DISPOSICIÓN N.º 872/DGIUR/

Machine Age

So far, in addressing Faust and Frankenstein, I have been exploring mythic narratives in relation to how they might be useful for interpreting and processing the industrialisation process and its effects on social and political systems in Western Europe, particularly Britain. Now, I will shift focus towards how those myths were put to use, specifically in literature critical of industry as a key feature of modernity. By incorporating thematic and structural elements of the myths of Prometheus, Faust, and Frankenstein into direct analysis of industrialisation and its effects, both Carlyle and Marx would prove the relevance of those myths to their present time. Moreover, they would also expand upon and utilise those myths to create a separate narrative for industrialisation that shares characteristics with earlier myths, but functions separately as a myth in itself. In this way, they helped establish many of the terms for how later generations would reimagine the time period.

To this end, Carlyle is a particularly important figure to acknowledge for his prominence as a critic within, and of, nineteenth-century British culture. His appeal was in part the divisiveness of his worldview, in combination with his undeniable skill and

perception as a literary and cultural critic. George Eliot noted that ‘there is hardly a

superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle’s writings,’ though complete agreement with him was far more rare (CCH 3). His position as a literary attacker—as William Henry Smith of Blackwood’s put it, ‘objecting, denouncing, scoffing, rending all to pieces in his bold, reckless, ironical manner’—allowed him to portray a crisis point in how society was incorporating industrialisation and capitalism into itself, lending apocalyptic drama to his critique of invasive mechanisation of daily processes (CCH 210). From the reactions of both his supporters and detractors, Jules Paul Siegel suggests that their reactions ‘illuminat[ed] the intellectual and emotional conflicts of the reviewers themselves as well as the character of the age’, and in this way we can begin to see how Carlyle’s body of work specifically contributed to an industrial myth (CCH 24). Across his works, both historical and focussed on the present day, his Goethean belief in a holistic ‘thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature’ made up of both the material and spiritual realms fostered his mythic reading of the dawning mechanical age (Sartor Resartus 41).

Carlyle identifies the crisis point of the mid-nineteenth century as the unbalancing of natural harmony, in which the treatment of history as merely a collection of facts is one symptom of the larger movement towards Mechanism; that is, ‘man has grown mechanical in head and in heart’ (‘Signs’ CME II: 63). Moreover, his work reiterated the profound ambivalence which had characterised Faust and Frankenstein; even more than Goethe, he was deeply troubled by the conflict between visionary individual power, which he believed in as an expression of how ‘the Divine Idea of the Universe is pleased to manifest itself’, and the violence of sudden change that could be enacted by such vision (Sartor 166). Furthermore, he too was concerned about the ubiquity of technology in a far more straightforward way than Mary Shelley, as indicated by his indictment of mechanism’s proliferation in his early essay ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829). Thus, in Carlyle’s diagnosis of the Machine Age, he presents industrialisation as usable history through his timeless treatment of mankind as a Goethean manifestation of Spirit in a physical vessel that is changing in a single process over a contained period of specific time. In this way, his social criticism takes the form of mythic narrative: it is both the story of a critical period in human history and a universal analysis of human nature. His analysis of workers’ rights, laissez-faire capitalism, and post-Enlightenment disenchantment utilised German and classical works in order to set forth a body of work that expressed his own convictions about specific societal ills while illustrating the more abstract contradictions inherent in modern industrial culture. In this way, he presented modern history not necessarily as a unified narrative, but as an environment wherein the ‘Truth of Things’ must be excavated out from underneath a national preoccupation with money and objects. His efforts to excavate, or even define that truth, was not often successful—the writer Robert Vaughan rather delicately commented that ‘Mr. Carlyle has not explained the principle on which he has endeavoured to separate the thread of truth from fiction’ in his biography of

Cromwell, which was a frequent problem that often left his readers mired in his prose (CCH 265). However, the spirit and power of his inquiry hit upon an anxiety felt by his contemporaries about the costs of development in British society, which was moving ever further along. This chapter will therefore highlight how Carlyle elevated history and present conditions into a struggle for balance between the physical and spiritual worlds, and the terrible danger man courts by allowing the pull of materialism to overwhelm his sensitivity to Nature.

