Editorial Introduction: Or, How to Read Sartor Resartus
Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus is at once one of the most influential and idiosyncratic works of the nineteenth century. Carlyle described the book to James Fraser in a letter dated 27 May 1833 as “a Satirical Extravaganza on Things in General” (CLO).). Treating a range of subject matter — including philosophy, religion, politics, consumerism, literature, history, and aesthetics — it provides no single line of argument, and this is reflected in the book’s unconventional structure. To quote Rodger Tarr, whose edition of the book demonstrates extraordinary insight and erudition, Sartor Resartus is
a novel anti-novel, guided by figurative language and informed by paradoxical relationships. It is a fictive narrative while a parody of didactic fiction; it is a complex of structures similar to a mathematical tract while a challenge to the Newtonian systems of cosmos: it is a formal essay while an inventive discourse; it is a veiled autobiography and relies on a recognition of the complex allusions which are often dependent on or enhanced by the use of irony. (xxii-xxiii)
In other words, it is a work that continually appeals to and undermines its own generic conventions. To this extent, it reflects that air of self-consciousness, which Carlyle regarded as a defining feature of nineteenth-century culture. As George Levine astutely observes, the generic indeterminacy of the book reflects Carlyle’s position in the 1830s, a time when he was at his most “flexible and undogmatic” (Boundaries, 29). In 1832, the first Reform Act (see Carolyn Vallenga Berman’s discussion on BRANCH) enacted a number of important changes in voting rights, including the extension of the franchise to small landowners, and tenant farmers, as well as to householders who paid a minimum rent of 10 pounds. These changes may seem relatively minor today, given the fact that so many people remained without a political voice; however, they helped to catalyze the more radical shifts in power that would transpire over the decades to come.
At the time of writing Sartor Resartus, Carlyle sympathized with the plight of the impoverished working class, and his 1839 essay “Chartism” explicitly attacks the capitalist system that had perpetuated abuses against them. This may surprise some readers, for Carlyle would later emerge as a more conservative — even reactionary — voice. In his essay “Shooting Niagara—and After?” (1867), Carlyle criticized the Second Reform Act, which extended the franchise to some members of the male working class (see Janice Carlisle’s discussion on BRANCH). Although Sartor Resartus reflects the spirit of a younger, less polemical, and far more compassionate Carlyle, it also betrays a mind already torn between a desire for change and a reluctance to abandon the institutions of the past. The seeming contradictions within the text, then, to some extent mirror Carlyle’s anxiety about the political condition of Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century.
The generic indeterminacy of the volume has likewise contributed to a widespread belief in its dwindling popularity in the twenty-first century. In his own time, even the most laudatory reviews warned readers that they might find Carlyle’s style strange and unpleasant. The Sun referred to the volume as a “heap of clotted nonsense,” and the North American Review described Carlyle’s style as a “sort of Babylonish dialect” (“Sartor Resartus,” 3; “Thomas Carlyle,” 459). The Spectator observed in 1838 that “the purpose of the author is not very intelligible, and he spins out the thread of his jest too long” (“Progress,” 760). Repeatedly, reviews of the volume highlight its departure from narrative or expository convention, expressing a concern that it might alienate even the most charitable reader.
Even Carlyle’s personal acquaintances were not quite sure what to make of this peculiar text. In a letter dated 8 April 1834, Leigh Hunt admitted to being “mystified enough when your Sartor Resartus first appeared, to take it for a satire on ‘Germanick[?ism]’ ” (Leigh Hunt Letters, 2). John Sterling, who was comparatively positive in his appraisal, objected to the volume’s “Rhapsodic-Reflective” style and “its occasional jerking and almost spasmodic violence” (Carlyle, Life of John Sterling, 135). John Stuart Mill was more pointed in his critique, inquiring: “are there many things worth saying, and capable of being said in that manner which cannot be as well or better said in a more direct way?” (Mill, Letters I, 64).
