The Reader as Editor

The foregoing chapters have followed, as closely as possible, some of the ways and lines along which Victorian literature and science were brought into existence as various kinds of written text. As I have argued, what such seemingly different forms of writing as G. H. Lewes's and George Eliot's studies, Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, and the sensational fictions of M. E. Braddon and Wilkie Collins have in common is that they are expressive of experimental activities through which personal perception comes to matter in social forms. Moreover, almost all of the texts assembled here appear to be, in Thomas Carlyle's words, ‘intensely self-conscious’ about how they interpret and recreate the relationship between such concepts as the individual and the general, matter and thought, nature and culture, the human and the animal, science and art, or mechanical reproduction and original invention. According to Carlyle, this intense self-consciousness is a hallmark of the very ‘Society’ in the continuous reassociation of which his works participated alongside that of multiple others. ‘Our whole relations to the Universe and to our fellow man have become an Inquiry, a Doubt,’ he writes as early as 1831, ‘all things must be probed into, the whole working of man's world be anatomically studied.’

Shortly after he made this statement, Carlyle began to work on his own enquiry into ‘all things’, Sartor Resartus, which is not only about the philosophy of one Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, ‘Professor of Things in General’; Sartor Resartus is also about the editorial activity of assembling the professor's life and ideas from an impenetrable jumble of printed text as well as from ‘miscellaneous masses of Sheets, and oftener Shreds and Snips’, written in a ‘scarce-legible cursiv-schrift’ (SR 60). As a result, Sartor Resartus is composed of both Teufelsdröckh's philosophical-biographical writing and of the demanding, often exasperating process of making it readable for an English audience, of bringing it into the public world. It presents the ‘Life and Opinions’ of a German professor in the process of being retailored according to the needs of an English readership (SR 10).

Carlyle's ‘bold experiment in style and method’ therefore offers an appropriate way of concluding this book.