Dark Victorians

3. Thomas Carlyle: Case Study of a Dark Victorian

3. Thomas Carlyle Case Study of a Dark Victorian The presence of African Americans abroad advanced neither their emancipatory missions nor their human status in the hearts and minds of some British Victorians. Preeminent among those Victorians who proved unsympathetic to the condition and plight of blacks in England or the Americas was social and moral critic and prophet Thomas Carlyle, who critic Logan Pearsall Smith dubbed “the Rembrandt of English Prose.” Over the course of his career, Carlyle was compelled, no doubt, by the force of such events as the emancipation of West Indian blacks in 1833, the American Civil War, the Jamaican Rebellion, and the Governor Eyre Controversy in 1865 to consider social and political issues surrounding nineteenth-century blacks. On both the public and private occasions Carlyle turned his attention to black people, he did so vigorously and violently, if not devastatingly. In an imperious, loud voice, he spoke, wrote, and performed in a manner and style that commanded the attention of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Carlyle provides a powerful, interesting, and influential example of British racist-imperialist thinking and of African American reaction to such thinking. Thomas Carlyle’s proclamations about blacks, definitively set forth in the December 1849 issue of Fraser’s Magazine as “An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (the essay was expanded and reprinted later as a pamphlet in 1853 with the title “An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question”) could not be summarily dismissed because Carlyle’s discourse, occasional or otherwise, was so undeniably and powerfully constitutive. Thus in 1850, one of Carlyle’s friends, Edinburgh University regius professor and quondam editor of Macmillan, David Masson would declare in hyperbolic tones, “It is nearly half a generation since Mr. Carlyle became an intellectual power in this country; and certainly rarely, if ever, in the history of literature, has such a phenomenon been witnessed as that of his influence. Throughout the whole atmosphere of this island his spirit has diffused itself, so that there is probably not an educated man under forty years of age, from Caithness to Cornwall, that can honestly say he has not been more or less affected by it . . . one can hardly take up a book or a periodical without finding in every page some expression or some mode of thinking that bears the mint-mark of his genius” (2). Novelist George Eliot’s famous, oft-quoted, pronouncement about Carlyle proved nearly as adulatory as Masson’s: “there is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle’s writings: there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived” (344). Carlyle’s influence was such that it boomed across the ocean to the United States with the help of transcendentalist and abolitionist Ralph Waldo Emerson who extended several invitations to Carlyle to travel to America. One such invitation urged the British sage to “come & found a new Academy that shall be church & school & parnassus, as a true Poet’s house should be.” Another invitation pressed Carlyle to “come here forthwith, and deliver in lectures to the solid men of Boston the History of the French Revolution before it is published . . . here. There is no doubt of the perfect success of such a course now that the five hundred copies of the Sartor are all sold, and read with great delight by many persons” (Slater, Correspondence 110, 149). According to Carlylean biographer Fred Kaplan, such correspondence from Emerson “assured him [Carlyle] quite correctly if with some exaggeration, that his American brothers were more eager than the English to recognize his genius and provide a supportive environment for his work” (230). Others seconded Emerson’s assurances of welcome and support in the United States. Thus, George Ripley, a Unitarian minister from Boston and a young friend of Emerson’s was “effusive” in his “transatlantic applause” for Carlyle, averring that “a letter of yours to my friend R. W. Emerson, has convinced me that you are an actual Incarnation, and not merely a Presence and a Force, sent to say, ‘Let there be Light,’ but invisible t[o the] fleshly eye” (Slater, “George Ripley” 341, 343, 344).1 Another American, Arthur Buller, as Carlyle himself recalls, practically clamored for a Carlylean visit to America, “preach[ing] to me . . . that I, namely, am the most esteemed &c, and ought to go over and Lecture in all great towns...