Annandale world view. Clearly ,as
Campbell points out, this is “the moment of change” for Carlyle, who “takes
the strong structure he grew up with in Scotland — one based on powerful
personalities, financial stringency, and an omnipresent protestant theology — and
sees its inevitable transformation into the Civitas Dei he met in early Victorian
London” (Campbell 2012: 9-10).
It is worth noticing that while Carlyle was recalling the past he would not
forget to bring himself back to the present reality by saying that “I should now
have more sympathy with his than was then the case.” In fact, Carlyle was not as
radical as we imagine and his view of change assumes a form of ambivalence in
Sartor Resartus. Teufelsdröckh holds a dialectic view of change by comparing it
to the Nevada of Phoenix, which he thinks, quite contrary to common senses, is a
paradoxical mixture of “melodious Death-song and Birth-song”:
[Change] is wont to be gradual: thus, while the serpent sheds its old skin, the
new is already formed beneath. Little knowest thou of the burning of a World-
Phoenix, who fanciest that she must first burn out, and lie as a dead cinereous
heap; and therefrom the young one start up by miracle, and fly heavenward.
Far otherwise! In that Fire-whirlwind, Creation and Destruction proceed
together; ever as the ashes of the Old are blown about, do organic filaments of
the New mysteriously spin themselves: and amid the rushing and the waving
of the Whirlwind element come tones of a melodious Death-song, which
end not but in tones of a more melodious Birthsong. Nay, look into the Firewhirlwind
with your own eyes and thou wilt see. (185)
The image of fire as a reviving and purifying power is frequently employed by
Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus. Towards the end of the Everlasting No chapter
Teufelsdröckh , after a hard inner struggle against the Devil Universe, comes to the
realization that“it is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or
Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man” ( 129)
.Later in the Old Clothes chapter, the Clothes-Professor proclaims: “ ‘Ghosts of
Life, come to Judgment!’ Reck not, ye fluttering Ghosts: he will purify you in his
Purgatory, with fire and with water; and, one day, new-created ye shall reappear”
( 183). Sun Newspaper ( 1st April, 1834) cited commentary of an “ old Dennis” ,
calling Sartor Resartus “a heap of clotted nonsense, mixed however, here and there,
with passages marked by thought and striking poetic vigor,” while questioning
Carlyle’s intelligibility in using the phrase “Baphometic fire-baptism ” ( qtd.in
APPENDIX V to SR 237 ).
Carlyle’s “Baphometic fire-baptism” is, to my understanding, a paradoxical
allusion of the binary elements representing the sum total of the universe, a union
of opposites, a mixture of good and evil, life and death. Teufelsdröckh’s fire
resembles the fire of Dante’s Commedia which is more of a reviving and purifying
power than a fatally destructive agent. The so-called Old and Sick Society,
according to Teufelsdröckh, is “but her mortal coil which she has shuffled off, to
assume a nobler; she herself, through perpetual metamorphoses, in fairer and fairer
development, has to live till Time also merge in Eternity”( 179). Teufelsdröckh is
content that “old sick Society should be deliberately burnt”, and he believes that
like phoenix “a new heaven-born young one will rise out of her ashes!”(180)
The recurrent fire-image as a simultaneous power of “Creation and
Destruction” and a catalyst of the union of “melodious Death-song and melodious
Birthsong” indicates Carlyle’s restrained view of change. Therefore, it deserves
special notice that Carlyle’s radicalism through the mouthpiece of Teufelsdröckh
was a moderate one and rarely developed into extremism, even in his early years.
His view of change, both personal and social, was that of a gradual reconstruction
instead of an entire destruction. This explains Carlyle’s own conservatism as
he grew older and became increasingly distinguished in social position. As
Teufelsdröckh suggests, change should be something like “organic filaments”
spinning themselves in gradual process and in organic and unified form instead of
a bloody and stormy revolution. It is for this reason that Teufelsdröckh’s change is
humorously dubbed by the editor-narrator as “glorious revolution” (141).
II
The label of “glorious revolution” attributed to Teufelsdröckh is in a sense Carlyle’s
self-mockery which anticipates his own stronger ambivalence and conservatism
later in his writing. The most visible evidence of Carlyle’s ambivalence is exhibited
in his unpopular Latter-Day Pamphlets where he attempts to balance sympathy for
the social problems of his age with an over-arching desire for order in his society.
Without question, Latter-Day Pamphlets shows that Carlyle had shifted to
the right in politics, and had little time for the parliamentary democracy of his
age which he saw as ineffective and class-ridden. Yet there is a keen common
sense among the overblown rhetoric of a chapter like Model Prisons. Latter-Day
Pamphlets is a good illustration of why Carlyle “may seem at first sight illiberal
and fascist, yet on a more sensitive reading he may be seen to adhere to a different
logic” (Campbell 1993:120 ) .Carlyle may scoff at the philanthropy which tried
to rescue prisoners’ souls, but he points out emphatically that such attempts are
paid for by taxing the hard-working poor all around. What about their welfare?
Carlyle actually went (in 1849) himself to Ireland to see the plight of the poor
before writing on the question. Therefore, in his later writings or speeches, Carlyle
believed the urgency of his message: “poverty is a reality, just outside the walls of
model prison; and anarchy, religious weakness and realities are near every home”
(Campbell 1993:124). If in later life he was to write about the emancipated negro
slaves (in The Nigger Question) or the Civil War in the USA, it was regrettably
without actually going there to see for himself — and his views are all the more
intemperate and unbalanced as a result. The older Carlyle saw things in black and
white, and the nuanced sympathy for individuals gives way to an overwhelming
urge to keep society ordered, hard working and ethically sound.
That the universe should be a natural, orderly and authorised world is a
concept firmly rooted in Carlyle’s mind. Carlyle believed there should be a
controlling great presence governing the order of the universe, even if he did not
link it to the Christian “God” explicitly. His world-view was one where human
beings were of limited authority, and there were more powerful forces at work. In
his earlier years he had been interested in the forces represented by NATURE in
the works of writers like Goethe; in later years, he was interested in the forces of
ORDER AND AUTHORITY which, in his view, were necessary to prevent society
slipping into anarchy. Carlyle really saw the world as having an authority-figure,
however little he defined that figure. This is behind the hardening and authoritarian
writing of his later years: the fear that the disorder he had witnessed in his youth
(social change, Napoleonic wars, and Industrial upheaval) would overwhelm
his society. It was due to this fear that Carlyle turned himself to a determined
conservative. He remained, therefore, paradoxically a writer of critical duality: a
very conservative critic in his older years as well as a radical critic in his youth.
Walt Whitman sharply observed the duality of Carlyle’s personality in his
“Death of Thomas Carlyle” (Obituary, Critic, 12 February, 1881):
Two conflicting agonistic elements seem to have contended in the man,
sometimes pulling him different ways, like wild horses. He was a cautious,
conservative Scotchman, fully aware what a foetid gas-bag much of modern
radicalism is; but then his great heart demanded reform, demanded change —
an always sympathetic, always human heart — often terribly at odds with his
scornful brain.(qtd.in Seigel 457)
Fred Kaplan also notes that “it was as if there were two Carlyles: on the one hand,
the angry, uncontrollable prophet; on the other, the gentle, contained and incisive
artist, concerned more with vivid depiction than with strong-voiced persuasion”
( Kaplan 373). In “Discriminating Idolatry,” Ian Campbell aptly cites John D.
Rosenberg’s argument on the duality of Carlyle: “Radical and authoritarian,
compassionate and bigoted, prophetic and blind, Carlyle the man is as difficult to
categorize as his works” ( qtd.in Campbell 2012: 3).3 Carlyle’s embodiment of these
dualities indicates that he is imbued with modern anxiety, as Albert J. LaValley
rightly points out: “ He celebrates the dynamics of change, the possibilities of the
new society, but he laments the loss of roots and fears the mechanization of man
and a world governed by self-interest and greed” ( 3).
