Thomas Carlyle was
born near
Carlyle maintained his relationship with this part of
There are four main geographical locations of interest in relation to Carlyle:
his birthplace at Ecclefechan, the City of
The Arched House at Ecclefechan is of course interesting to visit. Built by
Carlyle’s father, the birthplace is maintained by The National Trust of
Scotland and has been open to the public since 1883. Providing some rare
suggestions of the family’s life towards the end of the 18th century, the
visitor books contain the names of thousands of people who have journeyed to
Ecclefechan over the course of some 125 years. It is one of several buildings
that still stand testimony to the skills of solid construction associated with
Carlyle’s stonemason father, James Carlyle, and his generation of hardy and
highly competent workers. Another example of their work is a fine bridge over
the river Nith at Auldgirth. The birthplace at Ecclefechan is situated near to
several other locations strongly associated with Carlyle such as Scotsbrig,
Hoddom, Annan, and
Edinburgh is for many reasons undoubtedly also interesting in relation to
Carlyle, particularly with regard to the University, the former Advocates’
Library (now the National Library of Scotland), and a number of Edinburgh-based
intellectuals connected with Carlyle’s development as an author. Shortly before
the sudden death of Jane, the first conspicuous marker of
Often described in later life as the Sage of Chelsea, the Carlyles’ London home
is without question an inestimably important place in the history of Carlyle’s
writing, thought, contributions to Victorian culture, and his seemingly
countless links with both the London literati and overseas visitors. Their
The Carlyles set up home in
However, though the Carlyles’
Some fifteen miles from Dumfries, it was at Craigenputtoch (to use Carlyle’s
preferred spelling) that he wrote and first published in the early 1830s in Fraser’s
Magazine, that unique work ‘of genius’ as Jane described it, the text that
would prove to be both hugely influential to several generations of writers and
fundamental to much of what Carlyle wrote later in his career, Sartor
Resartus.
A text that often perplexes readers, but which is at once immensely funny and
gravely serious, Sartor Resartus repays the tough demands it makes on
readers who learn how to read it and discover its buoyant wit and amazing
artistry. Though the work has been enjoyed by people of greatly varying
abilities and interests, arguably in Sartor Resartus Carlyle is very
much a writer’s writer. Certainly, the list of famous authors influenced by Sartor
Resartus is seemingly endless.
The authors most clearly affected by Sartor include: Elizabeth Barrett
and Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, T.H.
Huxley, Thomas Hardy, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, and Alfred Tennyson. Many
more might be added to this list if it were not already needlessly too long to
demonstrate the importance of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus to the whole
field of Victorian literature. Leaving aside the influence of Sartor
Resartus on 19th-century American, German, and other European writers, to
look briefly to the 20th century, novelists who were inspired by or in some way
wrote texts with a particular Carlylean resonance include: James Joyce, D.H.
Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and much more recently Scotland’s Alasdair Gray,
himself author of an introduction to the Canongate edition of Sartor
(2002). Rodger Tarr gives most of the names listed above, and many more
besides, as having been markedly influenced by Sartor, but as Tarr
nicely points out: ‘That a copy of Sartor Resartus sits atop one of Paradise
Lost in Paul Gauguin’s 1889 portrait of Meyer de Hahn is ample
acknowledgment of its importance’ (Sartor Resartus, Strouse edition,
p.xxx).
This immediately suggests something of the still largely unappreciated great
cultural significance of Craigenputtoch itself. As the place in which was
written a text that has left such indelible traces upon vast swathes of
literature, including much of Carlyle’s later work, Craigenputtoch is without
question one of
Sartor Resartus was by no means the only important text that Carlyle
published while living at Craigenputtoch. At this wilderness retreat he was
immensely productive, publishing a substantial number of articles, including
‘Burns’, ‘German Playwrights’, ‘Voltaire’, ‘Novalis’, ‘Jean Paul Richter’,
‘Schiller’, ‘Biography’, ‘Corn-Law Rhymes’, ‘Diderot’, and most
notably his hugely famous ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829). Carlyle’s
letters from this period are also particularly noteworthy as he corresponded
intimately with, among others, one of the most influential German writers in
Carlyle’s work as an essayist during his Craigenputtoch period alone, suggests
a fascinating cluster of possible studies that might be given at this or future
conferences or symposia on, for example, Goethe, Carlyle’s treatment of German
literature, the French philosophes of the Enlightenment such as
Voltaire and Diderot, working-class protest against the Corn Laws, Carlyle’s definition
of the 19th century as ‘the Mechanical Age’, the significance of his coining
the term ‘environment’, and his intriguing and influential treatment of
Scotland’s national Bard, Robert Burns, whose house and mausoleum may be
visited in Dumfries.
