page_title: Sartor Resartus
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Sartor Resartus / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture of Carlyle's Craigenputtock
context_page_description: Sartor Resartus is an 1836 novel by Thomas Carlyle, first published as a serial in Fraser's Magazine in November 1833–August 1834. The novel purports to be a commentary on the thought and early life of a German philosopher called Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, author of a tome entitled Clothes: Their Origin and Influence, but is actually a poioumenon. Teufelsdröckh's Transcendentalist musings are mulled over by a sceptical English Reviewer who also provides fragmentary biographical material on the philosopher. The work is, in part, a parody of Hegel, and of German Idealism more generally. However, Teufelsdröckh is also a literary device with which Carlyle can express difficult truths.
context_section_description: Archibald MacMechan surmised that the novel's invention had three literary sources. The first of these was A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift, whom Carlyle intensely admired in his college years, even going by the nicknames "Jonathan" and "The Dean". In that work, the three main traditions of Western Christianity are represented by a father bestowing his three children with clothes they may never alter, but proceed to do so according to fashion. Carlyle's second influence, according to MacMechan, was his own work in translating Goethe, particularly Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Faust, all of which Carlyle quotes and explicitly refers to, especially when Teufelsdröckh's names his own crisis "The Sorrows of Young Teufelsdröckh." The third major influence was Tristram Shandy from which Carlyle quotes many phrases, and he referred to earlier in his letters.
  Carlyle worked on an earlier novel, Wotton Reinfred which Macmechan refers to as "[t]he first draft of Sartor." Carlyle finished seven chapters of the semi-autobiographical novel depicting a young man of deeply religious upbringing being scorned in love, and thereafter wandering. He eventually finds at least philosophical consolation in a mysterious stranger named Maurice Herbert, who invites Wotton into his home and frequently discusses speculative philosophy with him. At this point, the novel abruptly shifts to highly philosophical dialogue revolving mostly around Kant. Though the unfinished novel deeply impressed Carlyle's wife Jane, Carlyle never published it and its existence was forgotten until long after Carlyle's death. MacMechan suggests that the novel provoked Carlyle's frustration and scorn due to the "zeal for truth and his hatred for fiction" he speaks of in his letters of the time. Numerous parts of Wotton appear in the biographical section of Sartor Resartus, in which Carlyle humorously sentences them to the bags containing Teufelsdröckh's autobiographical sketches, which the editor constantly complains are overly fragmented or derivative of Goethe. Though widely and erroneously reported as having been burned by Carlyle, the unfinished novel is still extant in draft form; several passages were moved verbatim to Sartor Resartus, but with their context radically changed.
  Carlyle had difficulty finding a publisher for the novel, and he began composing it as an article in October 1831 at Craigenputtock. Fraser's Magazine serialised it in 1833–1834. The text would first appear in volume form in Boston in 1836, its publication arranged by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who much admired the book and Carlyle. Emerson's savvy dealing with the overseas publishers would ensure Carlyle received high compensation, which the novel did not attain in Britain.  The first British edition would be published in London in 1838.
caption: Craigenputtock House
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