The Carlyles in
‘The
Carlyles in Scotland and Europe’which took place in Edinburgh, Scotland, 4-6
April, 2001, was the second of two conferences arranged to celebrate the Carlyles
in the new Millenium. The first, The Carlyles in the
The conference was supported financially by
Consignia, Baillie Gifford & Co., the Saltire Society, the A. R. and K. M.
McLaren Trust Fund, the Faculty of Arts and the English Department of
The conference itself took place in the
Victorian surroundings of St. Leonnard’s Hall (part of Pollock Halls, and built
by Thomas Nelson the publisher). Rather than the organisers describing the
conference, we thought it more appropriate to ask four scholars to write their
particular impressions. Rosemary Ashton and Caroline McCracken-Flesher had not
attended a conference dedicated to the Carlyles before, while Lowell Frye and
Jude Nixon between them attended most of the Carlyle conferences of the 1990s
(for example, the centenary conferences at Memorial University, St. John’s,
Newfoundland, Canada, and at the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University,
Texas, USA, 1995). As the conference was run partly in parallel sessions (a
matter of regret to some, making choices between sessions hard, and relief to
others who found the number of papers attended a more manageable amount to take
in), each report covers only part; taken together they give some sense of the
whole.
The participants were from Europe and the
Reflections
on ‘The Carlyles in
Rosemary Ashton,
The Carlyles in
On the cross-cultural front, several papers
engaged with aspects of Carlyle's relations with German culture (Wendling,
Ashton, apRoberts, Alvarez-Fernandez, Hubbard, Rundle), and one described
Carlyle's importance for Jorge Luis Borges (Vegh). There were papers on Carlyle
and history (memorably Dudley Edwards on Carlyle and Macaulay), Carlyle and
science (Ulrich), Carlyle and the race question (Dickerson), and Carlyle and
the visual arts (De Laura). McCracken-Flesher's paper on Carlyle and Scott,
Jessop's on Carlyle and Hume, and Jack’s on Masson and Carlyle were the main
contributions under the 'Scottish' heading. Perhaps there could have been more
papers addressing this aspect of the conference's theme; most contributors
chose to address the 'European' element. There was redress, however, in the
conference's adjunct activities: a delightful visit to Jane's home in
Haddington and a wonderful evening in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
listening to Tom Fleming read out Ken Fielding's selection of extracts from
Carlyle's letters proposing the foundation of the gallery itself, followed by a
private view of the specially mounted exhibition of portraits of the Carlyles,
and finished off by supper in one of the galleries, enjoyed under the watchful
eye of some other famous Scots, including Lords Jeffrey and Byron.
Like many of my colleagues at the Carlyle conference,
I have been reading the Carlyles for many years--about twenty-five years, in my
case. That number pales beside the experience of several esteemed senior
Carlyleans who helped us reflect on the Carlyles in Scotland and Europe
and--perhaps with apologies to the conference organizers--just about everywhere
else, too. Still, twenty-five years is a long time, and it has led me from
Sartor Resartus to the great essays (‘Signs of the Times’, ‘Biography’,
‘Characteristics’) to The French Revolution and Past and Present
and Cromwell. The quarter century of my interest in Carlyle has
fortunately coincided with the regular appearance of volumes of the Carlyles'
correspondence, and so I have been able to follow their life in letters through
the same trajectory: from their courtship to the trying years in Craigenputtoch
to life and triumph and difficulty in
The Carlyle conference this April--like the one
in
Views of Carlyle as an old man are, as Ken
Fielding noted, still dominated by the harsh image constructed by Froude in his
biography of Carlyle. Ken in his talk on "'Justice for Carlyle'"
helped us to see the elderly Carlyle as a humane man and (for those of us so
inclined) to avoid rushing to accept Froude's judgment. Rosemary Ashton
accomplished something of the same task for the young Carlyle. Her talk on
"The Uses of German Literature in the Carlyles' Courtship" is a
subject that on the surface has a forbidding tone: how pleasing could any
courtship be if one of its main vehicles is the discussion of German
literature, in German, no less! Yet Rosemary's weaving together of passages
from the letters reveals how witty both of the Carlyles were, whether it was
Thomas pressing his advantage through references to Goethe, or Jane verbally
slapping the hand of her presumptuous suitor. Rosemary's talk reminded me that
whatever the difficulties of the later marriage, the courtship letters show the
