Abstract
In the 1820s and 1830s, Thomas Carlyle made two career-defining moves: from mathematics to letters and from verse to prose. The residue of this period of transition is a corpus of, at best, mediocre verses—the awkward beginnings of a writer whose poetic instinct, critics note, was better suited to the flexibility of prose. In this chapter, Kiera Allison takes a fresh look at those poems, and the mathematical tendencies they encode, to reveal how Carlyle’s period of metrical experimentation—far from the false-start his critics describe—directly informs the method of his mature prose. The chapter first tracks meter’s expansion in Carlyle (from stanza to narrative paragraph to inter-chapter ostinato), then uncovers those same meters inside the frequent numerical ruminations of Carlyle’s French Revolution. In so doing, Allison offers a vision of a postclassical literature that sustains its own growth—in length, and in historical scope—precisely by committing to the fine-print controls of meter and measure.
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Notes
- 1.
Carlyle “had no correct metrical ear,” according to his biographer J. Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner), 205. William Allingham writes that he “remains entirely insensible to the structure of verse, to the indispensable rules derived from the nature of the human mind and ear” (qtd. in Rodger L. Tarr and Fleming McClelland, The Collected Poems of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle [Greenwood: The Penkevill Publishing Company], xxi; italics original). Likewise, James Russell Lowell finds that he lacked both the “shaping faculty” and the “plastic imagination” that “would have made him a poet in the highest sense” (qtd. in Mark Cumming, A Disimprisoned Epic: Form and Vision in Carlyle’s French Revolution [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988], 11).
- 2.
Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 206.
- 3.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Past and Present,” in Emerson’s Complete Works, vol. 12, ed. James Elliott Cabot (Cambridge: Riverside, 1883), 248.
- 4.
John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (Hamden: Archon, 1962), 57.
- 5.
G.B. Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structure, and Style of Thomas Carlyle’s First Major Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 285.
- 6.
Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus, 60.
- 7.
Tennyson, “Foreword,” in The Collected Poems of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Roget L. Tarr and Fleming McClelland (Greenwood: Penkevill Publishing Company, 1986), xix.
- 8.
For a swift but compendious treatment of German Romantic aesthetics and the radicalization of form, see Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 20.
- 9.
Carlyle, “Burns,” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished: Goethe—Goethe’s Helena—Burns (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, & Company, [1828] 1890), 147.
- 10.
See, e.g., Carlyle’s letters to Robert Browning (21 June 1841) and Emerson (30 Dec. 1847) in Carlyle Letters Online, ed. Brent E. Kinser (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1215/lt-18410621-TC-RB-01, and https://doi.org/10.1215/lt-18471230-TC-RWE-01. For additional discussion of Carlyle’s relationship to contemporary poets, see Charles Richard Sanders, “Carlyle, Browning, and the Nature of the Poet,” Emory University Quarterly 16 (1960), 198–200, and “Carlyle and Tennyson,” PMLA, 76 (1961), 87, http://www.jstor.org/stable/460317.pdf.
- 11.
Carlyle, Past and Present (New York: New York University Press), 133.
- 12.
Donald Wesling, The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 109.
- 13.
Tarr and McClelland, Poems, 45.
- 14.
Ibid., 62.
- 15.
Letter to Sterling, 27 Sep. 1841, in Carlyle Letters Online, https://doi.org/10.1215/lt-18410927-TC-JOST-01.
- 16.
Jane Carlyle’s “maternal hopes” were a subject of their letters around this period (Tarr and McLelland, Poems, 167).
- 17.
These include four published editions, from 1824, 1839, 1842, and 1874, respectively, as well as the two undated manuscripts (Tarr and McClelland, Poems, 205).
- 18.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Halle: Hendel, 1910), 122.
- 19.
Quoted in Tarr and McClelland, Poems, 205.
- 20.
On Carlyle’s mathematical career and how it influenced his literary works, see Moore, “Carlyle: Mathematics and ‘Mathesis,’” in Carlyle Past and Present: A Collection of New Essays, ed. K.J. Fielding and Roger L. Tarr (Plymouth: Clarke, Doble and Brendon, 1976), 61–95. I will go further next section into the intersections of Carlyle’s mathematizing and his metrical tendencies: specifically in The French Revolution, his most painstakingly enumerative and also most exuberantly rhythmical prose work.
- 21.
Other reasons include Carlyle’s contempt for religious theater (“particles” are another name for the communion Host), and for the sectarianism of the Thirty-Nine Articles. See Tarr and McClelland, Poems, 177–78.
- 22.
Tarr and McClelland, Poems, 58.
- 23.
Thomas Carlyle to John Sterling, 25 Dec. 1837, in Carlyle Letters Online, https://doi.org/10.1215/lt-18371225-TC-JOST-01 (italics original).
- 24.
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 120. Author’s italics on “his own Shadow” and “Ach Gott!”; the other emphases (italics, bold, and underlining) are mine.
- 25.
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 112.
- 26.
Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus, 258–59. In a similar vein, Levine declares that he “greatly distrust[s] analysis of sound patterns as a guide to meaning” in Carlyle—before venturing to observe the accumulation of e’s, n’s, and th’s, which, he concedes, seem to add direction and force to a key passage in Past and Present (George Levine, “The Use and Abuse of Carlylese,” in The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden [New York: Oxford, 1968], 108).
- 27.
Tennyson, “Foreword,” xvi.
- 28.
William Hazlitt, “On the Living Poets,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, vol. 5 (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1930), 161–2.
- 29.
Wesling, Chances, 9.
- 30.
Ibid., 50.
- 31.
Ibid, 124.
- 32.
In addition to Wesling, see Garrett Stewart’s Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), and Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), on the sentence-level phonetic and grammatical organizations of Victorian and early twentieth-century prose fiction. Joseph P. Jordan’s Dickens Novels as Verse (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012)—a seminal influence on both the concept and the title of the present essay—offers a meticulous demonstration of the “verse-like” structures governing Dickens’ major prose works.
- 33.
Philipp Müller, “Understanding history: Hermeneutic scholarship and source-criticism in historical scholarship,” in Reading Primary Sources: The interpretation of texts from nineteenth- and twentieth-Century history, ed. Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann (London: Routledge, 2009), 25.
- 34.
Ibid., 24–25 (italics mine).
- 35.
Ibid, 25.
- 36.
The phrase, which is mine, borrows closely from the themes of Roland Barthes’ “Listening,” in which he projects a postlapsarian world where “the gods speak” sporadically, and in “a language of which only a few enigmatic fragments reach men, though it is vital—cruelly enough—for them to understand this language”; and where mastery of rhythm, and the oscillation between sign and signified, is the thing “without which no language is possible” (in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Art, Music, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard, [Oxford: Blackwell, 1985], 249).
- 37.
I paraphrase George Levine on the paradigm shift that takes place in late-eighteenth-century science and epistemology, where, in his words, “God withdraws from the field of natural knowledge” (“By Knowledge Possessed: Darwin, Nature, and Victorian Narrative,” New Literary History 24 (1993), 365, http://www.jstor.org/stable/469411.
- 38.
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 42 (italics mine).
- 39.
Carlyle, “Goethe’s Helena,” 7, 10.
- 40.
Thomas Carlyle to J.S. Mill, 24 Sep. 1833, in Carlyle Letters Online, https://doi.org/10.1215/lt-18330924-TC-JSM-01.
- 41.
Carlyle, French Revolution, II.328.
- 42.
Ibid., II.329.
- 43.
I acknowledge the inconsistency in my scansion of “Pétion” between this and the first quotation. Here, I heed the accent on the first syllable, preserving what strikes my ear as an unmistakable dactylic beat. But the second syllable could also elongate to fill a final paeonic foot in the first quotation.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Ibid., italics original.
- 46.
Ibid., II.131 (italics original).
- 47.
Ibid., II.328.
- 48.
Ibid., II.435–36.
- 49.
Ibid., II.390.
- 50.
Ibid., II.328.
- 51.
Ibid., II.321.
- 52.
Ibid., II.341.
- 53.
Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 155, https://hdl-handle-net.proxy01.its.virginia.edu/2027/heb.05562.epub.
- 54.
Ibid., I.29 (italics original). The falling of oak and axe reemerges some 12 books and 600 words later in the shape of that greater “Cyclopean axe” of “Oak and Iron” that “falls in its grooves like the ram of the Pile-engine” (II.131, italics mine).
- 55.
Ibid., II.9. Variations of the phrase “conflux” or “middle of Eternities” appear in vol. 1: 11, 36, 141, and vol. 2: 10, 165.
- 56.
Ibid., II.285.
- 57.
Other deep-historical rhythms include the millennial recurrences of “Sansculottism” (II.441), of silent suffering that erupts every few centuries into “loud-speaking” complaint (II.443), as well as the many folk rhythms, ballads, marches, and hymns that weave into this book’s rhythmic and sonic textures (see, e.g., the genesis of the Marseillaise: II.84).
- 58.
Ibid., II.328.
- 59.
I take liberty here to imagine a slight subordination of the stress on “li-ving” to “yet.”
- 60.
Ibid., II.307.
- 61.
See especially Carlyle’s tallying of body counts in ibid., I.501, II.164.
- 62.
Ibid., II.375.
- 63.
Ibid., II.385 (italics mine).
- 64.
Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 13–15.
- 65.
Quoted in Jameson, Prison House, 15.
- 66.
Carlyle’s Revolution has its fair share of visions of math at the limits, and of calculuses imploding around the ungraspable or disappearing unit. See esp. I.223, II.192–93.
- 67.
For further examples of the tabulation of human suffering and death, see vol.1: 219 and vol. 2: 130, 165–66, 390, 429, and 441. Examples of plus-or-minus (“more or less,” “better or worse”) rhetoric in the Revolution are too many to enumerate, but a representative sampling includes: vol. 1: 341, 362, 366, 451, and vol. 2: 28, 39, 164, and 268.
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Allison, K. (2023). “Visions, half-visions, guesses and darknesses…”: History as Verse in Thomas Carlyle. In: Behlman, L., Loksing Moy, O. (eds) Victorian Verse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_10
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