The charge is striking, especially given Carlyle’s own interest in the “unreadability” of the world around us. A skeptic by nature, Carlyle felt that truth could be embedded in the world but always in an obscure and sublimated form. He regarded the past as a “complex Manuscript, covered over with formless, inextricably-entangled unknown characters” (“On History,” 89). By this logic, the historian or philosopher should seek to uncover knowledge, yet that quest is unlikely ever to yield more than a partial glimpse of the truth. Carlyle’s insistence that the world is essentially unknowable places him squarely in line with the German idealists he so often cites across his oeuvre (most notably Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schlegel). Like these thinkers, Carlyle felt that empirical truth was unverifiable and that individual perception therefore avails the most valuable perspective on the world we inhabit. If those insights are incomplete, they nevertheless empower the individual, who does not merely see but actually helps to make his own reality. This spirit of uncertainty may have extended to Carlyle’s understanding of religious and philosophical truth as well. After all, despite his intention to present in Sartor Resartus a commentary on “Things in General,” it was by no means clear to Carlyle that a comprehensive knowledge of the world was either possible or desirable.
Carlyle’s investment in such ideas was not entirely lost on his contemporaries. In an 1839 essay on his work, the London and Westminster Review lauded Carlyle’s resistance to conventional forms of reasoning, noting his penchant for both philosophical and stylistic obscurity. If Carlyle seems at times to be wracked by spiritual doubt, he maintains that the universe is governed by laws that remain unfathomable to the individual. The reviewer observes:
[…] this writer very naturally holds in detestation all attempts to give dialectics any important place in human life. He admits, indeed, that reflection inevitably produces thoughts which find no sufficient symbols in any single objects, what are the ideal roots of whole classes of existence, and finally pass into one great principle of life originating and organizing all that is. But the attempt to define this in any precise form of words, though it has been the aim, as he admits, of many of the greatest among men, meets with small sympathy from him. (“Carlyle’s Works,” 8)
It is this desire to circumvent conventional ways of seeing and knowing the world, the critic reports, that has so often led readers to discount Carlyle’s work as dense and bewildering. Those who are willing to embrace a new approach to reading, by contrast, will likely “admire his wildest extravagances, and will discover in his most playful disportings a hidden wisdom” (“Sartor Resartus,” Christian Examiner 75). In his preface to the first bound edition of Sartor Resartus, Ralph Waldo Emerson highlighted the book’s eccentricity, reminding the reader that its chapters originally appeared as “ephemeral pamphlets,” much like the strange sheets of paper that constitute the archive of Teufelsdröckh’s life and work (Emerson, 246). Emerson frankly admits to having “no expectation that this little work will have a sudden and general popularity” and refuses to defend “the gay costume in which the Author delights to dress his thoughts” (Emerson, 246). In the end, it is Carlyle’s ambition to present an earnest appraisal of his own time, in all of its illegibility, that distinguishes Sartor Resartus. For Emerson, the philosophical rewards of such a style outweigh the risks: after all, “what work of imagination can hope to please all?” (Emerson, 246)
In like spirit, George Eliot acknowledged that some may find Carlyle’s style “as unendurable as an English lady finds peppermint” but insisted that the historical value of his work was indisputable: “The character of his influence is best seen in the fact that many of the men who have the least agreement with his opinions are those to whom the reading of ‘Sartor Resartus’ was an epoch in the history of their minds” (312, 311). Certainly, the claim is borne out by the number of popular writers who cite the volume as a defining influence, including Mark Twain, Hermann Melville, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Dickens.[1] If readers of Sartor Resartus were reluctant upon its initial publication, it is undeniable that the book has been influential. But it was singular because it was, for many, a stylistic aberration.
In large part, Carlyle’s stylistic choices reflect a distaste for the more systematic, empirical approaches of his contemporaries. In “Characteristics” (1831), an essay written just after completing his first draft of Sartor Resartus, Carlyle juxtaposed the work of the poet or priest to the manufactured rhetoric of the “Logician, or uninspired thinker” (16). Here, Carlyle does not merely argue against the polemical writing he saw emerging everywhere in the nineteenth-century press. He argues in favor of a new mode of discourse — one that is freed from the trammels of linear, syllogistic thinking. In his notebooks (produced between 1822 and 1832), Carlyle reflects on the futility of the philosophical treatise as a mode of reflection:
One is tired to death with his and Goethe’s palabra about the nature of the fine arts. Did Shakespeare know aught of the aesthetic? Did Homer? Kant’s philosophy has a monstrously gigantic appearance at a distance — enveloped in clouds and darkness, shadowed forth in types and symbols of unknown and fantastic derivation, there is an apparatus and a flourishing of drums and trumpets and a tumultuous Marktschreyerei as if all the Earth were going to renew its youth; and the esoterics are equally allured by all this pomp and circumstance, and repelled by the hollowness and airy nothingness of the ware which is presented to them. […] What is Schlegel’s great solution of the mystery of life — “the strife of necessity against free-will”? Nothing earthly but the old, old story that all men find it difficult to get on in the world […] (41-42)
If Carlyle is often thought to have been a devoted follower of German aesthetic philosophy, in the days leading up to the publication of Sartor Resartus we see him instead frustrated by the linear, systematic thinking deployed by his philosophical idols. Whereas Kant and Schlegel grounded their understanding of aesthetics in subjective judgment and the exercise of free will, Carlyle found little comfort in these propositions. They could not combat his sense of human experience as small, fragile, and possibly inexpressible.
