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Jeffrey: Mutilator of Carlyle's “Burns”?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Maxwell H. Goldberg*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts State College

Extract

For the persistence, since 1924, of contrasting opinions as to Jeffrey's treatment of the text of Carlyle's “Burns,” David Alec Wilson is in no small measure responsible. First, Wilson's violent partisanship apparently has led some critics of Carlyle to assume that they may disregard the Wilson Life without discrediting themselves. Second, Wilson's inadequate handling of the “Burns” episode itself has permitted continued divergences of opinion among those students of Carlyle who seem directly acquainted with the pertinent Jeffrey-Carlyle correspondence in the second volume of the Life. For, though Wilson quotes generously from this correspondence, and though he makes frequent references to details in it, he nowhere explicitly gives the conclusion to which his own fresh examination of the evidence may have led him. Wilson's inadequacy is reflected both in popular digests of his account of the Carlyle-Jeffrey clashes concerning the “Burns” and in Isaac Watson Dyer's bibliographical summary of this account.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1941

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References

Note 1 in page 466 The year of publication of Carlyle to the “French Revolution” (1826–1837) (London and New York).

Note 2 in page 466 Cf. Norwood Young's Carlyle: His Rise and Fall (New York, n.d. [1928])—American edition. This book, says Waldo H. Dunn, contains not a single reference to Wilson's biography. Commenting on the surprise that has been expressed at this circumstance, Dunn finds the reason obvious: Young, realizing that Wilson's Life was “projected as propaganda,” and that it perpetuated conclusions “known to be untenable,” felt that it was “unworthy of notice in a book which professes to throw new light upon Froude as well as upon Carlyle.”—Froude and Carlyle (London, etc., 1930), pp. 103–104.

Note 3 in page 466 Immediately after a long excerpt from one of the Jeffrey letters, instead of bringing to a point the newly published material, Wilson explains that the Fanny referred to in a postscript was the Jeffreys' lapdog. (P. 74.) His later remark that Jeffrey knew how sore the abbreviating of the article had left Carlyle does not satisfy the resolute doubter; for this remark does not make it certain that Wilson wishes to imply that the curtailments went unchanged. (P. 104.) Similarly inconclusive to the extreme questioner are two other observations by Wilson. The first is on p. 177: “... Carlyle had written there [in the ”Burns“] about the clothes making the man and the tailor being a creator, and Jeffrey cutting that out made him remember it the more. ...” The second reference is to be found on p. 178: “... now when listening to talk on the impending visit of the Jeffreys and the one before, he [Carlyle] might re-call the mutilation of the proofs of Burns which they had brought then. ...” Both of these comments leave room for uncertainty concerning Wilson's opinion as to what Jeffrey did with Carlyle's revision of his (Jeffrey's) revision of the original manuscript.—Wilson's various references to the “Burns” episode do seem to assume that Jeffrey finally had the upper hand, and it seems reasonable to regard this as Wilson's verdict. By neglecting to pronounce his judgment explicitly, Wilson, however, fails to check the persistent practice of awarding Carlyle the palm. Wilson's neglect also has permitted Carlyle's major bibliographer to describe Wilson's account as but an amplification of the story already told by Froude. Yet Froude emphatically makes Carlyle, not Jeffrey, the triumphant hero of the skirmishes about the “Burns.” (Cf. footnotes 5 and 20, below.)

Note 4 in page 466 Cf. “Francis Jeffrey and Thomas Carlyle,” Blackwood's ccxvi (Aug. 1924), 290.

Note 5 in page 467 A Bibliography of Thomas Carlyle's Writings and Ana (Portland, Maine, 1928), p. 39: “Mr. Froude tells the story of Carlyle's writing the piece and his trouble with Jeffrey as editor, in Thomas Carlyle, the First Forty Years of His Life, vol. ii, 28–39. The same story is told in fuller detail in Wilson's Life of Carlyle; how Jeffrey found the essay too long, and in parts grotesque; his attempt to cut it down; Carlyle's insistence that the paper be printed substantially as written or not at all, and his final triumph in changing the popular estimate of Burns and establishing him in his rightful place in English literature.”

Note 6 in page 467 Op. cit., pp. 89–90.

Note 7 in page 467 Op. cit., p. 39.

Note 8 in page 467 Ibid., p. 488.

Note 9 in page 467 Memoir and Letters, ed. Edward L. Pierce (Boston, 1877), i, 364. Letter of Oct. 1, 1838. This was ten years after the “Burns” episode.