The duality of Carlyle’s personality is a combination of the philosophy he
had absorbed from his father in Ecclefechan and the philosophy he had drawn
from Goethe and other romantic writers.4 Carlyle’s conservatism starts in his
early writings. Sartor Resartus, although regarded as a young man’s splendidly
radical critique of his society, has already somewhat shown the writer’s moderate
conservatism and his fear of the threats that enormous social changes might
have caused to the people, and such fear is closely related with Carlyle’s family
background and his early life experience.
Carlyle’s family, as we know, was a poor working one, and while he gave
up his ambition for the Church he had no desire to return to a working-class
environment on the countryside, preferring the difficult life of private tutor or
schoolmaster in the city. There, he had ample opportunity to see poverty and social
unrest during the difficult years following the Napoleonic Wars, the radical risings
in Manchester (1819) and Glasgow (1820) and the periodic hard times which
affected the working classes of both Scotland and England. His first introduction to
urban life, seeing Manchester and Liverpool and London, sharpened his awareness
of the changes convulsing his society.
Carlyle’s early writings have already shown signs of paradoxical attitudes
towards changes and social advancement brought about by industrialization: on one
hand he saw in his travels the convenience of life produced by industrialization;
on the other hand he felt more worried about the poverty, class conflicts, loss of
faith and the alienation of workers which resulted from rapid social transformation.
Bulwer-Lytton’s “iconoclastic” new Millennium was to Carlyle the “Mechanical
Age’’ (Criticism of Thomas Carlyle 20). In Sartor Resartus Carlyle adopts a mild
sarcasm of Swift-style in attacking the so-called human progress of the “Mechanical
Age.’’ The opening paragraph of Sartor Resartus is a controlled sardonic scorch on
the “progress” of human civilization and the “Torch of Science”:
Considering the present advancement state of culture, and how the Torch of
Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect,
for fine thousand years and upwards; how in these times especially, not only
still the Torch burns, and perhaps more fiercely than ever, but innumerably
Rush-lights and Sulphur-matches, kindled thereat, are also glancing in every
direction, so that not the smallest cranny or doghole in Nature or Art can
remain unilluminated…. ( 3)
The ironic image of the “Torch of Science” and the ironic play on the word
“progress” or “advancement” are later echoed in many writers, especially in Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Outpost of Progress. The narrator’s voice is
itself a sort of garment in style, wrapping underneath a sting on the omnipresence
of mechanism in Victorian age. In Signs of the Times (1829) Carlyle makes an
apocalyptic analysis of the “mighty changes” of the manner of existence of human
being in a Mechanical Age:
These things, which we state lightly enough here, are yet of deep import, and
indicate a mighty change in our whole manner of existence. For the same habit
regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling.
Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They
have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not
for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for
institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope
and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism,
and are of a mechanical character. (Criticism of Thomas Carlyle 22)
Carlyle fears that mechanical furtherance will reduce to nothing men’s innate
power of wonder for nature and men’s natural capability of work, two fundamental
elements that he thinks are indispensable for a spiritually and physically
healthy man possessing individual faith and internal perfection. The former, as
Teufelsdröckh acknowledges, is“the basis of Worship，something “perennial,
indestructible in Man” (53), while the latter a creative instinct or “schaffenden
Trieb” (71) which is “the whole duty and necessity of man”(100).
In their insightful Introduction to the World Classic edition of Sartor Resartus,
Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor precisely point out that “the fundamental
premises of Teufelsdröckh’s thought is the epistemological distinction between
understanding (Verstand ) and Reason ”(xxv). Teufelsdröckh borrows Kant’s term
“pure reason” to illustrate his philosophy of clothes: pure reason (the intuitive
faculty of human epistemological power) which is imaginative and spiritual and
thus transcendentally reveals to us the things-in-themselves) as opposed to what
he calls the “vulgar Logic” (51) or empirical knowledge derived from sense
experience, or, in Teufelsdröckh’s words, the “ Garments of flesh” or “of Senses”
(51). Apparently, through Teufelsdröckh's philosophy of transcendentalism,
Carlyle severely critiques utilitarianism and scientism prevalent at his times.
Walt Whitman went so far as to introduce Carlyle to the American like this:
“All that is comprehended under the terms republicanism and democracy were
distasteful to [Carlyle] from the first, and as he grew older they became hateful and
contemptible” (qtd.in Seigel 461 ).
III
Teufelsdröckh is quite uneasy with the progress of Science, which he concludes
“is to destroy Wonder ”(53). He asserts that “the man who cannot wonder, who
does not habitually wonder (and worship)…is but a pair of Spectacles behind
which there is no Eye” (54). Teufelsdröckh’s logic is clear-cut, pure and thoughtprovoking:
if there is no wonder, there will be no worship and faith, and without
faith and worship the society will be in chaos.
Teufelsdröckh’s remedy for the social ailment is Work, because he regards
work as “the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments”(126). He
cites Goethe’s Faust to show how the Earth-Spirit works for the living visible
Garment of God:
In Being’s floods, in Action’s s storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
‘Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by. (44)
In the Idyllic chapter Teufelsdröckh suggests that man’s “vocation is to work.
The choicest present you can make him is a Tool; be it knife or pen-gun, for
construction or for destruction; either way it is for Work, for Change ”(71).The
Everlasting Yea chapter ends with a very passionate urging for work:
I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even
Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction
of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out
with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole
might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man
can work. (149)
Here between the lines of biblical language，we find a strong Christian resignation
to the Gospel of Work, signifying, although not quite convincingly, Teufelsdröckh’s
inner transformation. Taking Sartor Resartus as a sort of life writing,
Teufelsdröckh’s appeal is recognizably that of Carlyle’s, as Peltason rightly notes
that the Victorian writing of biography is “one of the chief means by which the
Victorians presented their accomplishments and their ideals — the complex image
both of what they were and what they aspired to be — to themselves”(Peltason in
Tucker 357). Carlyle’s idealization of the Gospel of Work was further developed
and elucidated in Past and Present:
FOR there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were
he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in
a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual
despair. Work, never so Mam-monish, mean is in communication with Nature;
the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to
Nature’s appointments and regulations, which are truth.
The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. ‘Know
thyself:’ long enough has that poor ‘self’ of thine tormented thee; thou wilt
never get to ‘know’ it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing
thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and
work at it, like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.
It has been written, ‘an endless significance lies in Work;’ a man perfects
himself by working. (168)
Here Carlyle replaces the classical dictum of “Know thyself” with “ Know thy
work” and he conceptualizes work as a mirror wherein “ one objectifies and
reifies oneself”( P. Rosenberg 60). The similar ideology later finds echo in Joseph
Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1898), in which the character-narrator Marlow
recognizes the Gospel of Work in his self-reflections on the steamboat: “No, I don’t
like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done.
I don’t like work — no man does — but I like what is in the work — the chance to
find yourself. Your own reality — for yourself — not for others — what other man
can ever know. The can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really
means” ( Conrad 31). In his commentary on Michael John DiSanto’s monograph
Under Conrad’s Eyes Hugh Epstein points out paradoxically that Conrad realizes
Carlyle’s idea that “work is the most important expression of being and the most
important avoidance of being” (1).
Essentially, Carlyle’s work ethics was a precious spiritual treasure he inherited
from his Calvinist parents. In Reminiscences he calls his diligent working father
James Carlyle “a natural man” and “a noble inspiring example”:
I call him a natural man, singularly free from all manner of affectation ; he was
among the last of the true men which Scotland on the old system produced
or can produce ; a man healthy in body and mind, fearing God, and diligently
working on God’s earth with contentment, hope, and unwearied resolution.