This is not to suggest that Carlyle adopted a position of nihilistic uncertainty. Indeed, Carlyle’s appreciation for the “significance of Mystery” to some extent finds its roots in Calvinism and its claim that knowledge of God cannot be either comprehensive or acquired by force of will (“Characteristics,” 16). For many years, Sartor Resartus was treated as exemplifying the Victorian “crisis of faith.” John D. Rosenberg famously suggested that the volume represents “Romanticism half-way down the road to renouncing itself,” a work that insists that “doubt has become the pre-condition for tenable belief” (10). This certainly seems to have been the position of John Sterling, who wrote to Carlyle in 1835, observing that the book “falls-in with the feelings and tastes which were, for years, the ruling ones of my life; but which you will not be angry with me when I say that I am infinitely and hourly thankful to have escaped from” (Carlyle, Life, 108). Yet to suggest that Sartor Resartus highlights a moment of doubt that every man must in turn confront and transcend, as Sterling suggests, is perhaps to miss Carlyle’s larger point. After all, the question of belief was not strictly a religious one for Carlyle — it was also epistemological. Chris R. Vanden Bossche has rightly noted that Carlyle’s relationship to knowledge in Sartor Resartus is rife with paradox. The German philosopher, he observes, “needs knowledge to obtain authority, but he can only achieve authority and rest when he stops seeking knowledge” (Vanden Bossche, 28-29). Only an unremitting quest for knowledge can bring the individual to a realization that such a quest is pointless. Through this relentless process of seeking, we become aware of the mind’s limitations and capacities.
Questioning, then, is not merely a means of attaining enlightenment or clarity. Indeed, it is perplexity that serves as a source of philosophical clarity. It would be nearer the truth to suggest, as J. Hillis Miller has done, that Sartor Resartus is a book about books, that it is “about the act of narration, about the act of achieving knowledge by a process of reminiscent retelling, retailoring the tailor, repatching the patcher, sartor resartus” (3). Seen this way, the protagonist of Sartor Resartus is not the English Editor or Diogenes Teufelsdröckh: it is the reader himself and the movement of his own mind. The question is not what to believe but rather how to think.
In Sartor Resartus, this process of interpretation is thematized through the book’s very structure — its fictive origin in fragments of text, encyclopedic content, and the tense (and tenuous) relationship between Teufelsdröckh and the unconvinced English Editor. But the centerpiece of this hermeneutic dilemma is the “Philosophy of Clothes” itself. Tracing the history of clothing back to the very origins of human society, Teufelsdröckh insists that the “first purpose of Clothes [. . .] was not warmth or decency, but ornament.” If the term “ornament” would seem to describe this endeavor as trivial or superficial, the philosopher in fact treats clothing as a permeable boundary between the material world and metaphysical truth. The historical and cultural evidence proffered by Teufelsdröckh is extensive. For the sans-culottes — the common people of eighteenth-century France, so named because they lacked the silk stockings or culottes worn by aristocrats — clothing became synonymous with class hierarchy and the political movement that challenged it. For the magistrate, donning “a horsehair wig, squirrel skins, and a plush [red] gown,” clothing connotes the power to judge and to condemn. And the dandy makes his “Idea an Action” by conveying through clothing an attention to the aesthetic forms of the world in which we live and breathe.