Note 10 in page 467 Carlyle (New York, 1932), p. 108.

Note 11 in page 468 Wilson, op. cit., p. 66.

Note 12 in page 468 Letters of Thomas Carlyle: 1826–1836, ed. Norton (London and New York, 1888, i, 168–169.

Note 13 in page 468 Wilson, ibid.

Note 14 in page 468 On this page, there are two quotations: one, eleven lines in length; the other, six. On the eighteenth page, there is a four-line quotation from the poetry of Burns. The next quotation, ten lines long, does not occur until the twenty-fourth page (p. 290). (xlviii (Dec. 1828), [267]–312 top.)

Note 15 in page 468 Wilson, ibid., p. 73: “... How can you dream of restoring such a word as fragmentary, or that very simple and well used joke of the clothes making the man and the tailor being a creator? It was condescension enough to employ such ornaments at first, but it is inconceivable to me that anybody should stoop to pick them up and stitch them on again, when they had once been stripped off.”

Note 16 in page 468 Introduction to Gore's edition of Carlyle's essay on Burns (originally published in 1900 [London and New York], and reissued since then), reprint of 1925 (New York), p. xxviii.

Note 17 in page 468 Wilson, ibid., p. 74.

Note 18 in page 468 Ibid., p. 65; and Letters of Thomas Carlyle, i, 168.

Note 19 in page 469 Letters of Thomas Carlyle, i, 187.—This letter seems to have been neglected by some students of Carlyle who have treated the “Burns” episode. With this letter available, R. S. Craig maintained that Jeffrey “actually printed Carlyle's contributions in extenso as receivedl even those he had himself desired to curtail.”—The Making of Carlyle (New York, 1909), p. 410.

About 1920, Augustus Ralli still insisted that Jeffrey tried in vain to reduce the length of the essay on Burns.—Guide to Carlyle (London, 1920), i, 64.

Note 20 in page 469 Cf. Thomas Carlyle. A History of the First Forty Years of Bis Life, 1795–1835 (New York, 1882), ii, 35. “... Few editors would have been so forbearing as Jeffrey when so audaciously defied. He complained, but he acquiesced. He admitted that the article would do the Review credit, though it would be called tedious and sprawling by people of weight whose mouths he could have stopped. He had wished to be of use to Carlyle by keeping out of sight in the Review his mannerism and affectation; but if Carlyle persisted he might have his way.”

20a Ibid., pp. 34–35.

Note 21 in page 469 Selection from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier, Esq. (London, 1879), p. 126.

Note 22 in page 469 Cf. Letters of Thomas Carlyle, i, 89; and Wilson, op. cit., p. 104.

Note 23 in page 470 The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1834–1872 (Boston, 1883), i, 203.

Note 24 in page 470 Wilson, op. cit., p. 73.

Note 25 in page 470 Original Reviews, Mostly of German Literature, etc. (Rare Book Room, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University), pp. 268, 291.

Note 26 in page 470 Wilson, op. cit., pp. 66 and 74; and Letters of Thomas Carlyle, i, 168–169.

Note 27 in page 470 Op. cit., ii, 42.

Note 28 in page 470 Op. cit., pp. xxx–xxxiv.

Note 29 in page 470 Op. cit., p. 35.

Note 30 in page 470 For example, Carlyle substitutes, for “It is necessary, however, to mention,” “Here, however, let us say”; for “extreme sensibility,” “weak-eyed maudlin sensibility”; for “guide,” “lodestar.” Most striking are the changes in the following sets of passages: (1) “Without eyes, indeed, the task might be hard.” (Edinburgh version, p. 278), and “Without eyesight, indeed, the task might be hard. The blind or the purblind man ‘travels from Dan to Beersheba, and finds it all barren.‘” (revised version in the Miscellanies); (2) “We fear such counsellors knew but little of Burns; and did not consider that happiness might in all cases be cheaply had by waiting for the fulfilment of golden dreams, were it not that in the interim the dreamer must die of hunger.” (Edinburgh version, p. 299), and “Unwise counsellors! They know not the manner of this spirit; and how, in the lap of most golden dreams, a man might have happiness, were it not that in the interim he must die of hunger!” (revised version in the Miscellanies).

Note 31 in page 471 Thomas Carlyle (Edinburgh, 1881), p. 44.

Note 32 in page 471 New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (London and New York, 1903), ii, 73.

Note 33 in page 471 Dyer, op. cit., pp. 35–36.