We have seen in our own time great talents, intense labour, and long meditation, employed in this struggle against the spirit of the age, and employed, we will not say absolutely in vain, but with dubious success and feeble applause.26

As in the early poems of Tennyson and Browning, which also date from the early 1830s, one finds in Sartor Resartus and in Carlyle’s comments about the work an intense and brooding self-consciousness, a sense of isolation, and a demoralizing awareness of the lack of any fit audience. One also finds frames and other distancing devices employed to distract attention from the deeply personal and subjective content of the utterance. What is being enacted in these texts is part of a complex shift in sensibility that is ultimately the mutation of Romantic into Victorian literature.27 Sartor Resartus itself, as George Levine has argued, ‘marks a transition from the Romantics to the Victorians because it adds one quality to the Romantic vision which had not yet become dominant—desperation’. Carlyle ‘could not establish himself as a sage in Sartor because, though like the Romantics in having won through to a deeply personal affirmation and discovery of his identity, he was not able to see the experience as anything but personal in a world obviously inimical’.28 No wonder then that after Sartor, Carlyle, like 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 that the 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

WE 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 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.