Although it is true that Carlyle deplores the worship of objects for their own sake, Sartor Resartus does not entirely reject the value of physical objects, which serve as valuable conduits for sublimated truth. The important thing is to recognize that the relationship between transcendental truth and the material world is ever shifting. As Chris Vanden Bossche puts it: “Insofar as beliefs and institutions possess transcendental authority, they unite the authority to compel belief and to compel obedience, but because clothes, beliefs, and institutions are historical, they gradually lose their ability to manifest or represent transcendental authority” (43). Hence, political and social change — even revolution — is not to be feared. On the contrary, it is an unwavering commitment to what is “customary or habitual” that threatens the progress of human society (Vanden Bossche, 43). To this extent, Teufelsdröckh’s “Philosophy of Clothes” cautions us against any fixed way of understanding a world that is by nature always in flux.
As an illustration of this principle, we might turn to one of Carlyle’s other signature works, Past and Present (1843), where he would return to the clothing metaphor. The volume, which juxtaposes the work ethic of a medieval monastery to that of nineteenth-century England, resembles Sartor Resartus in its generic indeterminacy and its attention to speculative modes of inquiry. In Book 2 of Past and Present, Carlyle depicts the speculative mode through a striking episode in which Abbot Samson attempts to view the shrouded body of his patron, St. Edmund, thus coming face to face, as it were, with historical and religious truth. The Loculus containing the body is wrapped in several layers of tissue:
There was an outer cloth of linen, enwrapping the Loculus and all; this we found tied on the upper side with strings of its own; within this was a cloth of silk, and then another linen cloth, and then a third; and so at last the Loculus was uncovered, and seen resting on a little tray of wood, that the bottom of it might not be injured by the stone. Over the breast of the Martyr, there lay, fixed to the surface of the Loculus, a Golden Angel about the length of a human foot; holding in one hand golden sword, and in the other a banner: under this there was a hole in the lid of the Loculus, on which the ancient servants of the Martyr had been won’t to lay their hands for touching the Sacred Body. And over the figure of the Angel was this verse inscribed: “Martiris ecce zoma serant Michaelis agalma. This is the Martyr’s Garment, which Michael’s Image guards.” (Past and Present, 120)
At first, it might seem as though the inscrutable past becomes increasingly visible as each layer of cloth is removed. The process of uncovering the truth is merely a laborious unraveling of vestments that promise to terminate in the immediate apprehension of the body. The Latin inscription, however, suggests that the garment is perhaps not meant to be removed, so that this process of denuding the Sacred Body is explicitly challenged. When the Abbot peers beneath the lid, he finds layer upon layer of silk cloth covering the body: “These coverings being lifted off, they found now the Sacred Body all wrapt in linen; and so at length the lineaments of the same appeared. But here the Abbot stopped; saying he durst not proceed farther, or look at the sacred flesh naked” (Past and Present, 122).
How are we meant to understand the many layers that shroud the Sacred Body? And what are we to make of the Abbot’s ultimate refusal to divest the body of its clothes? On the one hand, we might regard clothing, as Carlyle does elsewhere, as a symbol for “habit” — that is, as a reflection of those cultural forms with which we adorn our lives. Such habits may be inspired by deep conviction and earnest passion, but they often ossify into polemic, ideology, or custom. As Carlyle puts it: “Ubi hones sent modi sent. Habit is the deepest law of human nature” (Past and Present, 126). Habit is, he goes on to say, “the very skin and muscular tissue of a Man’s Life; and a most blessed indispensable thing, so long as they have vitality withal, and are a living skin and tissue to him!” (Past and Present, 126). It is when we cease to engage actively and critically with these ideas — when they become mere habit — that they come to resemble “dead skin, mere adscititious leather and callosity, wearing thicker and thicker, uglier and uglier; till no heart any longer can be felt beating through them [. . .]” (Past and Present, 126). Hence, we might regard Abbot Samson’s refusal to denude the body as a celebration of old habits and a reluctance to seek out the living truth they once embodied. More charitably, Abbot Samson recognizes that only habit— that is, the symbolic value in which history has shrouded St. Edmund — retains any value, since no heart beats beneath the cloth wrappings. It is tradition and not literal truth that ultimately matters.
