“Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches” by Thomas Carlyle: history and biography

Critics have argued that Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton (1848), is split by a conflict between the modes of realism and romance. But the conflict does not render the novel incoherent, because Gaskell surpasses both modes through a utopian narrative that breaks with the conflict of form and gives coherence to the whole novel. Gaskell not only depicts what Thomas Carlyle called the ‘Condition of England’ in her work but also develops, through three stages, the utopia that will redeem this condition. The first stage is romantic nostalgia, a backward glance at Eden from the countryside surrounding Manchester. The second stage occurs in Manchester, as Gaskell mixes romance with a realistic mode, tracing a utopian drive toward death. The third stage is the utopian break with romantic and realistic accounts of the Condition of England and with the inadequate preceding conceptions of utopia. This third stage transforms narrative modes and figures a new mode of production.

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Black Ireland's Race: Thomas Carlyle and the Young Ireland Movement

Victorian Studies ◽

10.2979/vic.2006.48.3.461 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 48 (3) ◽

pp. 461-485 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Julie M. Dugger

Keyword(s):

Thomas Carlyle

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‘The greatest irregular’

10.1093/oso/9780198737827.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Ruth Scurr

Keyword(s):

French Revolution ◽

Historical Record ◽

Thomas Carlyle ◽

History Of ◽

Dramatic Narrative ◽

The French Revolution ◽

The Revolution

Thomas Carlyle claimed that his history of the French Revolution was ‘a wild savage book, itself a kind of French Revolution …’. This chapter considers his stylistic approaches to creating the illusion of immediacy: his presentation of seemingly unmediated fact through the transformation of memoir and other kinds of historical record into a compelling dramatic narrative. Closely examining the ways in which he worked biographical anecdote into the fabric of his text raises questions about Carlyle’s wider historical purposes. Pressing the question of what it means to think through style, or to distinguish expressive emotive writing from abstract understanding, is an opportunity to reconsider Carlyle’s relation to his predecessors and contemporaries writing on the Revolution in English.

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