Past and Present (review)

Ralph Waldo Emerson epitomized Past and Present (1843) in a mere two words: an "immortal newspaper." The phrase captures Thomas Carlyle's unique fusion of the timeless and the topical, the everyday and the eternal, in his great critique of the suffering of the English working classes during the Hungry Forties. How, Carlyle asks, can widespread starvation coexist with vastly increasing productivity and wealth?

His answer centers on two contrasting walled communities. In the one, a newly constructed workhouse at St. Ives, able-bodied men, in compliance with the grimly Malthusian logic of the New Poor Law of 1834, are imprisoned for the "crime" of poverty; the pauper-inmates were fed fewer calories per day than were allowed a convicted felon. The other community—close-knit, hierarchical, and prosperous—grew up around the body of the martyred saint at Bury St. Edmunds. The thriving twelfth-century Abbey of St. Edmunds and the "Poor Law Bastille" of St. Ives are Carlyle's emblems of ancient community and modern industrial alienation, of hope and hell.

In the most magical pages of Past and Present, Carlyle recreates, through the medium of the newly-translated Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond—a kind of medieval newspaper—the daily life and doings within the walls of the Abbey, where each man is his brother's keeper and Abbot Samson rules justly, compassionately, and sternly. (Like his hero Samson, the Tory-Radical Carlyle is also and emphatically an authoritarian.)

In stark contrast to life within the Abbey, Carlyle cites a ghoulish inquest, reported in the Examiner of 1 November 1840, into the murder by desperate parents of one of their children in order to feed the remainder of the family on the proceeds from their burial insurance. "And now Tom being killed, and all spent and eaten," Carlyle asks in the deranged idiom appropriate to a populace that is compelled by hunger to consume rather than nurture its children, "Is it poor little starveling Jack that must go, or poor little starveling Will?" (8).

The cries of infant Tom reverberate throughout Past and Present. So, too, the trail of contagion and death carried by a starving Irish widow spreads in widening circles through Carlyle's "Iliad of English woes" (again, the phrase is Emerson's). A haunting emblem of a community whose strongest link is forged by disease, she drags her body from door to door through the streets of Edinburgh in an unavailing search for food for her children. The widow "proves her sisterhood" by fatally infecting seventeen of her uncaring neighbors. A late-breaking item in Carlyle's "immortal newspaper," she is his most moving symbol of the inhumanity of laissez-faire England, where the amassing of individual riches results in widespread impoverishment and death. The Irish widow's festering body is the antitype of the miraculously preserved corpse of St. Edmund, unearthed for the reader at the luminous end of Book II ("The Ancient Monk").

In a work so teeming with allusions—topical, historical, biblical, ancient, and modern—extensive annotation is imperative, and this fourth in the projected eight-volume Strouse Edition of Carlyle's major writings contains over two hundred pages of notes. Nothing important is omitted, and very little that is superfluous is included. (One exuberant note of several hundred words describes the discovery, appearance, and variant spellings of three fossilized creatures that Carlyle mentions in passing early in Book II.)

In addition to copious notes, the editors include a useful "Chronology of Carlyle's Life," and a highly informative historical and biographical introduction. The introduction is especially illuminating on Carlyle's profound influence on Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold. Arnold's startling account of the infanticide Wragg in "The Function of Criticism" (here mistakenly attributed to Culture and Anarchy) is almost certainly indebted to Carlyle.

The textual apparatus also...