Jonathan Rose’s book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes is fascinating, and I highly recommend it. One of the main ideas that comes across in Rose’s book is that much of the British working class in the 19th century read a lot – and read a lot of difficult, deep stuff, and had highly specific taste. One curious aspect of this working class taste is that they tended to prefer conservative authors, but not necessarily because they were themselves conservative.
Indeed, even leftist agitators among the working class often found inspiration in Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle, two of the authors most popular among the working class as a whole. Burke is famous as a godfather of modern conservatism; Carlyle is much less famous. It is possible that this is because he is just too reactionary for our modern democratic selves, but listen to Rose:
When the first large cohort of Labour MPs was elected in 1906, the Review of Reviews asked them to name the books and authors that had most deeply influenced them. […] Note that thirteen respondents mentioned Thomas Carlyle … [4th most popular after John Ruskin (17 votes), Dickens (16), and the Bible (14)]
[Carlyle] had a huge following among autodidacts … Carlyle’s ability to attract disciples from all points on the political spectrum, from Communists to Nazis, marks him as an author who might be turned to many purposes… .
One could draw a pacifist lesson from his fable of the sixty French and English soldiers who massacred each other over a trivial territorial dispute. Carlyle’s hero-worship made him appear a proto-fascist in the eyes of many readers (including Joseph Goebbels) but it inspired [Keir] Hardie to embrace the role of Hero as Proletarian.
From Carlyle, as one agitator proclaimed, the working classes “learnt to hate shams.” He exposed the ideological facades of the class system, preached independence of mind, and offered a vision of economic justice.
[…] some working-class women found a feminist in Carlyle.
And on and on the examples go, for nearly ten pages in this chapter alone (the entry for Carlyle in the index spans seven lines).
If Carlyle’s popularity is surprising on a political level, it’s much more surprising on a stylistic level. I suspect the reason Carlyle has fallen into semi-obscurity has less to do with his politics and more to do with the fact that he wrote in a style which is deeply alien to us.
This is not just because he is old. Many writers of the 19th and 18th centuries are still readable to us. Dickens (whose Tale of Two Cities was inspired by Carlyle’s French Revolution) still entertains millions. The Henry Fielding of 1749 sounds like the sort of wag you wouldn’t be surprised to meet in a bar in 2015.
Carlyle is different. He wrote in a floridly romantic, extremely opaque and long-winded style which (I have heard) was popular in his day and fell out of favor soon after. I have read the first few chapters of two of his books – Sartor Resartus and The French Revolution. The former is convoluted but still reads well, but the latter, which was vastly popular, is now practically unreadable. The book’s style is easier to display than to describe. Here is how Carlyle expresses the thought we might now phrase as “kingship is a social construct”:
Time was when men could (so to speak) of a given man, by nourishing and decorating him with fit appliances, to the due pitch, make themselves a King, almost as the Bees do; and what was still more to the purpose, loyally obey him when made. The man so nourished and decorated, thenceforth named royal, does verily bear rule; and is said, and even thought, to be, for example, ‘prosecuting conquests in Flanders,’ when he lets himself like luggage be carried thither: and no light luggage; covering miles of road. For he has his unblushing Chateauroux, with her band-boxes and rouge-pots, at his side; so that, at every new station, a wooden gallery must be run up between their lodgings. He has not only his Maison-Bouche, and Valetaille without end, but his very Troop of Players, with their pasteboard coulisses, thunder-barrels, their kettles, fiddles, stage-wardrobes, portable larders (and chaffering and quarrelling enough); all mounted in wagons, tumbrils, second-hand chaises,—sufficient not to conquer Flanders, but the patience of the world. With such a flood of loud jingling appurtenances does he lumber along, prosecuting his conquests in Flanders; wonderful to behold. So nevertheless it was and had been: to some solitary thinker it might seem strange; but even to him inevitable, not unnatural.
For ours is a most fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures. A world not fixable; not fathomable! An unfathomable Somewhat, which is Not we; which we can work with, and live amidst,—and model, miraculously in our miraculous Being, and name World.—But if the very Rocks and Rivers (as Metaphysic teaches) are, in strict language, made by those outward Senses of ours, how much more, by the Inward Sense, are all Phenomena of the spiritual kind: Dignities, Authorities, Holies, Unholies! Which inward sense, moreover is not permanent like the outward ones, but forever growing and changing.
Well then! Believe it or not, this is one of Carlyle’s more lucid moments. More typical is the first sentence of the third chapter:
For the present, however, the grand question with the Governors of France is: Shall extreme unction, or other ghostly viaticum (to Louis, not to France), be administered?
Or this strange outburst from Chapter 1:
Yes, Maupeou, pucker those sinister brows of thine, and peer out on it with thy malign rat-eyes: it is a questionable case. Sure only that man is mortal; that with the life of one mortal snaps irrevocably the wonderfulest talisman, and all Dubarrydom rushes off, with tumult, into infinite Space; and ye, as subterranean Apparitions are wont, vanish utterly,—leaving only a smell of sulphur!
Imagine huge numbers of working-class autodidacts not only struggling to puzzle out this kind of stuff, but becoming eager fans of it. This actually happened! I have to wonder how to explain the gap between these people and us. When we recoil from Carlyle, are we showing good sense, or have we lost something that these people possessed – or neither? By 1958, a reviewer (Dwight McDonald) could write:
The long, patient uphill struggle of the last fifty years to bring the diction and rhythms of prose closer to those of the spoken language might never have existed so far as Cozzens is concerned. He doesn’t even revert to the central tradition (Scott, Cooper, Bulwer-Lytton) but rather to the eccentric mode of the half-rebels against it (Carlyle, Meredith), who broke up the orderly platoons of gold-laced Latinisms into whimsically arranged squads, uniformed with equal artificiality but marching every which way as the author’s wayward spirit moved them. Carlyle and Meredith are even less readable today than Scott and Cooper, whose prose at least inherited from the 18th century some structural backbone.
So something happened between 1906 (when Carlyle was popular among Labour MPs) and 1958. I wonder what it was. (The first sentence of the McDonald quote gives one possibility – a “long, patient uphill struggle” which, if it really happened, has now largely disappeared from memory.)
(Amusingly, Mencius Moldbug – another guy who never uses five words when five pages will suffice – loves Carlyle. I wonder if he’s read Rose’s book? He writes that “the basic reason Carlyle is not in your high-school English reader, whereas [Walt] Whitman is, is that Carlyle was what, here at UR, we call a reactionary,” which seems unlikely given his popularity across the political spectrum. It seems more likely that people used to find the Carlylean style inspirational, and now it verges on intolerable.)
