UC Press Blog

By Marylu Hill, coeditor of Essays on German Literature and Culture, Part I and Part II

It has been surprisingly easy for Victorian scholars to overlook Thomas Carlyle in recent years as an unfashionable “Victorian sage.”  But in his time, in George Eliot’s description, Carlyle was like an oak leaving fertile acorns of ideas that would grow and spread with good influence. 

I first found Carlyle when I was a graduate student in English. At that time, I was excited and thrilled by his modern writing techniques in Sartor Resartus and his insights into the writing of history. His approach to historiography gave me a topic for an early conference paper and a chance as a fledgling scholar to meet the Carlyle community of scholars at a conference sponsored by St Joseph’s University in Philadelphia (David Sorensen). They were lovely and generous scholars—welcoming of a young new scholar—and I found myself encouraged and inspired to “open my Carlyle” and learn more. 

I discovered that Carlyle had made his own journey of self and education. As Chris Vanden Bossche notes in his introduction to Carlyle’s Essays on German Literature and Culture, Part I, Carlyle was inspired by Goethe to move from skeptical disbelief to a more harmonious system of belief and being—from the “everlasting Nay” to the uplifting “Everlasting Yea.” As a young scholar raised in the dispiriting air of deconstruction, I found something helpful and motivating in Carlyle’s own journey and his injunction to “close thy Byron and open thy Goethe”—to move from Byronic life-weariness to Goethean spiritual harmony.

As a Victorian scholar, it has been fascinating to see the traces of these injunctions filter through the nineteenth century in so many impressive and life-changing ways, by the likes of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and William Morris.  As I have become a scholar of Oscar Wilde, it has been fascinating to realize how Carlyle also impacted Wilde. As I recount in my essay in Carlyle Studies Annual, “A Tale of a Desk”, Wilde thought he had purchased Carlyle’s old desk, and was inspired by the idea! (Turns out he was wrong, and that is a tale for another time.)  Wilde and Carlyle might seem like an unlikely pair, but they shared this curious connection.

Carlyle also became even more relevant to me as I went through a dramatic change in my own life. This past year, after the German Essays volume went to press, I had a life altering car accident which resulted in a brain injury that left me partially crippled. In a way, I found myself resartus—in a sort of retailoring of my body.  And I also found myself confronted with the bitterness of the “everlasting nay,” bitter because I didn’t get the happiness I thought I deserved. 

But Carlyle came to my rescue. His work called me to “close thy Byron and open thy Goethe.” To find my closest duty and work and do it. To say yes to the universe rather than nay, and to be inspired to stay on my journey.  And to remember the importance of love—that without love, humans cannot be held together (as I was held together by the love of family and friends and doctors and nurses after my accident and through my healing).  The “everlasting Yea” makes it possible to do that work. 

So I have discovered for myself the many ways Carlyle is still relevant. What he found through Goethe and the German thinkers helped him though the bitterness of skepticism, and the insight continues to give me hope. No doubt you will find your own inspiration in the German essays, in Sartor Resartus, or in whatever cover you might open.