"We do nothing but enact history": Thomas Carlyle stages the past

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Volumn 54, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 27-52

  Schoch, Richard W ^a  

^a QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049174167     PISSN: 08919356     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2902996     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Roland Barthes, "The Discourse of History," trans. Stephen Bann, Comparative Criticism, 3 (1981), 18
2. The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1985), p. xii
3. See Thomas Babington Macaulay, rev. of Henry Neele, The Romance of History, Edinburgh Review, 47 (1828), 331
4. J. A. Froude, "History: Its Use and Meaning" (rev. of Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, 2d ed.), Westminster Review, 62 (1854), 423 (second emphasis added)
5. "Carlyle's Past and Present, History, and a Question of Hermeneutics," Clio, 13 (1984), 252. Of course, Romantic fancy was not without its restrictions. While Macaulay, in his review of Neele, cautioned that the "perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque," he must take equal care to balance that rhetorical flourish with a prudent reliance on facts "authenticated by sufficient testimony" (pp. 331, 364). However tempted the historian may be to spruce up a drab chronological record, he must not insert any "additions of his own" (P. 331)
6. Thomas Carlyle, "Thoughts on History," Fraser's Magazine, 2 (1830), 415
7. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), p. 14
8. See Jann, p. 48; and Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 17
9. See Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992)
10. Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990)
11. and Auerbach, "Revelations on Pages and Stages," in Victorian Literature and Culture, Volume 21, ed. John Maynard and Adrienne Auslander Munich (New York: AMS Press, 1993), pp. 1-18
12. As Litvak reminds us, theatricality is not limited to writings "about" the theater, whether apologetic or accusatory, but rather extends to writings in a theatrical mode; writings that articulate the slippage between theatrical and literary discourses (see Litvak, "Actress, Monster, Novelist: The Tragic Muse as a Novel of Theatricality," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 29 [1987], 142)
13. Joseph Litvak, "The Infection of Acting: Theatricals and Theatricality in Mans-field Park," ELH, 53 (1986), 332
14. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, vol. 10 of the Centenary Edition (1843; London: Chapman and Hall, 1897), p. 57
15. See Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, vol. 5 of the Centenary Edition (1841; London: Chapman and Hall, 1897), pp. 78-114
16. See Thomas Carlyle, "The Diamond Necklace," Fraser's Magazine, 15 (1837), 1-19, and 172-89
17. On Carlyle's assumption of the role of stage director, see Carlisle Moore, "Carlyle's 'Diamond Necklace' and Poetic History," PMLA, 58 (1943), 537-57
18. Walter Scott, rev. of James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Quarterly Review, 34 (1826), 201
19. Thomas Carlyle, rev. of Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Baronet, Westminster Review, 28 (1837-38), 337
20. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), p. 231
21. John Wlliam Cole, The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, F.S.A., 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), II, 210
22. See Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations, 4 vols., vols. 6-9 of the Centenary Edition (1845; London: Chapman and Hall, 1897), III, 50-52
23. See Linda Georgianna, "Carlyle and Jocelin of Brakelond: A Chronicle Rechron-icled," Browning Institute Studies, 8 (1980), 122
24. Thomas Carlyle, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 29 August 1842, in The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964).P. 328
25. See Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda, de rebus gestis Samsonis Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi: nunc primum typis mandata, curante Johanne Gage Rokewode (London: Camden Society, 1840), p. 36. Rokewood (1786-1842) was also a genealogist and Director of the Society of Antiquaries. The extended title advertises, for classically literate Victorians, that Jocelin's Chronica has now been set into type for the first time. Jocelin's manuscript is only one of many documents on the Abbey of St. Edmunds in a large quarto volume written on vellum called the Liber Alius
26. Once the property of Robert Harley, the volume was one of the manuscripts in his collection, which the British government purchased in 1754 and to this day remains in the Harleian Collection of the British Library (Harl. MS. 1005) (see R. M. Thomson, introduction to The Chronicle of the Election of Hugh, Abbot of Bury St. Edmunds and Later Bishop of Ely, ed. and trans. Thomson [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974], pp. xlvii-xlviii)
27. See Gordon Hirsch, "History Writing in Carlyle's Past and Present," Prose Studies, 7 (1984), 225
28. See Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 29-37
29. G. Robert Stange, "Refractions of Past and Present," in Carlyle Past and Present: A Collection of New Essays, ed. K. J. Fielding and Rodger L. Tarr (London: Vision Press, 1976), p. 98
30. William Henry Smith, review of Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, Blackwood's Magazine, 54 (1843),123
31. See Horace Walpole, letter to his fellow antiquarian William Cole, 13 March 1780, in Selected Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. W. S. Lewis (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), P. 233
32. Illustrated London News, 28 (3 May 1856), 475
33. "Carlyle's Historical Imagination: Untrue Facts and Unfactual Truths," Victorian Newsletter, no. 61 (Spring 1982), 30
34. See Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), p. 71
35. Pictorialism, however, did not require historical precision in order to be effective or memorable. The tableau of "The Duel" showing the mortally wounded Louis dei Franchi, which closed the first act of Kean's 1852 production of The Corsican Brothers, made no attempt to be historically specific (see Dion Boucicault, Les Frères Corses; or, The Corsican Brothers [London: Samuel French, n.d. [1853?], p. 20). And yet it was one of the most celebrated theatrical moments of the 1850s
36. Abbot Leofstan unsealed the coffin after "a dream in which St. Edmund complained that his remains were not decently preserved" (see A.M.D. Hughes, note to Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. Hughes [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918], p. 31 in). Abbot Baldwin, in 1095, transferred the loculus to the Church but refrained from opening it
37. The exhumation of St. Edmund is not a true translatio because, as R. C. Finucane explains, it does not transfer the saint's remains "to a holier, more honourable position" within a church, thereby showing "the spiritual elevation of the deceased" (see "Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the Later Middle Ages," in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981], p. 53)
38. See Antonia Gransden, "The Alleged Incorruption of the Body of St Edmund, King and Martyr," The Antiquaries Journal, 74 (1994), 135-68
39. Robert Bell, "Modern English Drama," Dublin Review, 2 (1837), 378
40. To be sure, Carlyle himself harbored only disdain for High Church or Roman Catholic ritual, lamenting that "divine worship [had] become a Mumbojumboism" ("Jesuitism," in Latter-Day Pamphlets, vol. 20 of the Centenary Edition [1850; London: Chapman and Hall, 1898], p. 319)
41. See Grace J. Calder, The Writing of "Past and Present": A Study of Carlyle's Manuscripts (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1949), p. 43, n. 78
42. Carlyle, letter to John Stuart Mill, 22 July 1836, in The Collected Letters of Thomas andjane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Charles Richard Sanders and Kenneth J. Fielding, et al., 25 vols. to date (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1970-), IX, 15