From his Romantic influences and origins, therefore, I will attempt to highlight the ideas that best gave Carlyle the structure and basis for his presentation of his time,

particularly his belief in the natural balance between the material and spiritual realms that he uses as entrance to his approach to history and myth, as well as his central thesis regarding Mechanism. The former can be found throughout his work, but I will particularly highlight examples in Sartor Resartus (1836) and some of his early essays on German literature; the latter is first established in ‘The Signs of the Times’, and elaborated upon in Past and Present (1843). Acting as a preacher and a prophet, Carlyle’s myth of how all aspects of society were following the same path as industrialisation towards complete automation and mechanisation became a comprehensive narrative about the ‘true’ nature of the Industrial Revolution. Through the interconnectedness of Romantic sentiment with Carlyle’s diagnosis of the Machine Age and Dickens’s dramatization, I will illustrate the development of a coherent set of feelings towards industrialisation that derived from both spiritual and social concerns and impacted the attitudes of the general public.

German Romanticism and Carlyle’s conception of the poet

Carlyle’s conception of the poet, and mankind overall, can be traced to several features in German and British Romanticism. In particular, I will draw attention to the role of

Goethe’s conception of the balanced spiritual and physical components of the self, and the heroism of the individual, particularly the poet, found in both he and Percy Shelley’s works. This will establish the foundation upon which Carlyle’s social criticism rests, wherein he argues that mechanisation has disrupted this ideal form of being and achieving, resulting in political unrest. In this way, the disparity between his philosophical beliefs and what he observes of society makes use of Goethe’s conception of man, while his own narrative becomes far more similar to Frankenstein in its critical stance on the lack of responsibility he sees among aristocratic ‘Dilettantists’ and entrepreneurial ‘Mammonists’, and his warnings about only caring, as Frankenstein had, about physical, rather than spiritual, development.

Much of Carlyle’s critical engagement with his time period stemmed from his personal philosophical convictions as developed through his interest in German

Romanticism. He was brought up under strong Calvinistic principles by way of his mother and father, the latter of whom Carlyle called ‘a true workman in this vineyard of the Highest’, and then studied at Edinburgh with an intention to join the church (Reminiscences 5). However, after a crisis of faith during his studies, he broke away from Christian tradition in favour of a personal form of transcendentalism that sought to find the

‘mysteries and harmonies’ of which Emerson believed ‘Men live on the brink’ (CEC 121). Carlyle’s movement towards transcendentalism did not always align with Emerson’s, however; it originated more from Goethe, for whom Carlyle held a lifelong admiration. He imagined Faust and Homunculus both as ‘workmen’ in both spiritual and material labours. In lieu of orthodox forms of Christianity that Carlyle found inadequate for contemporary society’s needs, Goethe provided the tools to accurately describe his reckoning of the estrangement of man from the spiritual world through the mechanisation of society. As such, his style and approach to social criticism reflect his conception of Victorian society’s increasingly mechanical thinking—that is, his understanding of Benthamite, utilitarian thinking—expanding to take the place of outmoded religious orthodoxies, ushering in what he named ‘The Machine Age’.26

Carlyle’s early life stands him apart from the radicalism and freedom of Mary Shelley or Goethe’s younger years, making it doubly notable that several central strains of his social diagnosis of his age should carry many of the same strands of philosophical and narrative tone as those previous authors. Born in 1795, he was a contemporary of the Shelleys, but would not come into his own as a literary figure until well after most of the English Romantics had made their impact. His family was a warm and close-knit one, impressing upon him the value of self-sufficiency, independence, and disregard for social status as a source of authority. These principles would come to characterise Carlyle's approach to his work, and the value he placed in work at large as a spiritual vocation. Later in life, he would become known for his plain speech and uncompromising presentation, such that his acquaintance, the novelist Margaret Oliphant, would remember most vividly,

...his intense peasant suspiciousness and distrust of his fellow-men, with his equally intense peasant expectation that here at last might be found...the brilliant talk and lofty thought which he had believed in from the time of earliest musings and eager hopes conceived in his father's farmyard or among the beasts on the Annandale farm (115).