He was never visited with doubt….This great maxim of philosophy he had
gathered by the teaching of nature alone — that man was created to work —
not to speculate, or feel, or dream. (8-9; 10)
Obviously, as Campbell suggests, this passage shows an unmistakable “note of
envy in his recollection of his father’s theocentric view of the world” (Campbell
2012: 5) This could be a helpless envy for the lost paradise of simplicity, piety
and stability of country life. But more importantly, Carlyle recognised that behind
his father’s motivation for work was “his acceptance of a world-order in which
the Gospel of Work played a prominent part”(Campbell 1993:179). Here Carlyle
wished to use his father not only as a personal moral idol but also as an example of
the “ Gospel of Work ” for his generation to recover from their moral degradation.
Carlyle witnessed the decline of religion since the beginning of the Victorian
age when the clergy had lost some of its prestige and power, and as the century
progressed, Victorian religion was repeatedly challenged by evolutionary science
and other emerging fields of specialized knowledge. Carlyle’s life experience was
very different from his parents who were noted for “more than loyalty and piety”
(Campbell 1993: 6 ) and against the expectation of his parents he ceased to be a
practising churchgoer. In spite of all that, he paradoxically never quite left the early
influence of his parents’ Christianity and its bearing on his social analysis. His
earlier works show he was struggling to articulate the place of the individual in a
chaotic world.
Carlyle might have at first a sharp awareness of the change of religious belief
when he initiated himself into society, as he himself argued somewhat prophetically
in his seminal essay “Characteristics”(1831): “[the ] ancient ‘ground — plan of All’
belies itself when brought contact with reality; Mother Church has , to the most,
become a superannuated Stepmother, whose lessons go disregarded ; or are spurned
at, and scornfully gainsaid ” (Criticism of Thomas Carlyle 71). To his desperation
the young Carlyle found himself situated in a world without God:
Whiter has Religion now fled? Of churches and their establishments we here
say nothing; nor of the unhappy domains of Unbelief, and how innumerable
men, blinded in their minds, have grown to “live without God in the world”….
(Criticism of Thomas Carlyle 66 )
Carlyle acknowledges that the past world of his father’s generation is irrecoverable,
that his father’s world has vanished. In Reminiscences he recalls with grief those
venerable clergy of the old days who have left “ineffaceable” impression on him as
well as on Irving:
Very venerable are those old Seceder clergy to me now when I look back on
them. Most of the chief figures among them in Irving’s time and mine were
hoary old men; men so like what one might call antique Evangelists in ruder
vesture, and 6 poor scholars and gentlemen of Christ,’ I have nowhere met
with in monasteries or churches, among Protestant or Papal clergy, in any
country of the world. All this is altered utterly at present, I grieve to say, and
gone to as good as nothing or worse. It began to alter just about that very
period, on the death of those old hoary heads, and has gone on with increasing
velocity ever since. Irving and I were probably among the last products it
delivered before gliding off, and then rushing off into self-consciousness,
arrogancy, insincerity, jangle, and vulgarity, which I fear are now very much
the definition of it. Irving’s concern with the matter had been as follows, brief,
but, I believe, ineffaceable through life. (83)
Long after his own religious views had changed, in this moving memoir, written
over a single weekend after learning of his father’s death, Carlyle wrote:
He was never visited with Doubt; the old Theorem of the Universe was
sufficient for him…. Let me write my books as he built his houses... I have
a sacred pride in my peasant father, and would not exchange him, even now,
for any king known to me...I seem to myself only the continuation and second
volume of my father. (Reminiscences 9)
Carlyle’s admiration for the spiritual security of his father’s time was no more
apparent than his reminiscence of the stability of his father’s rural life — although
he also acknowledges in Chartism that change is not a necessary EVIL for
society as long as it is good for the benefits of the people，Carlyle always shows
anxiety over disorder which he regards as “ insane by the nature of it” and “ is
the hatefullest of things to man”(Chartism 30). Consequently，the paradox of
Carlyle's changing beliefs is underpinned by the fact he is always distantly in touch
with his father's set of values — and he also sees in change, painful as it is, a force
potentially for good.
Hence, Carlyle’s early life is one where he struggled with several incompatible
ideals. First of all, the Calvinist and ordered small-town life he grew up in, never
quite left him, though he acknowledged as early as 1832 (writing on the death
of his father) that the values that life exemplified were rapidly going out of date,
and not suited to the urban environment even a decade or two into the troubled
early Victorian years .Another strong influence on him in his early years was his
emergence from a working-class background without the privileges of birth or
education many Victorian writers might have had — or aspired to. At the time of
his settling in London (1834) Carlyle was thus torn between several influences and
sharply aware of the change sweeping over his country. Working on The French
Revolution (1837), on Chartism, Heroes and the later histories kept his focus
firmly on the mechanism by which a society lives and changes, and the occasional
bursts of violence and tumultuous upset inevitable at a time like the Victorian age.
Perhaps Carlyle’s desire for order and peace was nowhere more evident and fervent
in his French Revolution, in which he eloquently articulated: “Let there be order,
were it under the Soldier’s Sword; let there be peace, that the bounty of Heavens be
not split; that what of Wisdom they do send us bring fruit to its season!” (French
Revolution 250)
It is therefore no surprise to find that, as the decades passed, Carlyle’s
view itself changed. The radicalism of his early years (exemplified in his essay
on Edward Irving in the Reminiscences) gives way to the measured writing of
someone who has become an established Literary Giant in London, someone who
has emerged firmly into the professional middle class, who is the guest of nobility
and a member of the Athenaeum Club and the London Library.
Carlyle’s reputation suffered from a lapse in the firs half of the 20th century due
to the disputed immediate publication of his biography as well as his own hardened
views on Africans, Jews and Irish Catholics and particularly his defence of the
Governor John Eyre’s brutal suppression of Jamaica revolt in 1866. It was not until
the 1960s that his international reputation was successfully rehabilitated. In Culture
and Society (1958), Raymond Williams qualifies him as “the most important social
thinker of his century” (76). However, students of literature today might be either
not quite familiar with him or tend to associate him unfairly with the “authoritarian
and totalitarian personality cults that brought European civilization to the brink
of destruction in World War II” (Sorensen, Introduction 1). For this reason, the
course of change of Carlyle’s thoughts deserves clarification and re-assessment. We
should always remember in our appraisal of Carlyle that he was the offspring of
an age of great social change and turbulence, an age in itself full of contradiction
and confusion and therefore any evaluation of this great man should be based on
a historically dialectical standpoint. Deep in the heart of Carlyle’s change and
ambivalence dwells the agony of a prophet of modernist consciousness5 who was
acutely wary of the potential chaos, contradiction and even the absurdity far beyond
his era.
* Acknowledgements: I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Prof. Ian Campbell of Edinburgh
University for his inspiring guidance, illuminating advice, constructive criticism as well as his
meticulous polishing on both the contents and the style of the paper. This paper is part of the
author’s research program on Thomas Carlyle and his Influence supported by the Ministry of
Education,P.R.C. (Project Number: 10YJA752030 ) as well as part of the program on Carlyle’s
Cultural Criticism and its Influence sponsored by the National Social Science Fund (Project
Number:11BWW005).It is also sponsored by K.C.Wong Magna Fund in Ningbo University.
