The entire thrust of history, for example, was biographic, and when one came to consider ‘the whole class of Fictitious Narratives, from the highest category of epic or dramatic Poetry, in Shakespeare and Homer, down to the lowest of froth Prose in the Fashionable Novel’, one found that all these were ‘but so many mimic Biographies’. The problem with fiction was that it inevitably partook ‘of the nature of lying’; and therefore inevitably possessed an ‘in some degree, unsatisfactory character’. What was important and significant was ‘Reality’. Even if ‘the probable be well adhered to’ in works of fiction, the evil, while ‘much mended, [was] nowise completely cured’. Here and there, ‘a Tom Jones, a Meister, a Crusoe, will yield no little solacement to the minds of men; though still immeasurably less than a Reality would’. As for the varieties of literature, including the ‘Ship-loads of Fashionable Novels’: they were ‘the foam of penny-beer’ because ‘there is no Reality in them’. One had to realize ‘how impressive the smallest historical fact may become, as contrasted with the grandest fictitious event; what an incalculable force lies for us in this consideration: The Thing which I here hold imaged in my mind did actually occur.’8

Carlyle had begun to think about historical subject-matter as the outlet for his literary talents as early as 1822 when he had read Milton and histories of the English Civil War in the hope of finding a subject to write upon. But it was not until 1833, after almost a decade of attempting to write fiction, that he became fully convinced that the (mainly biographical) subject-matter of the French Revolution could furnish material for a historical work that might become a masterpiece, perhaps even ‘the grand Poem of our Time’.9 The ‘Biography’ essay, however, itself suggests that it was not so easy for Carlyle to escape contamination by fiction as he seemed to think. For in the middle of his essay Carlyle had introduced a fictional device, a book by a non-existent German professor—Doctor Gottfried Sauerteig’s Aesthetische Springwurzeln—and inserted into a long quotation from the Professor’s work his argument concerning the mendacious character of all fiction. This was the very same fictional device that Carlyle had used two years previously in Sartor Resartus, which opens as a review article of a learned book on clothes—Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken—by a non-existent German professor named Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. It was in Sartor Resartus, which is simultaneously his one full-length work of imaginative fiction and his farewell to fiction, that Carlyle finally found a way to record the story of his earlier life, including its Wertherian anxieties, to express the social and religious vision he had been forging during the preceding decade, and pre-emptively to dramatize his affrighted premonition of ‘the aspect of the Public’.

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The first reference to what became Sartor Resartus appears in Carlyle’s journal for September 1830: ‘I am going to write—Nonsense. It is on “Clothes.” Heaven be my comforter!’ A month later he wrote to his brother John: ‘For myself here [in Craigenputtock] I am leading the stillest life…. What I am writing at is the strangest of all things: begun as an Article for Fraser; then found to be too long (except it were divided into two); now sometimes looking almost, as if it would swell into a Book. A very singular piece, I assure you! It glances from Heaven to Earth & back again in a strange satirical frenzy whether fine or not remains to be seen.’ The piece was called Teufelsdreck (Devil’s Shit) after its principal character. Early in November this ‘singular piece’ was sent to Fraser’s Magazine. To its author’s great disappointment his bizarre submission was rejected. When the manuscript was back in his hands Carlyle determined to expand it into a book. He outlined his plans in a letter to John of January 1831: ‘I have taken a notion that I can make rather a good Book of it, and one above all likely to produce some desirable impression on the world even now … I can devise some more Biography for Teufelsdreck; give a second deeper part, in the same vein, leading thro’ Religion and the nature of Society, and Lord knows what.’ Carlyle worked on his book from January to late July 1831, when it was finished. The original two-part article had become Book I of the completed work; the biography of Teufelsdröckh formed Book II; and the ‘deeper part, in the same vein’, concerning ‘Religion and the nature of Society’, became Book III. At long last, more than a decade after determining that the vocation of writer was the means of realizing his powers to the full, Carlyle had succeeded in writing a book. But he now had to endure the frustration of being unable to find a publisher. Eventually, he had to return to Fraser’s Magazine, and offer to ‘slit’ his manuscript ‘up into stripes, and send it forth in the Periodical way’. The work was accepted for serial publication and finally appeared in print under the title Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored) between November 1833 and August 1834.10

Between its original conception as Teufelsdreck and its eventual publication as Sartor Resartus, Carlyle considered a third title for his work, ‘Thoughts on Clothes; or Life and Opinions of Herr. D. Teufelsdröckh D.U.J.’,11 and in the ‘Editorial Difficulties’ chapter of Book I the Editor characterizes his book as ‘properly a “Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh”’. The allusion is to an eighteenth-century precursor of Sartor Resartus, Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760—7), one of Carlyle’s favourite fictional works. A more direct reference follows in the ‘Adamitism’ chapter of Book I, which concludes with a quotation from ‘Yorick Sterne’s’ novel. Both Tristram Shandy and Sartor are fictions concerned with the making of biographies; both are steeped in the tradition of learned wit, deriving from Rabelais and Cervantes; and both provide dazzling displays of linguistic inventiveness, making frequent use of neologisms and borrowings from a variety of languages. Both are, at least in part, playful works, like Carlyle’s earlier, abandoned fiction ‘Illudo Chartis’ (‘I play on paper’). C.