In this way, Carlyle came by his radicalism through his position as an outsider both ideologically and geographically, as a Scotsman living and observing life in London. This persisted throughout his life and writing; in some ways it could be seen as imitative of Goethe’s detached perspective, but Carlyle’s distrust of authority and ‘suspiciousness’ set him apart from his German colleague’s generosity, contributing to his far more

26 Carlyle’s treatment of Bentham, which was both limited and ungenerous, seemed to rely heavily on Hazlitt’s assessment that he lived mostly in isolation, all the while ‘reducing law to a system and the mind of man to a machine’ (5). As a result, Carlyle’s critique of Bentham, when it appears, demonstrates Carlyle’s thesis on the increasing mechanisation of all aspects of modern life more than any understanding of utilitarianism.

contentious reputation. His ‘distrust’ of his fellow man never abated—if anything, it grew more severe. As Queen Victoria commented, having met him and several other notable writers for an evening, he ‘holds forth, in a drawling melancholy voice…upon Scotland and upon the utter degeneration of everything’ (qtd. in Pritchard 254). As his belief in the Goethean heroism of individuals like Faust increased, his desire for social responsibility and reform was forced to become ever more ambivalent due to its close ties to democratic movements.

Carlyle’s interest in German literature began as a result of attempting to keep up with European work in mathematics, which he studied at Edinburgh during his ‘hateful “Academy” life’ (Reminiscences 46). He became well-versed in German, and beyond

mathematics he became exposed to German literature at large, and out of this exploration, Goethe emerged as Carlyle’s primary role model. Carlyle’s attachment to Goethe stemmed from both his ‘poetic worth’ and his journey towards eminence, which manifested first in his identification with Goethe’s struggles as a younger man, ‘whose voice came to me from afar, with counsel and help, in my utmost need’ (CCG 7). Carlyle’s ‘hateful’ experience at Edinburgh had been in part due to the crisis of faith he experienced, which turned him away from a clerical career and left him adrift as to what to do with his life. After leaving university without completing his degree, he acted as ‘mathematical master’ at Annan Academy, but also found it ‘flatly contradictory to all ideals or wishes of mine’

(Reminiscences 47). Fred Kaplan elaborates that during this early period, ‘Carlyle needed a literary father, an articulate embodiment on an international scale of the virtues that he himself was trying to emulate’ (167). This is consistent with how Carlyle initially presented himself in his letters to Goethe, wherein he expressed a desire to ‘one day see you, and pour out before you, as before a father, the woes and wanderings of a heart whose mysteries you seemed so thoroughly to comprehend and could so beautifully represent’ (CLO 24 June 1824).

Carlyle saw in Goethe both a guiding father figure and a wiser version of Carlyle himself, the both of them having undergone a journey of self-realization similar to that portrayed in Wilhelm Meister: Wilhelm too had rejected a career he had deemed soulless, and had struggled to find a vocation that suited him before committing himself to a

philosophical pursuit. As part of his larger, matured conception of the modern hero, Carlyle's figuring of Goethe as a literary presence hinged on his spiritual leadership as well as his art, the two being inextricably entwined. Moreover, as Elizabeth Vida points out, ‘Carlyle sees in Goethe’s novel the unfolding of a striving mind, a presentation of a moral

struggle for values, not necessarily characterizing its hero, Wilhelm, but rather expressing the experience of Goethe himself’ (13). When writing Sartor Resartus, Carlyle would similarly explore (among other dramatized life experiences) this period of transition and tumult in the telling of Teufelsdröckh’s early life, thereby tying his experience to that of Goethe’s Werter and Wilhelm. During Book II of Sartor, in a chapter appropriately called, ‘Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh’, Teufelsdröckh wanders extensively, filled both emotionally and spiritually with carefully restrained passion and chaos: ‘He glides from country to country, from condition to condition; vanishing and re-appearing, no man can calculate how or where’, carrying with him only ‘A nameless Unrest’ (124-5), which Carlyle had already cited of Goethe in an earlier essay (CME I: 188). Carlyle himself did not wander far, at least not geographically—he emerged, however, from Calvinism into a unique mode of transcendental thought which would determine his conception of a spiritual universe at odds with the increasing materialism and utilitarianism which he saw in the world around him. Throughout this transition, German Romanticism was an increasingly important presence in his intellectual life, particularly through its philosophical tenets, insofar as what Carlyle imagined Goethe’s own spiritualism to be. The commitment to finding one’s true vocation as portrayed in Wilhelm Meister not only spoke to Carlyle as a model for his own development as a man of letters, but also to a lifelong belief in the importance of the Romantic conception of the hero to historical work.