Notes
1. For a detailed discussion of the awareness of the historical transition, see Lawrence Poston:
“1832” in H. F. Tucker , in which the 1830s has often been described in paradoxical terms of “the
striking contrast between the richness of the political history –Reform , the growth of political
and labour union, and at the end of the decade the movement for the redress of working-class
grievance , Chartism, the first stirrings of Anti-corn law League, the beginning of systematic
government intervention in prison conditions, education, welfare, working hours an public
order-and the apparent barrenness of cultural scene ”(5). Lawrence Poston also quotes Bulwer-
Lytton to show the visible historical transition(See Tucker 14 ). In fact, two years before Bulwer-
Lytton’s articulation, Carlyle in his Characteristics (1831) had detected the pulse of the change
but his expression was more passionate: “How changed in these new days! Truly may it be said,
the Divinity has withdrawn from he Earth; or veils himself in that Whirlwind of departing Era,
wherein the fewest can discern his goings. Not Godhead, but an iron, ignoble circle of Necessity
embraces all things; binds the youth of these times into a sluggish thrall, or else exasperate him
into rebel” (Criticism of Thomas Carlyle 72).
2. Engels was so appalled by the living condition of the Manchester workers that he concluded
in The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1845) that this population has “ sunk to the
lowest level of humanity ” (Engels, 1958:71). According to A.H. Harrison, Engels presents “the
first major study of the effects of industrialization on workers” ( See Antony H. Harrison: 1848 in
Tucker 21 ). Typical are his description of the working-class district of north-eastern Manchester.
Carlyle also opens his Chartism (1840) with the chapter on the Condition of England Questions.
Ian Campbell re-dramatizes in detail the “the vacated properties [of the old town]” that “suffered
a swift decline, first in social status, then in condition” (Campbell, 1993:15).
3. See John D. Rosenberg vii.
4. In his still important monograph Carlyle and German Thought ( 1934), C. F. Harrold
investigates how Carlyle’s early thoughts shows his understanding, amplification or distortion of
German thoughts in favour of his own belief. See Charles Frederic Harrold, Carlyle and German
Thought 1819-1834 (New Haven, 1934).
5. Philip Rosenberg argues that Carlyle is “a very much twentieth century figure”(54).
Works Cited
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. England and English. Ed. Standish Meacham. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1970.
Campbell, Ian. Thomas Carlyle .Edinburgh: The Saltire Society, 1993. .
---. “Discriminating Idolatry”, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 45.1 (Spring 2012): 1-21.
Carlyle, Thomas. “Signs of the Times’”/ “Characteristics” in Criticism of Thomas Carlyle. Ed.
Machael Disanto. Herefod: The Brynmill Press Ltd., 2006.
---. Sartor Resartus. Ed. Kerry Sweeney and P. Sabor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
---. Chartism. New York: John B. Alden Publisher, 1885.
---. Reminiscences, Volume I (Two Volumes). Ed. James Anthony Froude. London: Longmans,
Green, and Co., 1881.
---. Past and Present. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843.
---. French Revolution. London: Methuen & Co., 1902.
---. On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History. Ed. David R. Sorensen and Brent
E.Kinser. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Norton, 1988.
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Trans. Florence Kelly
Wischnewetzky. Sandford ( CA): Stanford UP, 1956.
Epstein, Hugh. Review of Michael John DiSanto. Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism
(Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009). The Conradian Reviews, 35.1(2010):1.
On-line review. http://www.josephconradsociety.org/conradian_review_epstein4.htm.
Hyslop, Jonathan. “A Scottish Socialist Reads Carlyle in Johannesburg Prison, June 1900:
Reflections on the Literary Culture of the Imperial Working Class,” Journal of Southern
African Studies, 29.3 (2003):639-655.
Kaplan, Fred. Carlyle, a Biography. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983.
LaValley, Albert J. Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1968.
Rosenberg, John D. Carlyle and the Burden of History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985.
Rosenberg, Philip. The Seventh Hero: Thomas Carlyle and the Theory of Radical Activism.
Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard UP, 1974.
Seigel, Jules Paul. Thomas Carlyle. The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1971.
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Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: Coleridge to Orwell. London: Hogarth Press, 1987.
Faculty of Foreign Languages, Ningbo University
818 Fenghua Road, Jiangbei District, Ningbo, Zhejiang 315211, China
Email: [email protected]
Abstract This paper discusses the ambivalence behind Carlyle’s change from
radicalism to conservatism, mainly by exploring the inner contradiction of
Teufelsdröckh, Carlyle’s semi-autobiographical figure in Sartor Resartus,while
citing Carlyle’s other writings to demonstrate how his early Calvinist family
background and his later outstanding years affected his appeals for social order
as well as the Gospel of work as a remedy for moral degradation of his time.
The paper concludes by suggesting that in the heart of Carlyle’s change and
ambivalence dwells the agony of a prophet of modernist consciousness who was
acutely wary of the potential chaos, contradiction and even the absurdity far beyond
his era.
Key words Carlyle; change; ambivalence
Author Wang Songlin is Professor of English at Ningbo University, China. His
research interests cover Victorian literature and culture. He is currently a visiting
scholar in English Department, Edinburgh University.
Although the first generation of what we call “Victorian” authors were born early
in the nineteenth century, and were active in its first two decades, their intellectual
roots are traceable back to the eighteenth. Carlyle, Mill, Newman, Macaulay all
grew up under the shadow of French Revolution of 1789 and later, as well as the
Napoleonic Wars ( 1803-15) which were changing the maps of Europe. They were
all of them, in different ways, children of an age of change and revolution, and this
was to be crucial in their work.
Many of Carlyle’s contemporary writers were quite conscious of the social
transition of their age.1 Bulwer-Lytton perhaps articulated most clearly such a
transition, he said:
We live in an age of visible transition — an age of disquietude and doubt，
of the removal of time-worn landmarks and the breaking up of the hereditary
elements of society — old opinions, feelings — ancestral customs and
institutions are crumbling away, and both the spiritual and temporal worlds
are darkened by the shadows of change. The commencement of one of these
epochs — periodical in the history of mankind — is hailed by the sanguine
as the coming of a new Millennium — a great iconoclastic reformation, by
which all false gods shall be overthrown. To me such epochs appear but as
the dark passages in the appointed progress of mankind — the times of great
unhappiness to our species — passages into which we have reason to rejoice
at our entrance, save from the hope of being sooner landed on the opposite
side. ( 318-19 )
None was, however, more affected by change than Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881),
born in a humble working-class environment in South-West Scotland, the product
of stern Calvinist Christian parents, who worked his way through school and
university, through an early writing career in Edinburgh to his move to Chelsea in
1834, and eventually to world renown as one of the Victorian Age’s most significant
essayists, historians and social thinkers.
I
Carlyle’s early life was spent in this age of tumultuous change, change in Europe, in
Britain undergoing the throes of the Industrial Revolution and the social upheaval
which accompanied it, and in Scotland where he witnessed a great literary age after
the death of Burns and the full popularity of Sir Walter Scott. His early years in
Ecclefechan instilled in him a world-view and a work ethic which were to remain
with him, in whatever modified form, to the end of his days in London. His village
life was still that of farming and small business, his University years introduced
him to city life in Edinburgh, and his holiday walks and travels introduced him
to the industrial landscape of Scotland and England which were transforming the
country. He came to see the working class poverty which was to strike Engels in
Manchester and Liverpool,2 and which he came to experience in the early years of
his marriage when he and his wife lived in their moorland farmhouse with almost
no money at all. From very modest beginnings in London he rose to eminence,
to mixing with high society as well as a vivid cross-section of the literary and
intellectual life of his time and of Europe, but he never lost touch with those early
years when (unlike many of his contemporaries) he had not enjoyed the privilege or
money, but had shared the basic working conditions of the working class.