Though Craigenputtoch presented difficulties for both Thomas and Jane, their
years here stand as testimony to the ways in which place, topography, the
environment, industrialism, silence, political unrest, anxieties concerning
health, disease, death, family, and a number of other matters may be said to
have played a part in shaping Carlyle’s outstanding skill as a writer. His
development of a prophetic style, attitudes towards a ruinously prevalent
materialism, and the counter-cultural nature of much of the work he produced
while at Craigenputtoch, would later mark him out as a leading intellectual in
Victorian Britain. Such general terms as those just mentioned provide ample
scope for various critical discourses concerning Carlyle’s work. However, other
topics embedded within Carlyle’s writing both during his Craigenputtoch years
and well beyond this period may also be addressed at this or future
conferences, including: nescience (ignorance), scepticism, work,
action, symbols, metaphor, organicism, and Carlyle’s sustained discourses to do
with the tensions between chaos and order, mind and body, language and meaning.
Of course at Craigenputtoch the Carlyles were rather sequestered, isolated from
the literary and intellectual social circles particularly enjoyed by Jane and
necessary for Carlyle to emerge more fully as one of the leading writers of his
day. However, one of their most acute-minded friends from the
The Carlyles had at least one other important visitor to the remote hill farm
of Craigenputtoch, the essayist and thinker somewhat aptly referred to on
occasion as ‘the American Carlyle’, Ralph Waldo Emerson. As many will know,
Emerson did a great deal to promote Carlyle in the United States, primarily by
ensuring the first publication of Sartor Resartus in the form of a
book published at Boston in 1836. Emerson himself later emerged as a pivotal
figure in the development of American literature, culture, and religion. On the
25th August 1833 Emerson and Carlyle spent a long day talking and walking
together in the solitude and silence of the hills surrounding Craigenputtoch.
This day marks the beginning of a 38-year correspondence between Carlyle and
Emerson. Their meeting of minds at Craigenputtoch effectually inaugurated one
of several key cultural connections between American and English literature, a
connection that might also be described as one of the many significant
intersections between American and Scottish thought. Though Carlyle and
American literature and thought have been examined by several scholars,
somewhat like Carlyle’s Scottish intellectual milieu and his relationship with
his Scottish theological and philosophical roots, the connections between
Carlyle and a number of American authors remains a fruitful area for further
research to help enhance our understanding of the long-standing deep
relationship that Scotland and indeed the United Kingdom has had with the
United States of America and also with Canada. Through Emerson’s promotion of Sartor
Resartus, Carlyle’s work reached an American audience, helping him to
become a literary figure of truly international stature.
Like many other sites in Scotland of interest with regard to their association
with the intellectual and cultural life-blood that has done so much to make
Scotland a highly distinctive contributor to the modern world, and yet which
have been similarly forgotten or neglected, Craigenputtoch is indeed a place of
much greater cultural significance than even many devoted readers of Carlyle
have hitherto appreciated. As we come to learn more about the intellectual,
literary, cultural, and political context that surrounded both Carlyle’s Sartor
Resartus and some of the other important texts which he wrote at
Craigenputtoch, and as we come to understand better the reach and import of
Carlyle’s influence on literature and thought internationally, this humble farm
may in time be regarded as one of the most important monuments in the world to
the writer’s craft. And if this can be said of Craigenputtoch, something
similar may be asserted concerning the many other places nearby that have long
been the most intellectually and artistically fertile areas in rural Scotland,
home to so many of Scotland’s most influential or remarkable people. Over
centuries much has emerged from here of cultural, intellectual, and practical
significance both nationally and internationally. But that such contributions
had their origins here and even that they had been made, also came to be
forgotten, ignored, or disvalued as though individuals, physical places, and
the social textures interwoven with them were somehow unimportant as soon as
the world had moved on. However, these contributions are now at last gradually
becoming rediscovered as inherently important to local and wider Scottish
narratives of identity crucial to much-needed economic and social regeneration.
Such a process of past contributions to the world slipping beneath notice, yet
beginning to re-emerge as potentially regenerative strands of the future fabric
of life – where they are presently poised precariously in the balance – is
symbolically reflected by the very situation in which knowledge about Carlyle’s
life and work now stands. Carlyle Country remains the formative domain of a
writer whose work irreplaceably contributed in substantial ways to a
literature, culture, and intellectual history of enduring value as a major dimension
of the world’s cultural inheritance. But Carlyle Country and the Carlyle
phenomenon are territories urgently in need of rediscovery, re-evaluation, and
the commencement of an educative programme to promulgate more widely something
of the national and international value of the cultural richness rooted in the
South and South West of Scotland and symbolised by Carlyle’s extraordinary
journey from Ecclefechan to other worlds of literature and thought.
Ralph Jessop, 14 July 2008
© http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/dumfriescampus/carlylecountry/
Other
articles written about Thomas Carlyle: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
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