Thus, moved by his interest in literary pursuits and his antipathy for teaching, Carlyle began a meagre career writing translations, particularly of Goethe’s works and of Schiller’s, and introductory essays on German literature. His admiration for these voices give us insight into what he valued both in literature and in its audience. In his article ‘The State of German Literature’ (1827), he seeks to dispel the impression that the country’s output is mainly the lowbrow Gothic horrors that had been so popular in the eighteenth century, but rather is rich with sophisticated and esoteric philosophical perspectives. The German horrors by Veit Weber the Younger and Kotzebue were, he argued, as good a representation of German literature at large as The Mysteries of Udolpho and, incidentally,

Frankenstein, were representations of British literature.27 _{Furthermore, he focussed on the}

more artistically open press he saw at work there, in which they ‘seem to set less store by wealth than many of ours’, and the German audience, which he thought were more welcoming towards esoteric works, while Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, for example, was

27 While this mention does not make clear whether Carlyle actually read Frankenstein, it does at least prove his awareness of it. It is not likely, as is fairly apparent here, that any similarities between it and his work were intentional.

‘triumphantly condemned…as clearly unintelligible’ by British critics (CME I: 56; II: 3). The freedom which he perceived Germans wrote with, and the subsequent purity of their authorial voices, as well as the compelling nature of their philosophical approaches

(‘[Lessing] thinks with the clearness and piercing sharpness of the most expert logician; but a genial fire pervades him...He is a sceptic in many things, but the noblest of sceptics’), appealed to his own uncompromising authorial voice (60). The influence of these authors, as well as that of his British contemporaries, provide a portrait of the development of his philosophical views and approach to his work, as well as what he most valued in literature universally. Above all, whether or not scepticism and indeed criticism was ‘noble’ to Carlyle was clearly rooted in strength of feeling as well as reason, Romantic in its ‘fire’, incisive and socially relevant.

Similarly, the young Carlyle drew upon Goethe’s writing to begin resolving his crisis of faith into a belief structure both spiritually meaningful and without the potentially corrupt authority of institutional religion. In identifying with Goethe and his struggles as a younger man, Carlyle saw in him a demonstration that one could strive for a Romantic unification of the material and spiritual in a modern world. While many other poets fell by the wayside in Carlyle’s estimation over the course of his lifetime, Goethe remained free from criticism. While Carlyle’s more mature beliefs did not always align with his mentor’s, he maintained that they were in perfect agreement. We find, for example, a strong

relationship between his beliefs and American Transcendentalism, best exemplified by his extensive correspondence with Ralph Waldo Emerson, which extended from 1833 to 1872, just following the death of Goethe. The American transcendentalists, particularly Emerson, debated Goethe’s works extensively, and were selective about their support of him. His brand of humanism was often considered troublingly atheistic, but on the whole his belief in the self- improvement of man through harmonious spiritual development was a source of encouragement for them. Both Emerson and Carlyle had grown up in strict religious households, making Goethe’s broad humanism difficult to access yet inspiring to their developing feelings on the inadequacy of institutional Christianity. ‘I fear, that Time, the serene Judge, will not be able to make out so good a verdict for Goethe as did & doth Carlyle,’ Emerson confided to his fiancée, Lydia Jackson, ‘I am afraid that under his faith is no-faith,—that under his love is love-of-ease’ (Rusk 241-2). For Emerson, Goethe’s

conception of spirituality may have aligned somewhat with his own, but he found the older writer’s aristocratic lifestyle and somewhat atheistic spiritualism unappealing. Carlyle, by