Sartor Resartus (Oxford World's Classics) (6 page)

The present edition is, we believe, the first to reproduce the work as it appeared in
Fraser’s Magazine
and thus to present
Sartor Resartus
in its original state, before Carlyle and anonymous compositors began the process of retouching. Many errors in the German passages, which were corrected in later editions, have been silently corrected here, as have other obvious misprints; but in general the text follows closely that of
Fraser’s Magazine
. The original divisions into eight monthly instalments are indicated by a row of asterisks after each part. Notes at the foot of the page, indicated by daggers in the text, are Carlyle’s.

The manuscript of
Sartor Resartus
is not known to have survived. The fullest account of its publishing history, though now badly outdated, remains that by Isaac Dyer in his
Bibliography of Thomas Carlyle’s Writings
(1928). No textual study of
Sartor Resartus
has been published.

EDITIONS

T
HE
standard edition of Carlyle’s works is the thirty-volume Centenary Edition, ed. H. D. Traill (London, 1896–9). The Duke-Edinburgh edition of
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
, ed. C. R. Sanders
et al
. (Durham, North Carolina, 1970– ), will supersede earlier collections. See also
The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle
, ed. J. Slater (New York, 1964). The text of
Wotton Reinfred
, Carlyle’s unfinished novel, is included in
Last Words of Thomas Carlyle
(London, 1892; reprinted with an introduction by K.J. Fielding, 1971). Several editions of
Sartor Resartus
include extensive introductions and annotation; those by A. MacMechan (Boston, 1896) and C. F. Harrold (New York, 1937) are especially valuable. The complex text of
Sartor
is included in G. B. Tennyson’s
A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle
(New York, 1969: Cambridge, 1984).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES

J. A. Froude,
Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of his Life, 1795–1835
(London, 1882) and
Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London, 1834–1881
(London, 1884); Froude’s four volumes have been abridged and edited by J. Clubbe (Columbus, Ohio, 1979).

W. Dilthey, ‘
Sartor Resartus:
Philosophical Conflict, Positive and Negative Eras, and Personal Resolution’ [1891],
Clio
, i. 3 (1972), 40–60.

L. Cazamian,
Carlyle
(Paris, 1913); trans. E. K. Brown (New York, 1932).

D. A. Wilson and D. W. MacArthur,
Carlyle
(6 vols., London, 1923–34).

E. Neff,
Carlyle and Mill
(New York, 1924).

R. Wellek, ‘Carlyle and German Romanticism’ [1929] in his
Confrontations
(Princeton, 1965).

E. Neff,
Carlyle
(New York, 1932, 1968).

C. F. Harrold,
Carlyle and German Thought: 1819–1834
(New Haven, 1934).

C. Moore, ‘Thomas Carlyle and Fiction: 1822–1834’,
Nineteenth-Century Studies
, ed. H. Davis
et al
. (Ithaca, New York, 1940).

J. L. Halliday,
Mr. Carlyle my Patient: A Psychosomatic Biography
(London, 1949).

B. Willey,
Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold
(London, 1949).

H. Shine,
Carlyle’s Early Reading to 1834
(Lexington, Kentucky, 1953).

D. DeLaura, ‘Arnold and Carlyle’,
PMLA
, lxxix (1964), 104–29.

A. J. LaValley,
Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern: Studies in Carlyle’s Prophetic Literature and its Relation to Blake, Nietzsche, Marx, and Others
(New Haven, 1968).

H. L. Sussman,
Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology
(Cambridge, Mass., 1968).

J. P. Siegel, ed.,
Carlyle: The Critical Heritage
(London, 1971).

P. Rosenberg,
The Seventh Hero: Thomas Carlyle and the Theory of Radical Activism
(Cambridge, Mass., 1974).

R. Ashton,
The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860
(Cambridge, 1980).

A. L. Le Quesne,
Carlyle
(Oxford, 1982).

F. Kaplan,
Thomas Carlyle: A Biography
(Ithaca, New York, 1983).

J. D. Rosenberg,
Carlyle and the Burden of History
(Cambridge, Mass., 1985).

STUDIES OF
‘SARTOR RESARTUS’

C. Moore,
‘Sartor Resartus
and the Problem of Carlyle’s Conversion’,
PMLA
, lxx (1955), 662–81.

G. Levine,
‘Sartor Resartus
and the Balance of Fiction’,
Victorian Studies
, viii (1964), 131–60; a revised version appears in Levine’s
The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman
(Princeton, 1968).