Carlyle’s attitudes towards change were thus ambivalent, fluctuating
paradoxically from the radicalism of his earlier years to conservatism in his later
years. In “Characteristics” written in 1831 Carlyle realised that change was a
painful “necessary evil”:
In Change, therefore, there is nothing terrible, nothing supernatural: on the
contrary, it lies in the very essence of our lot and life in this world. Today
is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our Works and Thoughts, if
they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed,
is painful; yet ever needful; and if Memory have its force and worth, so also
has Hope. Nay, if we look well to it, what is all Derangement, and necessity
of great Change, in itself such an evil, but the product simply of increased
resources which the old methods can no longer administer; of new wealth
which the old coffers will no longer contain? What is it, for example, that
in our own day bursts asunder the bonds of ancient Political Systems, and
perplexes all Europe with the fear of Change, but even this: the increase of
social resources, which the old social methods will no longer sufficiently
administer? (Criticism of Thomas Carlyle 79)
Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus (first published in1833 in Fraser’s Magazine
in serialization form), is at a very important level a Bildungsroman, a hidden
autobiography through which Carlyle (in the guise of Teufelsdröckh) recounts his
youthful struggles to come to terms with existence. Book II of Sartor Resartus
is in a way an exhibition of Carlyle’s own existential uncertainty and his strong
aspiration for radical change. Like Carlyle, whose childhood was spent in reverence
for and obedience to his father and whose higher education left him susceptible to
the infection of religious doubt, and desolate after the failure of his first romance,
the central personage Teufelsdröckh feels sorrowful and dark in his youthful
years. Unable to “escape from his own Shadow”(121), Teufelsdröckh experiences
a spiritual nadir in the “Everlasting No” chapter, desperately feeling the universe
has become “all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, Even of hostility: it was one
huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to
grind me from limb to limb”(127). Like Carlyle himself, Teufelsdröckh suffers “an
eclipse of faith which precipitate in him the abject psychic torment” ( P.Rosenberg
58 ).It is not until he comes to Paris where he is shifted to the big world outside
him, to cities and towns, to the battlefield of Wagram that Teufelsdröckh feels he
has broadened his vision , stepped out of his own shadow and changed to be a “Child
of Freedom” and could meet and defy anything:
And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and
I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength,
a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was
changed:no Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed
Defiance. ( 129)
Professor Teufelsdröckh’s raging voice is that of Carlyle himself. The repetition
of the word “fire” indicates the fury and strong desire of a radical young man for
change as well as for spiritual purification. Immediately after his awakening from
self-doubt, Teufelsdröckh, in the “Everlasting Yea” chapter, realizes his heavy
dreams “rolled gradually away,” and he awakes “to a new Heaven and a New
Earth” ( 142).
Teufelsdröckh’s radicalism also finds expression in his attitude towards
transforming the old society and old customs. In Teufelsdröckh’s writings on the
philosophy and history of clothes, Carlyle uses clothing as a metaphor for the empty
forms of old custom and institutionalized society. Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy is “but
a continual battle against Custom; an ever- renewed effort to transcend the sphere
of blind custom and so become Transcendental”(196). Teufelsdröckh cynically
treats the old world as a “huge Ragfair” where he is suffocated by the raining of
“rags and tatters of old Symbols” (179).Teufelsdröckh, clearly aware of the “critical
condition” in which he is situated, strongly advocates the Garment of the old
society shall be “mostly burned”:
[We] are at this hour in a most critical condition; beleaguered by that
boundless “Armament of Mechanizers” and Unbelievers, threatening to
strip us bare! “The World,” says he, “as it needs must, is under a process of
devastation and waste, which, whether by silent assiduous corrosion, or open
quicker combustion, as the case chances, will effectually enough annihilate
the past Forms of Society; replace them with what it may. For the present, it
is contemplated that when man’s whole Spiritual Interests are once divested,
these innumerable stript-off Garments shall mostly be burnt; but the sounder
Rags among them be quilted together into one huge Irish watch-coat for the
defence of the Body only!” — This, we think, is but Job’s-news to the humane
reader. (178)
The radicalism of Thomas Carlyle’s early years is best exemplified in his
Reminiscences posthumously published in 1881. Carlyle was quite well aware of
his own radicalism as he recalled his youth. In his recollection of the approaching
George Fourth visit to Edinburgh, he expressed his disgust with the “ fulsome
loyalty” of all classes in Edinburgh and claimed himself a man of “ private
radicalism of mind ” (Reminiscences 173). In his reminiscence essay on Edward
Irving (1866), Carlyle records his tenacious opposition to Irving in terms of his
notion of Reform Bill and Christianity:
He[ Irving] objected clearly to my Reform- Bill notions; found Democracy
a thing forbidden, leading down to outer darkness; I, a thing inevitable, and
obliged to lead whithersoever it could. We had several colloquies on that
subject; on which, though my own poor convictions are widened, not altered,
I should now have more sympathy with his than was then the case. We also
talked on Religion and Christianity “Evidences,” — our notions, of course,
more divergent than ever. “It is sacred, my friend; we can call it sacred: such a
Civitas Dei as was never built before; wholly the grandest series of work ever
hitherto done by the Human Soul, — the Highest God (doubt it not) assenting
and inspiring all along!” This I remember once saying plainly; Which was not
an encouragement to prosecute the topic. We were in fact, hopelessly divided,
to what tragical extent both of us might well feel! (Reminiscences 309-310)
Campbell notes that the above passage shows Carlyle’s “sharp-focused moments
of insight into his own character and a sense of the moments of turning which
influenced him” (Campbell 2012: 9).The passage also clearly records Carlyle’s
willingness to accept what he understood as “Democracy” and his doubts of
Christianity, in contrast to Irving’s reserved Annandale world view. Clearly ,as
Campbell points out, this is “the moment of change” for Carlyle, who “takes
the strong structure he grew up with in Scotland — one based on powerful
personalities, financial stringency, and an omnipresent protestant theology — and
sees its inevitable transformation into the Civitas Dei he met in early Victorian
London” (Campbell 2012: 9-10).
It is worth noticing that while Carlyle was recalling the past he would not
forget to bring himself back to the present reality by saying that “I should now
have more sympathy with his than was then the case.” In fact, Carlyle was not as
radical as we imagine and his view of change assumes a form of ambivalence in
Sartor Resartus. Teufelsdröckh holds a dialectic view of change by comparing it
to the Nevada of Phoenix, which he thinks, quite contrary to common senses, is a
paradoxical mixture of “melodious Death-song and Birth-song”:
[Change] is wont to be gradual: thus, while the serpent sheds its old skin, the
new is already formed beneath. Little knowest thou of the burning of a World-
Phoenix, who fanciest that she must first burn out, and lie as a dead cinereous
heap; and therefrom the young one start up by miracle, and fly heavenward.
Far otherwise! In that Fire-whirlwind, Creation and Destruction proceed
together; ever as the ashes of the Old are blown about, do organic filaments of
the New mysteriously spin themselves: and amid the rushing and the waving
of the Whirlwind element come tones of a melodious Death-song, which
end not but in tones of a more melodious Birthsong. Nay, look into the Firewhirlwind
with your own eyes and thou wilt see. (185)
The image of fire as a reviving and purifying power is frequently employed by
Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus. Towards the end of the Everlasting No chapter
Teufelsdröckh , after a hard inner struggle against the Devil Universe, comes to the
realization that“it is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or
Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man” ( 129)
.Later in the Old Clothes chapter, the Clothes-Professor proclaims: “ ‘Ghosts of
Life, come to Judgment!’ Reck not, ye fluttering Ghosts: he will purify you in his
Purgatory, with fire and with water; and, one day, new-created ye shall reappear”
( 183). Sun Newspaper ( 1st April, 1834) cited commentary of an “ old Dennis” ,
calling Sartor Resartus “a heap of clotted nonsense, mixed however, here and there,
with passages marked by thought and striking poetic vigor,” while questioning
Carlyle’s intelligibility in using the phrase “Baphometic fire-baptism ” ( qtd.in
APPENDIX V to SR 237 ).