Relating this back to Sartor Resartus, we might well concede Janice L. Haney’s point that it is an “overdetermined fiction, a text that lays fiction upon fiction as if it wanted to stop interpretation or at least make reading a problem” (307). By shrouding the life and philosophy of Teufelsdröckh within multiple layers of irony, Carlyle potentially arrests the interpretive process and compels the reader to confront his own reading habits. In this spirit, Geoffrey Hartman proposes that Carlyle resisted a “potentially infinite regress of mediation — even though it provides a saving distance from absolute inwardness or solipsism” (49). “His solution,” Hartman explains, “is to foreground the mediatory process, to make the writer’s distance from any source so palpable that the retailored text is endowed with a factitious presence of its own” (49). Irony in Sartor Resartus does not serve simply as a way of shielding the reader from truth or the author from potential criticism. Instead, these layers of irony call attention to the constructedness of all stories, habits, and cultural practices. As Tom Toremans puts it, such a reading implies that “Sartor’s entrance into literary criticism occurs as an affliction rather than as an unproblematical passage to moral, historical, political or critical instruction” (Kerry, 216).
I would propose, however, that Carlyle’s stylistic indirection is somewhat more generative than this, if we regard the subject of his work to be not the outcome of interpretation but rather interpretation itself. Seen this way, the layers of partial knowledge empower the reader to recognize the processes through which knowledge is a creation of the individual mind. If the infinite regress of Carlyle’s writing would seem to parody a Hegelian dialectic, as Hartman suggests, it is at least equally luxuriating in the failures of such a hermeneutic. Put another way, Carlyle’s reader — like Abbot Samson and the fictive English Editor — must finally abandon the linear, literal, and material quest for truth. He must leave aside the fetish or ritual to confront the underlying mystery of all things. If truth cannot be perceived empirically or deduced through a process of careful reasoning, perhaps it can be accessed through alternative means. It is possible, moreover, that the “infinite regress of mediation” in Carlyle’s writing serves a second and more vital function. After all, the linear quest for truth is not altogether without value in Carlyle’s eyes. While he calls Abbot Samson and his companions “stupid blockheads” for worshipping a dead body and seeking to find in it evidence of divine truth, he also recognizes that the relationship between the body and soul is one of the great mysteries of human life. Hence, while their worship of the body — their desire for literalism — may well be misguided, the speculative impulse is not.
The chief insight of Sartor Resartus, then, is not its engagement with Christian typology, Chartism, German philosophy, or anything else. At the heart of this strange book is the instantiation of a new methodological form — one that seeks to reform the reader’s approach to text and, consequently, to self-reflection. As Lee C.R. Baker suggests, “Sartor is not intended to persuade logically” but rather to draw the reader into a “state of mind” that is unfamiliar and therefore revelatory (220, 231). To date, scholars have attributed the oblique, non-linear rhetoric of Sartor Resartus to a number of influences. Some have suggested, quite naturally, that it reflects Carlyle’s investment in German idealism, which highlighted the unknowability of the world and called attention to the role of mental life in constructing the world as we see and know it. Others have aligned Carlyle with “Victorian sage” discourse, highlighting Carlyle’s efforts to speak from the margins of society — like a prophet crying out in the wilderness — to revise the underlying aims and strategies of nineteenth-century intellectual culture. Still others (like Chris R. Vanden Bossche and J. Hillis Miller) have suggested that it anticipates the work of contemporary cultural critics, especially those who seek actively to deconstruct meaning and the processes through which we come to knowledge. To my mind, all of these perspectives are both valid and persuasive.
Still, I would suggest that the volume does not seek to highlight a particular ideological program or to convert the reader to any single “philosophy” of art, politics, or clothes. The point (and the genius) of Sartor Resartus is its mobility. For it is essentially this that has rendered the text so impenetrable to readers both then and now — its fluidity, its insistence that the reader fleetingly shift from one field of knowledge to another or from one perspective to another. The process of reading Sartor Resartus, like the work of unveiling the Loculus, does not reveal to us divine mysteries or secular ones. Instead, it calls attention to our own interpretive processes, insisting that our reading habits are as worthy of scrutiny as any other habit.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault insisted that the “frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network” (25-26). In this age of digital media, we have become more accustomed to a non-linear reading experience — one that invites the reader’s active engagement in forging their own investigative pathways. This is precisely what has made Sartor Resartus so challenging to readers, from the time of its initial publication to the present day. Yet its fragmented structure, its appeal to irony, its unrelenting allusiveness — these are all qualities that invite the reader to move away from the reading practices we know and into a more speculative, stereoscopic way of seeing the world. Sartor Resartus is a book for the twenty-first century.
