At the Heart of Carlyle
Country
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) is one
of the greatest men of letters of all time. Highly important to the literature
and culture of the
His importance was acknowledged by many eminent contemporaries. However, almost
from the beginning of his career as a writer he attracted highly diverse
responses to his texts, ranging from quite excessive adulation to severe
denunciation. This diversity of reception is testimony to the richness and
complexity of his writing, the diversity of his readership, and his
pervasiveness. At least during several key decades of the 19th century
Carlyle’s work was so prevalent, his literary and intellectual connections with
other great Victorian writers were so extensive, and he was so widely read by
both rich and poor alike, that it would be hard to overstate just how important
his work was to Victorian readers generally. Through the work of those he
profoundly influenced, and through the writing of several prominent
20th-century writers, some of whom continue to grapple with topics at the very
heart of Carlyle’s texts (such as the legacy of the Enlightenment and the
challenges and problems of modernity), Carlyle continues to be important to our
reading and understanding of both Victorian and present-day literature and
thought. However, by comparison with times within living memory, when he was
virtually a household name, Carlyle is now largely unknown.
Paradoxically this ignorance has arisen during a period of much achievement
within the field of Carlyle scholarship. Largely over the past four decades,
ever increasing numbers of people know nothing or very little about Carlyle,
and yet we now have more at our fingertips concerning and by him than at any
time before.
The ongoing Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle is
approaching publication of volume 37. By the time the whole collection is
completed we should have an estimated 45 volumes of letters spanning some seven
decades of the 19th century. Access to the Carlyles’
letters has also been greatly enhanced with the launch of Carlyle Letters
Online in 2007 – at the click of a mouse internet users can now browse
through the first 32 volumes (go to carlyleletters.org). The scholarly Strouse edition of Carlyle’s works is another major ongoing
publication which so far has provided extensively footnoted authoritative texts
including: On Heroes, Hero-Worship & the Heroic in History, Past and
Present, Sartor Resartus, and Historical
Essays. Further selected volumes of Carlyle’s works are in the pipeline,
such as The French Revolution.
Throughout the last four decades a significant number of scholarly monographs
and articles have been published, including many notable items in the journal Carlyle
Studies Annual. In
Germane to much of this work, over the past 27 years since the centennial year
of Carlyle’s death, there have also been a number of important conferences on
the Carlyles held at, for example, Mainz (1981), St.
John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (1995), Baylor University, Texas, USA (1995), the
Keats and Carlyle conference in The Netherlands at Leiden (1995), Philadelphia
(2000), Edinburgh (2001), and most recently at Villanova (2007). Far from
exhausting the field of Carlyle studies, arguably much of this work suggests
great scope for further research, discussion, new ideas, and many substantial
additions to our knowledge and understanding of the Carlyle phenomenon.
However, while the resources for studying Carlyle have been greatly enhanced
over recent decades, and though scholars of Carlyle continue to find many new
research topics on or associated with the Carlyles,
as Paul Kerry recently claimed, Carlyle himself ‘is threatened with
marginalization within Victorian studies discourse’ (Literature and Belief,
vol. 25, p.ix). It is almost as though the wider
academic world, tacitly accepting a division of labour
of increasing necessity and convenience, have effectually found, virtually by
default, that they can do without Carlyle. Such a retrenchment has insensibly
transformed the study of Carlyle into a specialist concern quite out of kilter
with his pervasiveness, his unquestionable stature, and the significance of his
work to the trajectory of Western cultural change over the past centuries.
This is a situation which cannot continue for many more years. The steadily
growing body of scholarly work on Carlyle will within a few years culminate in
some of the best resources we have had available to inform the richest and most
sophisticated understandings of Carlyle, his countless connections with others,
and the ways in which Carlyle’s work is often pivotal to the literature,
culture, and intellectual history of almost three centuries from the
Enlightenment to the present day. The accumulated wealth of material needs to
become more widely used as a treasure trove of information and discourses
available to a much wider community who wish to dabble or delve into the lives
and works of our Victorian heritage and the strands that reach out from those
times to our own. But, while the digitisation of
texts and general expansion of IT resources and methods may make greater
accessibility to the Carlyles highly likely, there is
nothing inevitable about this nor does greater accessibility imply greater
knowledge, understanding, or warrantable discernment of value. Reversing
ignorance about Carlyle must involve a substantial educative project to
supplement the technical achievements required to make Carlyle more easily
accessible. Bringing together scholars from Australia, Belgium, Canada,
England, France, Poland, Scotland, and the USA, the Carlyle Conference at
Dumfries aims to build on so much earlier work, and the initiative of
principally the Villanova Conference in 2007, to quicken into life a longer-term
process of reversing the prevailing ignorance concerning Carlyle’s work,
beginning where Carlyle himself began at the heart of Carlyle Country.
Inspired by exciting discussions at Villanova and by the initiative of the
principal organisers of that event, Marylu Hill and Paul Kerry, the Carlyle Conference this
year at
In recent years several dedicated and much admired scholars, who have all made
major contributions to Carlyle studies, have passed away, including Ruth apRoberts and most notably K.J. Fielding. It is to be
expected that memorials to their endeavours and
celebration of the substantial work of a number of other leading Carlyle
scholars will occur at future conferences. However, given that one of Carlyle’s
most influential texts, Sartor Resartus, was
written just a few miles from our venue, it is particularly fitting that this
Conference should honour the memory of a man who for
many stands at the forefront of modern Carlyle scholarship, the author of a
book that perhaps did more than any single work of literary criticism to
reawaken a number of leading scholars in the United Kingdom and the United
States of America to the complexity, sophistication, and importance of Sartor
Resartus. This Conference is therefore dedicated
to Georg B. Tennyson, the former emeritus professor of English at the
Ralph Jessop, 14 July
2008
The Carlyle Conference 2008
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Other
articles written about Thomas Carlyle: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
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Forés López
Universitat
de València Press