Sartor Resartus (Oxford World's Classics) by Thomas Carlyle, Kerry McSweeney, Peter Sabor Read Free Book Online

the speaker of Browning’s first poem,
Pauline
(also published in 1833), resolved to ‘look within no more’, but to turn to biography and history for his subjects.
    The best recent critical accounts of
Sartor Resartus
, sensitive to the historical moment out of which it comes, make use of methodologies more sophisticated than that of the husk-and-kernel approach. Janice L. Haney, for example, has argued thatthe last three chapters of
Sartor
(in which Teufelsdröckh’s removal from Weissnichtwo to London is mentioned) show a turning away from an outmoded Romantic vision towards a Victorian social actuality and ‘an emerging Victorian mode of making meaning’. Carlyle, says Haney, pits ‘an empirical self’ against ‘a metaphysical and aesthetic self; together the two ‘compose a book about the quest for meaning’. 29 And in her
English Romantic Irony
, Anne Mellor presents
Sartor
as a ‘self-consuming artifact’ that ‘does not preach the truth, but asks that its readers discover the truth for themselves’.
Sartor Resartus
is a fictional work ‘designed to consume itself by revealing the limitations both of its own symbolic language and of language as such. It is intended not as a monument of truth but as a goad to action.’ 30
    This critical reorientation is a welcome reminder that when he wrote
Sartor Resartus
Carlyle had not yet become Carlylean, and had not yet successfully substituted biography, history, and social prophecy for imaginative fiction. It was perhaps for this reason that John Stuart Mill always regarded
Sartor Resartus
as Carlyle’s ‘best and greatest work’. Its distinction, however, was not immediately apparent to Mill any more than to most first-time readers, who may take heart from Mill’s experience. When first shown the manuscript by Carlyle, he ‘made little of it’; but by the time it appeared in
Fraser’s Magazine
two years later he had grown sufficiently advanced in ‘new modes of thought’ to read
Sartor Resartus
‘with enthusiastic admiration and the keenest delight’. 31

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    W E are much indebted to colleagues and friends who have assisted us in various ways: James Critchley, Catherine Harland, Robert Holton, Ross Kilpatrick, Marie Legroulx, George Logan, Susanne McSweeney, Emmi Sabor, M. G. Wiebe, and Gary Wihl. For financial assistance we are grateful to the Advisory Research Committee of the School of Graduate Studies, Queen’s University; and to the Humanities Research Grants Committee of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, McGill University.
    The letters from Carlyle to James Fraser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Sterling in Appendices I, III, and IV are reprinted from vols. 6, 7, and 8 of the Duke—Edinburgh Edition of
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
, ed. C. R. Saunders
et al
., by kind permission of Duke University Press. We have incorporated in the Explanatory Notes three corrections made by K. J. Fielding in his review of the edition.

NOTE ON THE TEXT
    Sartor Resartus
first appeared, anonymously, in the monthly issues of
Fraser’s Magazine
from November 1833 to August 1834, with gaps in January and May. These instalments were stitched into book form by Fraser’s for an edition of fifty-eight copies, privately issued in August 1834; this was not reset, but the necessary transference of blocks of type occasioned some typographical errors. The first edition of
Sartor
sold to the public was that published in Boston in 1836, with an unsigned preface by Emerson. Here Carlyle’s name first appears on the title-page; there are also many changes in paragraphing, spelling, and typography for which Carlyle was not responsible. A second American edition followed in 1837.
    For the first English edition of 1838, Carlyle added a subtitle to
Sartor Resartus: ‘the Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh’
. He also included the ‘Testimonies of Authors’ (see Appendix V below) and made some minor revisions to the