Carlyle and the St. Simonians

Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Professor of English, University of Notre Dame

[Home —> Authors —> Thomas Carlyle —> Works —> Carlyle and the Search for Authority]

[Chapter 3, note 2, of the author's Carlyle and the Search for Authority, which the Ohio State University Press published in 1991. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright. indicates a link to material not in the original print version. GPL]

See TNB, 160, 163, on the relationship between judge and criminal (SR, 60) and the vision of the clothes flying off the court (SR, 61). See also TNB, 164-66, and CL, 5:153; in the latter, a letter of August 30, Carlyle makes reference to "natural Supernaturalism." The first notebook passage occurs just after Carlyle notes that he had received writings from the St. Simonian Gustave d'Eichthal four weeks earlier. Since he received the packet around July 23 (see CL, 5:133), this would date the entry as about August 20. Both this letter (which mentions the July revolution) and the notebooks juxtapose mention of the St. Simonians and the use of the clothing metaphor. In his response to the St. Simonians, Carlyle employed, perhaps for the first time, the "tone and Phraseology of Teufelsdröckh" (CL, 5:136, n- 3). Although much of the material that Carlyle would include in Sartor Resartus had been gathering for nearly a decade (for example, in Wotton Reinfred), passages written before this date do not employ the clothing metaphor. In Sartor Resartus, for example, the passage on the figurativeness of language is expressed in terms of the clothing metaphor; but the earlier version of the passage, written in the latter half of 1829, does not use it (SR, 73; TNB, 141-42).

Contents last modified 5 October 2001