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

text, although he claimed in a letter to his brother John of 14 July 1838 that ‘there is no change in
Teufk
from the genuine Fraser Copy’ (
Collected Letters
, x. 121). Subsequent editions published in Carlyle’s lifetime contain further minor revisions; and the 1869 edition contains a new Author’s Note, Summary, and Index (see Appendix V below).
    The cumulative effect of these revisions is to make
Sartor Resartus
a less exotic, more familiar-seeming work. On numerous occasions, capitals are changed to lower case at the beginning of normally uncapitalized nouns; large numbers of hyphens are inserted to make compound words seem less unusual; and the punctuation, which had followed an individual, highly rhetorical system, is made to conform more closely to conventional usage. There are also about one hundred substantive revisions, the more significant of which are indicated in our notes. Many of the minor revisions follow specific patterns: ‘must’, for example, is often changed to ‘had to’, ‘has to’, etc.; ‘whatso’ and ‘whereso’ are changed to ‘whatsoever’ and ‘wheresoever’; and word order is altered for greater elegance.
    The present edition is, we believe, the first to reproduce the work as it appeared in
Fraser’s Magazine
and thus to present
Sartor Resartus
in its original state, before Carlyle and anonymous compositors began the process of retouching. Many errors in the German passages, which were corrected in later editions, have been silently corrected here, as have other obvious misprints; but in general the text follows closely that of
Fraser’s Magazine
. The original divisions into eight monthly instalments are indicated by a row of asterisks after each part. Notes at the foot of the page, indicated by daggers in the text, are Carlyle’s.
    The manuscript of
Sartor Resartus
is not known to have survived. The fullest account of its publishing history, though now badly outdated, remains that by Isaac Dyer in his
Bibliography of Thomas Carlyle’s Writings
(1928). No textual study of
Sartor Resartus
has been published.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
    EDITIONS
    T HE standard edition of Carlyle’s works is the thirty-volume Centenary Edition, ed. H. D. Traill (London, 1896–9). The Duke-Edinburgh edition of
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
, ed. C. R. Sanders
et al
. (Durham, North Carolina, 1970– ), will supersede earlier collections. See also
The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle
, ed. J. Slater (New York, 1964). The text of
Wotton Reinfred
, Carlyle’s unfinished novel, is included in
Last Words of Thomas Carlyle
(London, 1892; reprinted with an introduction by K.J. Fielding, 1971). Several editions of
Sartor Resartus
include extensive introductions and annotation; those by A. MacMechan (Boston, 1896) and C. F. Harrold (New York, 1937) are especially valuable. The complex text of
Sartor
is included in G. B. Tennyson’s
A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle
(New York, 1969: Cambridge, 1984).
    BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES
    J. A. Froude,
Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of his Life, 1795–1835
(London, 1882) and
Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London, 1834–1881
(London, 1884); Froude’s four volumes have been abridged and edited by J. Clubbe (Columbus, Ohio, 1979).
    W. Dilthey, ‘
Sartor Resartus:
Philosophical Conflict, Positive and Negative Eras, and Personal Resolution’ [1891],
Clio
, i. 3 (1972), 40–60.
    L. Cazamian,
Carlyle
(Paris, 1913); trans. E. K. Brown (New York, 1932).
    D. A. Wilson and D. W. MacArthur,
Carlyle
(6 vols., London, 1923–34).
    E. Neff,
Carlyle and Mill
(New York, 1924).
    R. Wellek, ‘Carlyle and German Romanticism’ [1929] in his
Confrontations
(Princeton, 1965).
    E. Neff,
Carlyle
(New York, 1932, 1968).
    C. F. Harrold,
Carlyle and German Thought: 1819–1834
(New Haven, 1934).
    C. Moore, ‘Thomas Carlyle and Fiction: 1822–1834’,
Nineteenth-Century Studies
, ed. H.