C. R. Sanders, ‘The Byron Closed in
Sartor Resartus’, Studies in Romanticism
, iii (1964), 77–108.

J. W. Smeed, ‘Thomas Carlyle and Jean Paul Richter’,
Comparative Literature
, xvi (1964), 226–53.

G. B. Tennyson,
Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structure and Style of Thomas Carlyle’s First Major Work
(Princeton, 1965).

G. H. Brookes,
The Rhetorical Form of Carlyle’s ‘Sartor Resartus’
(Berkeley, 1972).

P. Brantlinger, ‘“Romance”, “Biography”, and the Making of
Sartor Resartus’, Philological Quarterly
, lii (1973), 108–18.

J. Clubbe, ‘Carlyle on
Sartor Resartus’
, in
Carlyle Past and Present: A Collection of New Essays
, ed. K. J. Fielding and R. Tarr (London, 1978).

J. A. Dibble,
The Pythia’s Drunken Song: Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Sartor Resartus’ and the Style Problem in German Idealist Philosophy
(The Hague, 1978).

J. L. Haney, ‘“Shadow-Hunting”: Romantic Irony,
Sartor Resartus
, and Victorian Romanticism’,
Studies in Romanticism
, xvii (1978), 307–33.

A. K. Mellor, ‘Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus:
A Self-Consuming Artifact’, in her
English Romantic Irony
(Cambridge, Mass., 1980).

P. A. Dale,
‘Sartor Resartus
and the Inverse Sublime: The Art of Humorous Deconstruction’, in
Allegory, Myth and Symbol
, ed. M. W. Bloomfield (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).

B. V. Quails,
The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life
(Cambridge, 1982).

L. C. R. Baker, ‘The Open Secret of
Sartor Resartus:
Carlyle’s Method of Converting his Reader’,
Studies in Philology
, lxxxiii (1986), 218–35.

L. H. Peterson, ‘Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus:
The Necessity of Reconstruction’, in her
Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation
(New Haven, 1986).

S. Helming, ‘“The Thaumaturgic Art of Thought”: Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus’
, in his
The Esoteric Comedies of Carlyle, Newman, and Yeats
(Cambridge, 1988).

J. H. Miller, ‘“Hieroglyphical Truth” in
Sartor Resartus:
Carlyle and the Language of Parable’, in
Victorian Perspectives: Six Essays
, ed. John Clubb and Jerome Meckier (Newark, Delaware, 1989).

D. Riede, ‘Transgression, Authority, and the Church of Literature in Carlyle’, in
Victorian Connections
, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Charlottesville, 1989).

D. F. Felluga, ‘The Critic’s New Clothes:
Sartor Resartus
as “Cold Carnival”’,
Criticism
, xxxvii (1995), 583–99.

W. Iser, ‘The Emergence of a Cross-Cultural Discourse: Thomas Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus’
, in
The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between
, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, 1996).

J. Treadwell,
‘Sartor Resartus
and the Work of Writing’,
Essays in Criticism
, xlviii (1998), 224–43.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. W. Dyer,
A Bibliography of Thomas Carlyle’s Writings and Ana
(Portland, Maine, 1928).

G. B. Tennyson, ‘Thomas Carlyle’, in
Victorian Prose: A Guide to Research
, ed. D.J. DeLaura (New York, 1973), 33–104.

R. L. Tarr,
Thomas Carlyle: A Bibliography of English Language Criticism 1824–1974
(Charlottesville, 1976).