Carlyle’s “Baphometic fire-baptism” is, to my understanding, a paradoxical
allusion of the binary elements representing the sum total of the universe, a union
of opposites, a mixture of good and evil, life and death. Teufelsdröckh’s fire
resembles the fire of Dante’s Commedia which is more of a reviving and purifying
power than a fatally destructive agent. The so-called Old and Sick Society,
according to Teufelsdröckh, is “but her mortal coil which she has shuffled off, to
assume a nobler; she herself, through perpetual metamorphoses, in fairer and fairer
development, has to live till Time also merge in Eternity”( 179). Teufelsdröckh is
content that “old sick Society should be deliberately burnt”, and he believes that
like phoenix “a new heaven-born young one will rise out of her ashes!”(180)
The recurrent fire-image as a simultaneous power of “Creation and
Destruction” and a catalyst of the union of “melodious Death-song and melodious
Birthsong” indicates Carlyle’s restrained view of change. Therefore, it deserves
special notice that Carlyle’s radicalism through the mouthpiece of Teufelsdröckh
was a moderate one and rarely developed into extremism, even in his early years.
His view of change, both personal and social, was that of a gradual reconstruction
instead of an entire destruction. This explains Carlyle’s own conservatism as
he grew older and became increasingly distinguished in social position. As
Teufelsdröckh suggests, change should be something like “organic filaments”
spinning themselves in gradual process and in organic and unified form instead of
a bloody and stormy revolution. It is for this reason that Teufelsdröckh’s change is
humorously dubbed by the editor-narrator as “glorious revolution” (141).
II
The label of “glorious revolution” attributed to Teufelsdröckh is in a sense Carlyle’s
self-mockery which anticipates his own stronger ambivalence and conservatism
later in his writing. The most visible evidence of Carlyle’s ambivalence is exhibited
in his unpopular Latter-Day Pamphlets where he attempts to balance sympathy for
the social problems of his age with an over-arching desire for order in his society.
Without question, Latter-Day Pamphlets shows that Carlyle had shifted to
the right in politics, and had little time for the parliamentary democracy of his
age which he saw as ineffective and class-ridden. Yet there is a keen common
sense among the overblown rhetoric of a chapter like Model Prisons. Latter-Day
Pamphlets is a good illustration of why Carlyle “may seem at first sight illiberal
and fascist, yet on a more sensitive reading he may be seen to adhere to a different
logic” (Campbell 1993:120 ) .Carlyle may scoff at the philanthropy which tried
to rescue prisoners’ souls, but he points out emphatically that such attempts are
paid for by taxing the hard-working poor all around. What about their welfare?
Carlyle actually went (in 1849) himself to Ireland to see the plight of the poor
before writing on the question. Therefore, in his later writings or speeches, Carlyle
believed the urgency of his message: “poverty is a reality, just outside the walls of
model prison; and anarchy, religious weakness and realities are near every home”
(Campbell 1993:124). If in later life he was to write about the emancipated negro
slaves (in The Nigger Question) or the Civil War in the USA, it was regrettably
without actually going there to see for himself — and his views are all the more
intemperate and unbalanced as a result. The older Carlyle saw things in black and
white, and the nuanced sympathy for individuals gives way to an overwhelming
urge to keep society ordered, hard working and ethically sound.
That the universe should be a natural, orderly and authorised world is a
concept firmly rooted in Carlyle’s mind. Carlyle believed there should be a
controlling great presence governing the order of the universe, even if he did not
link it to the Christian “God” explicitly. His world-view was one where human
beings were of limited authority, and there were more powerful forces at work. In
his earlier years he had been interested in the forces represented by NATURE in
the works of writers like Goethe; in later years, he was interested in the forces of
ORDER AND AUTHORITY which, in his view, were necessary to prevent society
slipping into anarchy. Carlyle really saw the world as having an authority-figure,
however little he defined that figure. This is behind the hardening and authoritarian
writing of his later years: the fear that the disorder he had witnessed in his youth
(social change, Napoleonic wars, and Industrial upheaval) would overwhelm
his society. It was due to this fear that Carlyle turned himself to a determined
conservative. He remained, therefore, paradoxically a writer of critical duality: a
very conservative critic in his older years as well as a radical critic in his youth.
Walt Whitman sharply observed the duality of Carlyle’s personality in his
“Death of Thomas Carlyle” (Obituary, Critic, 12 February, 1881):
Two conflicting agonistic elements seem to have contended in the man,
sometimes pulling him different ways, like wild horses. He was a cautious,
conservative Scotchman, fully aware what a foetid gas-bag much of modern
radicalism is; but then his great heart demanded reform, demanded change —
an always sympathetic, always human heart — often terribly at odds with his
scornful brain.(qtd.in Seigel 457)
Fred Kaplan also notes that “it was as if there were two Carlyles: on the one hand,
the angry, uncontrollable prophet; on the other, the gentle, contained and incisive
artist, concerned more with vivid depiction than with strong-voiced persuasion”
( Kaplan 373). In “Discriminating Idolatry,” Ian Campbell aptly cites John D.
Rosenberg’s argument on the duality of Carlyle: “Radical and authoritarian,
compassionate and bigoted, prophetic and blind, Carlyle the man is as difficult to
categorize as his works” ( qtd.in Campbell 2012: 3).3 Carlyle’s embodiment of these
dualities indicates that he is imbued with modern anxiety, as Albert J. LaValley
rightly points out: “ He celebrates the dynamics of change, the possibilities of the
new society, but he laments the loss of roots and fears the mechanization of man
and a world governed by self-interest and greed” ( 3).
The duality of Carlyle’s personality is a combination of the philosophy he
had absorbed from his father in Ecclefechan and the philosophy he had drawn
from Goethe and other romantic writers.4 Carlyle’s conservatism starts in his
early writings. Sartor Resartus, although regarded as a young man’s splendidly
radical critique of his society, has already somewhat shown the writer’s moderate
conservatism and his fear of the threats that enormous social changes might
have caused to the people, and such fear is closely related with Carlyle’s family
background and his early life experience.
Carlyle’s family, as we know, was a poor working one, and while he gave
up his ambition for the Church he had no desire to return to a working-class
environment on the countryside, preferring the difficult life of private tutor or
schoolmaster in the city. There, he had ample opportunity to see poverty and social
unrest during the difficult years following the Napoleonic Wars, the radical risings
in Manchester (1819) and Glasgow (1820) and the periodic hard times which
affected the working classes of both Scotland and England. His first introduction to
urban life, seeing Manchester and Liverpool and London, sharpened his awareness
of the changes convulsing his society.
Carlyle’s early writings have already shown signs of paradoxical attitudes
towards changes and social advancement brought about by industrialization: on one
hand he saw in his travels the convenience of life produced by industrialization;
on the other hand he felt more worried about the poverty, class conflicts, loss of
faith and the alienation of workers which resulted from rapid social transformation.