Works Cited
Barbour James and Leon Howard. “Carlyle and the Conclusion of Moby-Dick.” New England Quarterly 49. 2 (1976): 214-24.
Bertolotti, D.S. “Mark Twain Revisits the Tailor.” Mark Twain Journal 13.4 (Summer 1967): 18-19.
Carlyle, Thomas. “Characteristics.” In Critical and Miscellaneous Essays 3. Vol. 28 of
The Works of Thomas Carlyle. Ed. H.D. Traill. London: Chapman and Hall, 1899. 1-43.
——. Letters of Thomas Carlyle. Ed. Charles Eliot Norton (London: Macmillan, 1889).
——. Life of John Sterling. London: Chapman and Hall, 1888.
——. Past and Present. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1847.
——. “The State of German Literature.” Carlyle’s Critical and Miscellaneous Writings. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1857. 15-34.
——. Two Notebooks of Thomas Carlyle. New York: Grolier Club, 1898.
“Carlyle’s Works,” London and Westminster Review 33.64 (October 1839): 1-8.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Preface.” Sartor Resartus (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1837): 3-4.
Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2002.
Haney, Janice L. “ ‘Shadow-Hunting’: Romantic Irony, ‘Sartor Resartus,’ and Victorian Romanticism.” Studies in Romanticism. 17.3 (Summer 1978) 307-33.
Hartman, Geoffrey. Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Hunt, Leigh. Leigh Hunt: A Life in Letters. Ed. Eleanor M. Gates (Essex, CT: Fall River Publications, 1998).
Levine, George. “ ‘Sartor Resartus’ and the Balance of Fiction.” Victorian Studies. 8.2 (December 1964), 131-60.
“Sartor Resartus,” The Christian Examiner 21 (September 1837): 74-84.
“Sartor Resartus.” The Sun Newspaper (1 April 1834): 3.
McGettigan, Kat. “Aestheticizing the Marketplace: Appropriations of the Literary Industry in Sartor Resartus and Moby-Dick.” Symbiosis 15.2 (2011): 173-91.
Mill, John Stuart. Letters of John Stuart Mill. London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1910.
Miller, J. Hillis. “Hieroglyphical Truth in Sartor Resartus: Carlyle and the Language of Parable.” Victorian Perspectives. Ed. John Clubb and Jerome Meckier. London: Palgrave, 1989 1-20.
Petersheim, Steven. “‘Naked as a pair of tongs’: Twain’s philosophy of clothes.” Papers on Language and Litearture 48.2 (2012): 172-196
“The Progress of Publication.” The Spectator 11 (1838): 759-60.
Rosenberg, John D. Carlyle and the Burden of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Tarr, Rodger L. “Introduction,” in Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. xxi-xciv.
Tennyson, G.B. Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structure, and Style of Thomas Carlyle’s First Major Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.
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[1] For a discussion of Mark Twain’s interest in Carlyle’s book, see Steven Petersheim, “‘Naked as a pair of tongs’: Twain’s philosophy of clothes,” Papers on Language and Litearture 48.2 (2012): 172-196 and D.S. Bertolotti, “Mark Twain Revisits the Tailor,” Mark Twain Journal 13.4 (Summer 1967): 18-19. James Barbour and Leon Howard discuss Melville’s indebtedness to Sartor Resartus in “Carlyle and the Conclusion of Moby-Dick,” New England Quarterly 49. 2 (1976): 214-24. See also Kat McGettigan, “Aestheticizing the Marketplace: Appropriations of the Literary Industry in Sartor Resartus and Moby-Dick,” Symbiosis 15.2 (2011): 173-91. The scholarship on Thackeray’s response to Carlyle is abundant. One especially illuminating discussion of the subject can be found in Robert P. Fletcher’s “ ‘The Foolishest of Existing Mortals’: Thackeray, ‘Gurlyle,’ and the Character(s) of Fiction,” Clio 24.2 (1995): 113-126. Rodger Tarr observes, essays on “the influence of Sartor Resartus upon Dickens are too numerous to mention” (xviii.n11)
