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PORTRAYING PRESENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE, PORTRAITURE, AND BIOGRAPHY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2015

Julian North
Julian North*
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
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Extract

This essay looks at Carlyle's interest in visual and literary portraiture, as the basis for a reassessment of his practice as a biographer in relation to the wider biographical culture of Victorian Britain. Carlyle's fascination with portraits manifested itself in a number of ways. Despite his professed reluctance as a sitter, his face was one of the most visible of his day – painted, sketched, sculpted, photographed, and reproduced for public circulation in engravings and cartes de visite. He collected portraits of his family, friends, and heroes, and was a public champion of the art, most famously through his influential role in the founding of the English National Portrait Gallery. He was also valued by his contemporaries as a portraitist in words, a writer whose graphic style included a striking ability to picture people. Yet only partial answers have been offered to the question of how these activities related to each other and what their significance might be in terms of his career. Paul Barlow has explored Carlyle's concept of the authentic, historical portrait in relation to his proposals for a National Portrait Gallery (“Facing the Past” and “The Imagined Hero”), and John Rosenberg has discussed his pictorial style as a means by which he sought to make history into a secular scripture by “endowing the past with extraordinary ‘presence’” (24). Richard Salmon has given some consideration to Carlyle's engagement with contemporary “portrait gallery” publications as part of his discussion of his ambivalent response to idolatry and literary “lionism” (Salmon 2002). I am indebted to these discussions but I differ from them in arguing that we need to see Carlyle's interest in portraiture, both visual and verbal, as integral to his conception and practice of biography. The fact that he, famously, enmeshes history and biography, in theory and practice, does not invalidate this point. It is with biography and the biographical basis of historical narrative, that he associates the portrait and portraiture. This distinction matters because it shifts us away from the emphasis on Carlyle as an historian that has sometimes occluded his links with his contemporary biographical culture. By restoring these links we can understand more fully the significance both of the portrait within his work, and of his innovative contribution to a broader climate of experimentation with the conjunction of visual and verbal portraiture in life writing at the period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 465 - 488
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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