Bulwer-Lytton’s “iconoclastic” new Millennium was to Carlyle the “Mechanical
Age’’ (Criticism of Thomas Carlyle 20). In Sartor Resartus Carlyle adopts a mild
sarcasm of Swift-style in attacking the so-called human progress of the “Mechanical
Age.’’ The opening paragraph of Sartor Resartus is a controlled sardonic scorch on
the “progress” of human civilization and the “Torch of Science”:
Considering the present advancement state of culture, and how the Torch of
Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect,
for fine thousand years and upwards; how in these times especially, not only
still the Torch burns, and perhaps more fiercely than ever, but innumerably
Rush-lights and Sulphur-matches, kindled thereat, are also glancing in every
direction, so that not the smallest cranny or doghole in Nature or Art can
remain unilluminated…. ( 3)
The ironic image of the “Torch of Science” and the ironic play on the word
“progress” or “advancement” are later echoed in many writers, especially in Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Outpost of Progress. The narrator’s voice is
itself a sort of garment in style, wrapping underneath a sting on the omnipresence
of mechanism in Victorian age. In Signs of the Times (1829) Carlyle makes an
apocalyptic analysis of the “mighty changes” of the manner of existence of human
being in a Mechanical Age:
These things, which we state lightly enough here, are yet of deep import, and
indicate a mighty change in our whole manner of existence. For the same habit
regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling.
Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They
have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not
for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for
institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope
and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism,
and are of a mechanical character. (Criticism of Thomas Carlyle 22)
Carlyle fears that mechanical furtherance will reduce to nothing men’s innate
power of wonder for nature and men’s natural capability of work, two fundamental
elements that he thinks are indispensable for a spiritually and physically
healthy man possessing individual faith and internal perfection. The former, as
Teufelsdröckh acknowledges, is“the basis of Worship，something “perennial,
indestructible in Man” (53), while the latter a creative instinct or “schaffenden
Trieb” (71) which is “the whole duty and necessity of man”(100).
In their insightful Introduction to the World Classic edition of Sartor Resartus,
Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor precisely point out that “the fundamental
premises of Teufelsdröckh’s thought is the epistemological distinction between
understanding (Verstand ) and Reason ”(xxv). Teufelsdröckh borrows Kant’s term
“pure reason” to illustrate his philosophy of clothes: pure reason (the intuitive
faculty of human epistemological power) which is imaginative and spiritual and
thus transcendentally reveals to us the things-in-themselves) as opposed to what
he calls the “vulgar Logic” (51) or empirical knowledge derived from sense
experience, or, in Teufelsdröckh’s words, the “ Garments of flesh” or “of Senses”
(51). Apparently, through Teufelsdröckh's philosophy of transcendentalism,
Carlyle severely critiques utilitarianism and scientism prevalent at his times.
Walt Whitman went so far as to introduce Carlyle to the American like this:
“All that is comprehended under the terms republicanism and democracy were
distasteful to [Carlyle] from the first, and as he grew older they became hateful and
contemptible” (qtd.in Seigel 461 ).
III
Teufelsdröckh is quite uneasy with the progress of Science, which he concludes
“is to destroy Wonder ”(53). He asserts that “the man who cannot wonder, who
does not habitually wonder (and worship)…is but a pair of Spectacles behind
which there is no Eye” (54). Teufelsdröckh’s logic is clear-cut, pure and thoughtprovoking:
if there is no wonder, there will be no worship and faith, and without
faith and worship the society will be in chaos.
Teufelsdröckh’s remedy for the social ailment is Work, because he regards
work as “the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments”(126). He
cites Goethe’s Faust to show how the Earth-Spirit works for the living visible
Garment of God:
In Being’s floods, in Action’s s storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
‘Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by. (44)
In the Idyllic chapter Teufelsdröckh suggests that man’s “vocation is to work.
The choicest present you can make him is a Tool; be it knife or pen-gun, for
construction or for destruction; either way it is for Work, for Change ”(71).The
Everlasting Yea chapter ends with a very passionate urging for work:
I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even
Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction
of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out
with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole
might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man
can work. (149)
Here between the lines of biblical language，we find a strong Christian resignation
to the Gospel of Work, signifying, although not quite convincingly, Teufelsdröckh’s
inner transformation. Taking Sartor Resartus as a sort of life writing,
Teufelsdröckh’s appeal is recognizably that of Carlyle’s, as Peltason rightly notes
that the Victorian writing of biography is “one of the chief means by which the
Victorians presented their accomplishments and their ideals — the complex image
both of what they were and what they aspired to be — to themselves”(Peltason in
Tucker 357). Carlyle’s idealization of the Gospel of Work was further developed
and elucidated in Past and Present:
FOR there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were
he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in
a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual
despair. Work, never so Mam-monish, mean is in communication with Nature;
the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to
Nature’s appointments and regulations, which are truth.
The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. ‘Know
thyself:’ long enough has that poor ‘self’ of thine tormented thee; thou wilt
never get to ‘know’ it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing
thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and
work at it, like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.
It has been written, ‘an endless significance lies in Work;’ a man perfects
himself by working. (168)
Here Carlyle replaces the classical dictum of “Know thyself” with “ Know thy
work” and he conceptualizes work as a mirror wherein “ one objectifies and
reifies oneself”( P. Rosenberg 60). The similar ideology later finds echo in Joseph
Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1898), in which the character-narrator Marlow
recognizes the Gospel of Work in his self-reflections on the steamboat: “No, I don’t
like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done.
I don’t like work — no man does — but I like what is in the work — the chance to
find yourself. Your own reality — for yourself — not for others — what other man
can ever know. The can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really
means” ( Conrad 31). In his commentary on Michael John DiSanto’s monograph
Under Conrad’s Eyes Hugh Epstein points out paradoxically that Conrad realizes
Carlyle’s idea that “work is the most important expression of being and the most
important avoidance of being” (1).
Essentially, Carlyle’s work ethics was a precious spiritual treasure he inherited
from his Calvinist parents. In Reminiscences he calls his diligent working father
James Carlyle “a natural man” and “a noble inspiring example”:
I call him a natural man, singularly free from all manner of affectation ; he was
among the last of the true men which Scotland on the old system produced
or can produce ; a man healthy in body and mind, fearing God, and diligently
working on God’s earth with contentment, hope, and unwearied resolution.
He was never visited with doubt….This great maxim of philosophy he had
gathered by the teaching of nature alone — that man was created to work —
not to speculate, or feel, or dream. (8-9; 10)
Obviously, as Campbell suggests, this passage shows an unmistakable “note of
envy in his recollection of his father’s theocentric view of the world” (Campbell
2012: 5) This could be a helpless envy for the lost paradise of simplicity, piety
and stability of country life. But more importantly, Carlyle recognised that behind
his father’s motivation for work was “his acceptance of a world-order in which
the Gospel of Work played a prominent part”(Campbell 1993:179). Here Carlyle
wished to use his father not only as a personal moral idol but also as an example of
the “ Gospel of Work ” for his generation to recover from their moral degradation.
Carlyle witnessed the decline of religion since the beginning of the Victorian
age when the clergy had lost some of its prestige and power, and as the century
progressed, Victorian religion was repeatedly challenged by evolutionary science
and other emerging fields of specialized knowledge. Carlyle’s life experience was
very different from his parents who were noted for “more than loyalty and piety”
(Campbell 1993: 6 ) and against the expectation of his parents he ceased to be a
practising churchgoer. In spite of all that, he paradoxically never quite left the early
influence of his parents’ Christianity and its bearing on his social analysis. His
earlier works show he was struggling to articulate the place of the individual in a
chaotic world.
Carlyle might have at first a sharp awareness of the change of religious belief
when he initiated himself into society, as he himself argued somewhat prophetically
in his seminal essay “Characteristics”(1831): “[the ] ancient ‘ground — plan of All’
belies itself when brought contact with reality; Mother Church has , to the most,
become a superannuated Stepmother, whose lessons go disregarded ; or are spurned
at, and scornfully gainsaid ” (Criticism of Thomas Carlyle 71). To his desperation
the young Carlyle found himself situated in a world without God:
Whiter has Religion now fled? Of churches and their establishments we here
say nothing; nor of the unhappy domains of Unbelief, and how innumerable
men, blinded in their minds, have grown to “live without God in the world”….
