Thomas Carlyle - Sartor Resartus

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

SARTOR RESARTUS

THOMAS CARLYLE was born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, a small market village in Dumfriesshire. He studied for the ministry, enrolled in law classes, and taught briefly before deciding on a career as a writer. During the 1820s, his essays and translations helped to introduce German literature and thought to a British audience. Sartor Resartus, his one full-scale work of imaginative fiction, was first published periodically in 1833-4. In 1826 Carlyle had married Jane Welsh. In 1834 they moved from Scotland to London and settled at Cheyne Row, Chelsea. It was here that Carlyle wrote the works that confirmed his position as the most influential of the Victorian cultural prophets: The French Revolution (1837), On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), Past and Present (1843), Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), and the six-volume history of Frederick the Great (185865). His Reminiscences were published shortly after his death, in 1881.

KERRY MCSWEENEY is Molson Professor at McGill University in Montreal. His publications include the Worlds Classics edition of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings Aurora Leigh, Tennyson and Swinburne as Romantic Naturalists, Four Contemporary Novelists, Moby Dick: Ishmaels Mighty Book, George Eliot: A Literary Life, The Language of the Senses: Sensory-Perceptual Dynamics in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson, and Supreme Attachments: Studies in Victorian Love Poetry.

PETER SABOR is Professor of English at Laval University, Quebec. His other editions for Oxford Worlds Classics are Burneys Cecilia (with Margaret Anne Doody) and The Wanderer (with Doody and Robert Mack), and Clelands Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. He has also edited Richardsons Pamela, Sarah Fieldings David Simple and Remarks on Clarissa, and Burneys Complete Plays, and published two books on Horace Walpole: Horace Walpole: A Reference Guide, and Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage.

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

For over 100 years Oxford Worlds Classics have brought readers closer to the worlds great literature. Now with over 700 titlesfrom the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth centurys greatest novelsthe series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.

The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy, and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers.

Refer to the to navigate through the material in this Oxford Worlds Classics ebook. Use the asterisks (*) throughout the text to access the hyperlinked Explanatory Notes.

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THOMAS CARLYLE

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
KERRY McSWEENEY
and
PETER SABOR

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York

Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogot Buenos Aires Cape Town
Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi
Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
Paris So Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw
with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

Introduction, Note on the Text, Bibliography, Chronology, Explanatory Notes, Glossary
Peter Sabor and Kerry McSweeney 1987

The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1987
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1999

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Carlyle, Thomas, 17951881.
Sartor resartus
(Oxford worlds classics)
Bibliography: p.
I. McSweeney, Kerry, 1941.
II. Sabor, Peter.
III. Title.
PR4429.A2M37 1987 824.8 875753
ISBN 0192836730
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire

Sartor Resartus has long been recognized as a work of the foremost literary historical importance. For one thing, it marks the transition from the Romantic to the Victorian periods as sharply as the Preface to Lyrical Ballads marks that between the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. And unlike Wordsworths manifesto, Carlyles book enacts within itself the dislocations of the passage. For another, Sartor Resartus, which was first published in book form in Boston in 1836 with an enthusiastic preface by Ralph Waldo Emerson, was an important stimulus to the great mid-nineteenth-century flowering of American literature. Poe may have loathed the book, as he did everything of Carlyles; but it was a key influence, both thematic and formal, on two of the master-works of the American RenaissanceMelvilles Moby-Dick and Whitmans Song of Myself.

Most importantly, Sartor Resartus is the seminal expression of the thought of the most influential of the Victorian cultural prophets. The fundamental Carlylean doctrines are all articulated, or at least adumbrated, here: the horrors of Utilitarianism; the religious basis of society; the pattern of conversionfrom the Everlasting No, through the Centre of Indifference to the Everlasting Yeawhich showed that, in the words of Thomas Henry Huxley, a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology;

Of course, literary historical importance does not of itself make a literary work intrinsically interesting, let alone a major achievement. In the case of Sartor Resartus, its extrinsic importance and tract-for-the-times aspects can even become serious obstacles to seeing the work for what it actually isso serious that a process of defamiliarization may be necessary before Carlyles text can recover its freshness. Custom, as the central personage of