‘Still but an Essayist’: Carlyle’s Early Essays and Late-Romantic Periodical Culture

This chapter pursues a critical reassessment of Thomas Carlyle’s 1820s writings and their participation in the periodical culture and literary marketplace of the time. Well before he developed from Late-Romantic transcendentalist to historian of the French Revolution and, ultimately, to Victorian sage and ultraconservative political commentator, Carlyle’s early reputation in Britain was initiated by translations and critical essays in leading periodicals. His early career as cultural mediator started with his Life of Schiller, first published serially in the London Magazine in 1823-4. In the following years, Carlyle published translations and reviews of works by Goethe, Werner, Heine, Novalis, Voltaire and Jean-Paul Richter, among others. The essays ‘The State of German Literature’ and ‘Signs of the Times’, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1827 and 1829, represent the culmination of Carlyle’s early aesthetic and social critique. These early publications have mainly been analysed as preparations for Carlyle’s influential transcendental aesthetic in the 1830s and, by extension, for his later historical and biographical works. This chapter restores these essays to their historical and material contexts of production, focusing how they subtly enact a critique of Late-Romantic periodical culture, thereby repositioning them as precursors for Carlyle’s peculiar literary-philosophical anti-novel Sartor Resartus.