(Criticism of Thomas Carlyle 66 )
Carlyle acknowledges that the past world of his father’s generation is irrecoverable,
that his father’s world has vanished. In Reminiscences he recalls with grief those
venerable clergy of the old days who have left “ineffaceable” impression on him as
well as on Irving:
Very venerable are those old Seceder clergy to me now when I look back on
them. Most of the chief figures among them in Irving’s time and mine were
hoary old men; men so like what one might call antique Evangelists in ruder
vesture, and 6 poor scholars and gentlemen of Christ,’ I have nowhere met
with in monasteries or churches, among Protestant or Papal clergy, in any
country of the world. All this is altered utterly at present, I grieve to say, and
gone to as good as nothing or worse. It began to alter just about that very
period, on the death of those old hoary heads, and has gone on with increasing
velocity ever since. Irving and I were probably among the last products it
delivered before gliding off, and then rushing off into self-consciousness,
arrogancy, insincerity, jangle, and vulgarity, which I fear are now very much
the definition of it. Irving’s concern with the matter had been as follows, brief,
but, I believe, ineffaceable through life. (83)
Long after his own religious views had changed, in this moving memoir, written
over a single weekend after learning of his father’s death, Carlyle wrote:
He was never visited with Doubt; the old Theorem of the Universe was
sufficient for him…. Let me write my books as he built his houses... I have
a sacred pride in my peasant father, and would not exchange him, even now,
for any king known to me...I seem to myself only the continuation and second
volume of my father. (Reminiscences 9)
Carlyle’s admiration for the spiritual security of his father’s time was no more
apparent than his reminiscence of the stability of his father’s rural life — although
he also acknowledges in Chartism that change is not a necessary EVIL for
society as long as it is good for the benefits of the people，Carlyle always shows
anxiety over disorder which he regards as “ insane by the nature of it” and “ is
the hatefullest of things to man”(Chartism 30). Consequently，the paradox of
Carlyle's changing beliefs is underpinned by the fact he is always distantly in touch
with his father's set of values — and he also sees in change, painful as it is, a force
potentially for good.
Hence, Carlyle’s early life is one where he struggled with several incompatible
ideals. First of all, the Calvinist and ordered small-town life he grew up in, never
quite left him, though he acknowledged as early as 1832 (writing on the death
of his father) that the values that life exemplified were rapidly going out of date,
and not suited to the urban environment even a decade or two into the troubled
early Victorian years .Another strong influence on him in his early years was his
emergence from a working-class background without the privileges of birth or
education many Victorian writers might have had — or aspired to. At the time of
his settling in London (1834) Carlyle was thus torn between several influences and
sharply aware of the change sweeping over his country. Working on The French
Revolution (1837), on Chartism, Heroes and the later histories kept his focus
firmly on the mechanism by which a society lives and changes, and the occasional
bursts of violence and tumultuous upset inevitable at a time like the Victorian age.
Perhaps Carlyle’s desire for order and peace was nowhere more evident and fervent
in his French Revolution, in which he eloquently articulated: “Let there be order,
were it under the Soldier’s Sword; let there be peace, that the bounty of Heavens be
not split; that what of Wisdom they do send us bring fruit to its season!” (French
Revolution 250)
It is therefore no surprise to find that, as the decades passed, Carlyle’s
view itself changed. The radicalism of his early years (exemplified in his essay
on Edward Irving in the Reminiscences) gives way to the measured writing of
someone who has become an established Literary Giant in London, someone who
has emerged firmly into the professional middle class, who is the guest of nobility
and a member of the Athenaeum Club and the London Library.
Carlyle’s reputation suffered from a lapse in the firs half of the 20th century due
to the disputed immediate publication of his biography as well as his own hardened
views on Africans, Jews and Irish Catholics and particularly his defence of the
Governor John Eyre’s brutal suppression of Jamaica revolt in 1866. It was not until
the 1960s that his international reputation was successfully rehabilitated. In Culture
and Society (1958), Raymond Williams qualifies him as “the most important social
thinker of his century” (76). However, students of literature today might be either
not quite familiar with him or tend to associate him unfairly with the “authoritarian
and totalitarian personality cults that brought European civilization to the brink
of destruction in World War II” (Sorensen, Introduction 1). For this reason, the
course of change of Carlyle’s thoughts deserves clarification and re-assessment. We
should always remember in our appraisal of Carlyle that he was the offspring of
an age of great social change and turbulence, an age in itself full of contradiction
and confusion and therefore any evaluation of this great man should be based on
a historically dialectical standpoint. Deep in the heart of Carlyle’s change and
ambivalence dwells the agony of a prophet of modernist consciousness5 who was
acutely wary of the potential chaos, contradiction and even the absurdity far beyond
his era.
* Acknowledgements: I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Prof. Ian Campbell of Edinburgh
University for his inspiring guidance, illuminating advice, constructive criticism as well as his
meticulous polishing on both the contents and the style of the paper. This paper is part of the
author’s research program on Thomas Carlyle and his Influence supported by the Ministry of
Education,P.R.C. (Project Number: 10YJA752030 ) as well as part of the program on Carlyle’s
Cultural Criticism and its Influence sponsored by the National Social Science Fund (Project
Number:11BWW005).It is also sponsored by K.C.Wong Magna Fund in Ningbo University.
Notes
1. For a detailed discussion of the awareness of the historical transition, see Lawrence Poston:
“1832” in H. F. Tucker , in which the 1830s has often been described in paradoxical terms of “the
striking contrast between the richness of the political history –Reform , the growth of political
and labour union, and at the end of the decade the movement for the redress of working-class
grievance , Chartism, the first stirrings of Anti-corn law League, the beginning of systematic
government intervention in prison conditions, education, welfare, working hours an public
order-and the apparent barrenness of cultural scene ”(5). Lawrence Poston also quotes Bulwer-
Lytton to show the visible historical transition(See Tucker 14 ). In fact, two years before Bulwer-
Lytton’s articulation, Carlyle in his Characteristics (1831) had detected the pulse of the change
but his expression was more passionate: “How changed in these new days! Truly may it be said,
the Divinity has withdrawn from he Earth; or veils himself in that Whirlwind of departing Era,
wherein the fewest can discern his goings. Not Godhead, but an iron, ignoble circle of Necessity
embraces all things; binds the youth of these times into a sluggish thrall, or else exasperate him
into rebel” (Criticism of Thomas Carlyle 72).
2. Engels was so appalled by the living condition of the Manchester workers that he concluded
in The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1845) that this population has “ sunk to the
lowest level of humanity ” (Engels, 1958:71). According to A.H. Harrison, Engels presents “the
first major study of the effects of industrialization on workers” ( See Antony H. Harrison: 1848 in
Tucker 21 ). Typical are his description of the working-class district of north-eastern Manchester.
Carlyle also opens his Chartism (1840) with the chapter on the Condition of England Questions.
Ian Campbell re-dramatizes in detail the “the vacated properties [of the old town]” that “suffered
a swift decline, first in social status, then in condition” (Campbell, 1993:15).
3. See John D. Rosenberg vii.
4. In his still important monograph Carlyle and German Thought ( 1934), C. F. Harrold
investigates how Carlyle’s early thoughts shows his understanding, amplification or distortion of
German thoughts in favour of his own belief. See Charles Frederic Harrold, Carlyle and German
Thought 1819-1834 (New Haven, 1934).
5. Philip Rosenberg argues that Carlyle is “a very much twentieth century figure”(54).
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