development of a fine regard and respect and love between Jane and Thomas. I
had read all these letters once upon a time, but I never read them closely, one
upon the other. Rosemary's narrative sequence humanized these two gifted,
difficult people. So too did Aileen Christianson's talk on "Jane Welsh
Carlyle: Imaginary Letters and Ghost Publications." Aileen--as well as
text of "The simple Story of my own first Love"--persuaded me to see
Jane Welsh Carlyle as a more complex woman than Froude's narrative of
victimhood allows or even as the private writer of excellent letters. The story
of JWC's complex mingling of fiction and autobiography in letters and in the
"simple Story" warn me, at least, against simplistic judgments of her
or of "the greatest Philosopher of our day"--how I'd like to hear the
intonation Jane used when she spoke those words! Kathy Chamberlain in her talk
placed Jane Welsh Carlyle in a transitional zone between private and public
writing, an ambivalent site that suggests both the triumphs and the
frustrations of Jane's career. Kathy persuasively notes that "JWC's
aspirations beyond private writing, as well as her deep ambivalence about
venturing forth, show her as complex and fascinating. There is a nervous modern
ring to her restlessness" that helps explain our continuing interest in
Jane's life and letters, beyond the connection to Thomas.
Other papers at the conference explored aspects
of Thomas Carlyle's life and work that I found valuable, some because they were
new to me and some because they extended my knowledge of a particular subject.
As the father of two children who have successfully passed through the period
of dinosaur-love that seems a necessary part of a modern childhood, I was
intrigued by John Ulrich's paper on "Victorian Dinosaurs" and the
relationship between Carlyle and Richard Owen. John has spoken before on
Carlyle's resuscitation of the past; the connection with Victorian paleontology
is a thoughtful extension of that work. Jude Nixon's narrative of the
complicated attempt to help Samuel Johnson's god-daughter, more for Johnson's
sake than for that of the poor woman herself, usefully explored the ideological
aura of a philanthropical act. David Sorensen did a fine job tracing not only
the personal connection between Carlyle and Alexander Herzen, but also the
affinity between the two men's thinking. It helps me to think of Herzen's
affection for Carlyle in the early 1850s, despite the two men's disagreements
about the revolutions of 1848. Since reading Isaiah
Caroline McCracken-Flescher,
How does the Carlylean past appear through our
present which is Carlyle’s invisible future? The 2001 conference grappled with
Carlyle’s philosophy, his tortuous reasonings, convoluted style, and the class,
race and gender politics that underpin his authorship, from perspectives that
were often simultaneously Carlylean and postmodern. At this advanced stage in
Carlyle studies, with the letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle moving
along, and recent and exceptional editions of On Heroes and
Hero-Worship and Sartor Resartus readily available, criticism now
takes a double turn through biography and culture, text and its production. The conference show-cased a number of remarkable presentations that
read Carlyle’s work according to the moment and mode of its writing.
Owen Dudley Edwards considered Frederick the Great through Carlyle’s
class and political rivalry with Macaulay. Critics considered, too, the
production of Thomas Carlyle: Susan McPherson pondered how the borderline
"New Woman," Mary Aitken Carlyle, problematized Froude’s biography.
Others wrestled with the ways in which Carlyle figured but also manipulated the
lives around him and at times complicated his own.
Rosemary Ashton traced the mutual and debatable
construction of "the Carlyles" through their exchange of German
literature; Lowell Frye rehearsed the entanglements of Carlylean metaphor;
Chris Vanden Bossche pointed to a Carlyle who adjusted medium, style and sense
in accordance with a shifting personal and national terrain. Indeed, perhaps
the most notable phenomenon of the conference was how speakers persistently
read Carlyle according to his own ideas, methods and criteria, but from a
position located subtly apart. And the conference itself seemed to shift and
slide in time and place: in one day we were at Haddington, place of Jane
Baillie Welsh’s birth and Jane Welsh Carlyle’s burial in the afternoon and in
the evening, we sat in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, triangulated by
busts of Edward Irving and Walter Scott and a gigantic statue of the Sage of
Chelsea, while fixed by the voice of Royal Weddings (Tom Fleming) intoning Ken
Fielding¹s script drawn from Carlyle’s letters that established the institution
in which we sat.
