Table Of ContentCarlyle
and the Burden of History
Thomas Carlyle. Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1867. All rights reserved:
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949. (49.55.324)
C A R L Y LE
and the
Burden of History
JOHN D ROSENBERG
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
1985
Copyright © 1985 by John Rosenberg
All rights reserved
Printed in Great Britain
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 32 1
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rosenberg, John D.
Carlyle and the burden of history.
Includes bibliographies.
1. Carlyle, Thomas, 1795-1881—Knowledge—History.
2. Carlyle, Thomas 1795-1881. French revolution.
3. France—History—Revolution, 1789-1799. I. Title.
PR4437.H5R67 1985 824'. 8 85-8407
ISBN 0-674-09754-8
To Maurine and Matthew
Preface
History, as Carlyle understood it, is poetry, prophecy, biography,
and social criticism—all in one. In the writing of history he found his
vocation, and his practice of that vocation is the subject of this book.
Carlyle conceived of his histories as modern prose-epics—successors
to the Bible, Homer, and Milton. In The French Revolution he came
closest to realizing this exalted ambition. A central document of nine-
teenth-century culture, The French Revolution is my principal concern,
but Carlyle's historical imagination figures importantly in almost all
that he wrote: in his early essays on English culture, as in the bitter
journalism of Latter-Day Pamphlets, he is the chronicler and critic of his
own age; On Heroes and Hero-Worship is rooted in history; in Remi-
niscences and in the autobiographical Sartor Resartus he is the historian
of himself.
Radical and authoritarian, compassionate and bigoted, prophetic
and blind, Carlyle the man is as difficult to categorize as his works.
His indictment of the brutality of laissez-faire capitalism inspired
Dickens, Ruskin, and Engels, yet he supported slavery in the American
South and was awarded the Order of Merit by Bismarck's Prussia.
His moving plea for community gradually gives way to a frightened
call for authority, his receptivity to new ideas hardens into intolerance
of all creeds save his own.
Carlyle's estrangement from the world and from his own genius
becomes increasingly apparent in the years following The French
Revolution. Past and Present, his last great work, is also the first in which
he loses his way. His confidence in his ability to read the design of
history falters, and as the past grows unintelligible, the present be-
comes intolerable. He retreats within himself, and the signs of that
long withdrawal are everywhere evident in Frederick the Great, his final
meditation on history.
In the course of writing this book I was generously aided by fellow-
ships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National
Endowment for the Humanities. My wife Maurine and friend Elliott
Zuckerman read the manuscript in each of its many stages; their criti-
cism and encouragement were vital. Joanna Gondris and Maude
Meisel were the most astute and enterprising of research assistants.
viii PREFACE
My chapters on The French Revolution profited greatly from the keen
scrutiny of Anne Prescott. Elizabeth Wheeler offered a host of helpful
suggestions, substantive as well as stylistic. Louis Menand's com-
ments unfailingly led me to tighten an argument or more nearly
approximate a truth. To Margaretta Fulton and Kim Scott Walwyn I
owe thanks for their confidence in this book even before it reached
their editorial desks. For reasons too numerous to specify and too im-
portant to ignore, I am also indebted to Richard D. Altick, Jonathan
Arac, James R. Bird, Jr., Andrew Brown, K. J. Fielding, Elizabeth
Langen, Fred Kaplan, George Leonard, Peter Rudnytsky, and
Joseph Slater.
My final chapters were written in the pleasant village of Peacham,
in the former summer-home of Moses Hadas, the first of the great
company of teachers I encountered on entering Columbia College just
after the Second World War. Moses Hadas, Mark Van Dören, Lionel
Trilling, Joseph Wood Krutch, F. W. Dupee, Andrew Chiappe—
forty years ago they taught me much of what I know of the humane
study of literature. I like to think they teach me still.
J. D. R.
New York City
October 1984
Contents
The Advent of a Prophet
1. From Sartor Resartus to The French Revolution 3
2. History and the Human Voice 15
3. 'The Grand Poem of Our Time' 29
The French Revolution
4. The Grocer and the King of Kings 57
5. Narrative Voices 76
6. The Revolution Devours Itself 91
The Later Writings
7. Past and Present: Miracles and Metamorphoses 115
8. Cromwell Face to Face 137
9. Demon Cocks and Latter-Day Pamphlets 149
10. The Long Night of Frederick the Great 159
Notes 173
Bibliography 193
Index 201
