F. Harrold rightly noted over fifty years ago that while Carlyle’s ideas are profoundly indebted to those of German thinkers, his formal debts are primarily to English experimentalists such as Sterne, whom Carlyle termed our ‘best, our finest, if not our strongest’ humorist.12

A still more important influence on Carlyle was Swift, whose A Tale of a Tub (1704) provides the seminal idea for Carlyle’s book about clothes and their symbolic and religious meanings. Central to Teufelsdröckh’s theories is the idea expressed in the ‘Prospective’ chapter concluding Book I that ‘the whole external Universe and what it holds is but Clothing; and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES’, just as the editor had enquired in the second section of A Tale of a Tub, ‘what is Man himself but a Micro-Coat, or rather a compleat Suit of Cloaths with all its Trimmings?’ In the ‘Tailors’ chapter of Book III, Carlyle acknowledges his debt when Teufelsdröckh expounds ‘the doctrine, which Swift, with the keen forecast of genius, dimly anticipated … that the Tailor is not only a Man, but something of a Creator or Divinity’. As Teufelsdröckh’s ‘dimly anticipated’ suggests, however, Carlyle makes profounder use of the clothes metaphor than had his predecessor. In A Tale of a Tub, the fit suit of clothes is that worn by moderate Anglicans, in contrast to the excessive gaudiness of Catholics and the fanatical plainness of Dissenters. But in Sartor Resartus, the clothing fashioned by society and by religious institutions must be removed and replaced entirely; Carlyle thus resembles Jack, the persona for dissent in A Tale of a Tub, more closely than Martin, Swift’s Anglican representative.

Despite this obvious contrast between the descendentalist Swift and the transcendentalist Carlyle, Sartor Resartus is imbued with the spirit of various Swiftian writings. Teufelsdröckh’s observation in the ‘Pedagogy’ chapter of Book II on man’s ‘omnipotent or rather omni-patient Talent of being Gulled’ clearly derives from Swift’s famous definition of ‘Felicity’ in the ninth section of A Tale of a Tub as ‘the Possession of being well deceived’. Gulliver’s Travels (1726), another favourite of Carlyle’s, is also a recurring presence in Sartor Resartus; the Laputians’ ‘Bladders with dried Peas’ appear in the ‘Pure Reason’ chapter of Book I, while Teufelsdröckh’s acerbic reflections on warfare in the ‘Centre of Indifference’, Book II, are surely influenced by Gulliver’s grimly ironic account to the King of Brobdingnag of human beings killing one another. More Swiftian overtones are heard in the project for shooting, salting, and barrelling paupers described in the ‘Helotage’ chapter of Book III, a savage piece of irony deriving from the scheme to kill, dress, and export children of the Irish poor in Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729). And in the earlier definition of man as ‘a forked straddling animal with bandy legs’, in ‘The World Out of Clothes’ chapter of Book I, Carlyle is quoting directly from the eleventh chapter of The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741), a collaborative production of Swift and his fellow Scriblerians. Allusions such as this, as well as ones to Pope and Gay’s Memoirs of P. P. Clerk of this Parish in the ‘Prospective’ chapter of Book I and to The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) by ‘English Smollett’, in the ‘Centre of Indifference’ chapter of Book II, demonstrate Carlyle’s immersion in the satirical, non-realistic fiction of the eighteenth century that prepared the way for the constantly shifting ironies and mordant satire of Sartor Resartus.

Other important influences on Sartor are found in Carlyle’s own writings of the previous decade. A number of passages from Wotton Reinfred, for example, were worked into the story of Teufelsdröckh’s spiritual development in Book II. Of much greater importance is the influence of the periodical essays that Carlyle had been writing. Generically speaking, Sartor Resartus is a distinctly mixed work; but it is before anything else a fictitious review essay in which Carlyle makes brilliant imaginative use of the conventions of the form that he had himself helped to develop during the previous decade. In 1823 he had written the first of a series of essays and review articles that were to play a significant role in introducing German literature and thought to a wide British audience. The basic method of these pieces was to combine biographical accounts of the lives of their subjects with descriptions and appreciations of their work. At the same time, the review essay format more and more became a vehicle for the expression of Carlyle’s own emerging ideas and sense of the times. In fact, by the end of the decade his review essays were being superseded by pieces such as ‘Signs of the Times’ and ‘Characteristics’ that show Carlyle emerging in propria persona as a social critic and cultural prophet.

One of Carlyle’s review essays, his first for the Edinburgh Review, was on Jean Paul Richter, the German humorist whose ‘fantastic, many-coloured, far-grasping, everyway perplexed and extraordinary’ mode of writing was an appreciable influence on Sartor Resartus—a point indirectly acknowledged in the fourth chapter of Book I when the Editor/narrator recalls that the only time he ever saw Teufelsdröckh laugh was during a conversation with Jean Paul, the one writer of all those mentioned in the text who appears in person. Jean Paul’s works, Carlyle wrote in this 1827 review essay, were ‘no less multifarious than extensive’, and while his chief productions were novels, ‘the name Novelist, as we in England must understand it, would ill describe so vast and discursive a genius.’ The most striking feature of Jean Paul’s method was his sporting with the text, the two principal manifestations of which were his disruptive editorial and narratorial commentary and his style. Concerning the former, Carlyle noted that ‘every work, be it fiction or serious treatise, is embaled in some fantastic wrappage, some mad narrative accounting for its appearance, and connecting it with the author, who generally becomes a person in the drama himself, before all is over’. As for the style, it was deliberately outlandish: Jean Paul

deals with astonishing liberality in parentheses, dashes, and subsidiary clauses; invents hundreds of new words, alters old ones, or by hyphen chains and pairs and packs them together into most jarring combination; in short, produces sentences of the most heterogeneous, lumbering, interminable kind. Figures without limit; indeed the whole is one tissue of metaphors, and similes, and allusions to all the provinces of Earth, Sea and Air; interlaced with epigrammatic breaks, vehement bursts, or sardonic turns, interjections, quips, puns, and even oaths! A perfect Indian jungle it seems; a boundless, unparalleled imbroglio.13

Given its generic miscellaneousness, and the variety of literary influences upon it, it is hardly surprising that Sartor Resartus has very little in common with the dominant mode of nineteenth-century prose fiction—the realistic novel. Sartor lacks a narrative skeleton, and while it is full of vivid concrete details, this solidity of specification is not used to give a sense of verisimilitude or create a representational illusion. Nor is such a sense given by its hyperbolic, metaphorical and densely allusive style, which is essentially an expressive and rhetorical medium unsuited to narrative or representational effects. But the most significant way in which Carlyle’s fiction differs from the tradition of the realistic novel is found in its attitude to character and to ordinary human experience. The author of Sartor is uninterested in either, and gives no evidence of the human sympathy that seems an essential feature of the realistic novel.

In Book I, the narrator suggests that a key reason for the ‘short-comings, over-shootings, and multiform perversities’ of Teufelsdröckh’s book on clothes has to do with the ‘strange impartiality [and] strange scientific freedom’ with which he looks ‘in men’s faces’: he seems ‘like a man dropped thither from the Moon’. Mutatis mutandis, the same thing may be said about Carlyle’s attitude to his characters. Even in Book II, the story of Teufelsdröckh’s development from childhood to the threshold of adult life, which is in essence modelled on Carlyle’s own early years, there is a cordon sanitaire between the implied author and the central character; no suggestion of intimacy is permitted.