David DeLaura’s opening plenary figured what
became, I think, our critical keynote. In portrait after portrait, Carlyle the
iconoclastic icon exceeds the frame. Most notably, in Ford Madox Brown’s
painting ‘Work’, Carlyle’s body addresses the workers, but his face sneers out
at his audience, asserting personality through and against painting, and
blocking, challenging, demanding attention. Authoritative editions, the data of
portraits, history, biography, Jane Welsh Carlyle’s occluded productivity,
Carlylean practices and the approaches of current theory reveal both the art
and criticism of Thomas Carlyle as excercises intriguing for their obliquity.
Wherever Carlyle stands, he is not quite there; however we gaze, we don¹t quite
see him. Another conference is called for?
Thanks to David Sorensen for his work on the
first conference, to Ian Campbell and Aileen Christianson for their labours on
this second, and much enthusiasm for the challenges of the next.
Jude V. Nixon,
What continues to delight those of us who
regularly participate in the Carlyle conference is the combination of leading
Carlyle scholars matched with new Carlyle protégés. Not only are these seasoned
scholars leaving an indelible mark on Carlyle criticism and scholarship,
including valuable work on the primary texts and letters, but they continue to
shape the way we think about and read Carlyle and Victorian literature.
The conference held four plenary sessions. David
J. DeLaura’s ‘Icon and Iconoclast: Carlyle and the New Religion of Art’ opened
the proceedings by examining the ubiquitous Carlyle in art. We have long known that
Carlyle crops up in expected and un-expected places. For example, my colleague,
Natalie Cole, who attended the
‘Victorian Dinosaurs: Carlyle, Owen, and the
Presence of the Past’, by John Ulrich, excavated the metaphors from paleontology
in Carlyle (who also saw the historian as paleontologist), attributing them to
his familiarity with the work of the acclaimed paleontologist, Richard Owen.
Elisa Alvarez-Fernandez, in ‘Feigned Authorship in Carlyle’s Writings on German
Literature’, attributed the frequent pseudonymous German authorship in Carlyle
to the influence of German romantic writers, like Herne and Richter. She also
drew attention to a Cervantes influence and Carlyle’s frequent employment of
romantic irony. Brent Kinser’s ‘Thomas Carlyle, Mark Twain, and Shooting
Niagara’ examined Twain’s debates with Carlyle on the nature of democracy in
Twain’s writings on
‘“A Scotch Proudhon”: Carlyle, Herzen, and the
French Revolutions of 1789 and
Carlyle and the philosophers (German and Scottish)
saw no fewer than three papers. Of then, Margaret Rundle’s ‘Fichte’s Kindling
Carlyle’s New Promethean Fire’ identified Fichte’s ‘I and Not I’ as an
important idealistic influence on Carlyle’s rejection of materialism. Dale
Trela’s ‘Carlyle, Cultural Critics and Curricular Cononicity, 1880-
Brian Ridgers considered word portraiture in
both Carlyles’ letters of the 1820s in enjoyably theoretical terms and Marylu
Hill continued her intellectually stimulating discussion of Carlylean
historicism that she had begun in
A Carlyle conference would not be the event it
is unless some measure of structured (and spontaneous) play is involved. To
that end, the trip to Haddington and Jane Welsh’s home and church (St. Mary’s,
where she is buried) was truly a delightful excursion. So too was the evening
at the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, where we were treated to a
delightful reception, dinner, and a performance by Tom Fleming, who,
re-tailored in the aprons of the tailor, dramatized ‘Scottish Historical
Portraits: An Address by Thomas Carlyle’. The conference ended with the
conference banquet, introduced by Robin Harper, Green MSP and the Rector of
Edinburgh University, who expressed some consternation that his was a role
filled in 1866 by the great sage himself.
© http://www.englit.ed.ac.uk/research/carlyle/conf2001report.htm
Other articles written
about Thomas Carlyle: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
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