Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T16:28:47.564Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

PORTRAYING PRESENCE: THOMAS CARLYLE, PORTRAITURE, AND BIOGRAPHY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2015

Julian North
Julian North*
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Atkinson, Juliette. Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barlow, Paul. “Facing the Past and Present: The National Portrait Gallery and the Search for ‘Authentic’ Portraiture.” Portraiture: Facing the Subject. Ed. Woodall, Joanna. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. 219–38.Google Scholar
Barlow, Paul. “The Imagined Hero as Incarnate Sign: Thomas Carlyle and the Mythology of the ‘National Portrait’ in Victorian Britain.” Art History 17.4 (Dec. 1994): 517–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Booth, Alison. How to Make it as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Ed. Traill, H. D.. 5 vols. Works. [Abbreviated to CME in references.]Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. “Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters, No. XXII: The Baron Von Goethe.” Fraser's Magazine 5.26 (March 1832): 206.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. History of Friedrich II of Prussia, called Frederick the Great. 8 vols. Works. [Abbreviated to Frederick in references.]Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. The Life of John Sterling. Ed. Traill, H. D.. Vol. 11. Works. [Abbreviated to Sterling in references.]CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations. 4 vols. Works. [Abbreviated to Cromwell in references.]Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History. Ed. Goldberg, Michael K.. Berkeley California: U of California P, 1993. [Abbreviated to Heroes in references].Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. Reminiscences. Ed. Fielding, K. J. and Campbell, Ian. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Carlyle. Ed. Traill, H. D.. Centenary Ed. 30 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–99. Repr. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, n.d.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. The Carlyle Letters Online. 2007. Web. [Abbreviated to CLO in references].Google Scholar
Cumming, Mark, ed. The Carlyle Encyclopaedia. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2004.Google Scholar
De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (Dec. 1979): 919–30.Google Scholar
Elfenbein, Andrew. Byron and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Flint, Kate. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Fry, Herbert, and Walford, Edward (biographies), Maull and Polybank (photographs). Photographic Portraits of Living Celebrities, 40 numbers (May 1856-August 1859).Google Scholar
Haight, Gordan S., ed. The George Eliot Letters. 9 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954–78.Google Scholar
Hall, Samuel Carter [and Maria, Anna]. A Book of Memories of Great Men and Women of the Age, from Personal Acquaintances. London: Virtue, 1871.Google Scholar
Hazlitt, William. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Ed. Howe, P. P.. 21 vols. London: Dent, 1930–34.Google Scholar
Higgins, David. “‘Isn't She Painted Con Amore?’ Fraser's Magazine and the Spectacle of Female Genius.” Romanticism on the Net 46 (May 2007). Web. 25 July 2012.Google Scholar
“Historical Portraits.” Athenaeum (Nov. 1855): 1313–14.Google Scholar
[Hogg, Thomas Jefferson]. “Percy Bysshe Shelley at Oxford.” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 34–35 (January –December 1832); “The History of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Expulsion from Oxford.” New Monthly Magazine 38 (May 1833).Google Scholar
[Hogg, Thomas Jefferson]. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 4 vols [only 2 pub.]. London: Edward Moxon, 1858.Google Scholar
Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 2000.Google Scholar
Hunt, James Henry Leigh. Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries. London: Henry Colburn, 1828.Google Scholar
Hunt, James Henry Leigh. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, with Reminiscences of Friends and Contemporaries. 3 vols. London: Smith, Elder, 1850.Google Scholar
Leary, Patrick. “Fraser's Magazine and the Literary Life, 1830–1847.” Victorian Periodicals Review 27 (1994):105–26.Google Scholar
Lodge, Edmund. Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain and Historical Memoirs of their Lives and Actions. 1814. 8 vols. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849–50. [reissued in 4 vols. 1821–1834.]Google Scholar
[Maginn, William (text) and Maclise, Daniel, pseud “Alfred Croquis” (illustrations)]. “Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters.” Fraser's Magazine 1.5 (June 1830) to 17.100 (April 1838).Google Scholar
North, Julian. The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
North, Julian. “Shelley Revitalized: Biography and the Reanimated Body.” European Romantic Review 21: 6 (Dec. 2010): 751–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Novak, Daniel A.Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Ormand, Richard, and Cooper, John. Portraits and Photographs of Thomas Carlyle [catalogue of the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery 25-Sept. 1981–10 Jan. 1982]. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1981.Google Scholar
Patmore, Peter. My Friends and Acquaintance: Being Memorials, Mind-Portraits, and Personal Recollections of Deceased Celebrities. 3 vols. London: Saunders and Otley, 1854.Google Scholar
Pointon, Marcia. Hanging the Head. Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Prescott, Gertrude Mae. “Fame and Photography: Portrait Publications in Great Britain, 1856–1900.” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Austin: University of Texas, 1985.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, John D.Carlyle and the Burden of History. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salmon, Richard. “Thomas Carlyle and the Idolatry of the Man of Letters.” Journal of Victorian Culture 7.1 (2002): 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanders, Charles Richard. Carlyle’s Friendships and Other Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1977.Google Scholar
Seigel, Jules Paul, ed. Carlyle: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.Google Scholar
[Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, ed.]. The Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: John and Henry Hunt, 1824. [Abbreviated to PP in references.]Google Scholar
Shelley, [Mary Wollstonecraft], ed. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 4 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1839. [Abbreviated to PW in references.]Google Scholar
Shelley, [Mary Wollstonecraft], ed. Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. 1839. 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1840.Google Scholar
Shelley, [Mary Wollstonecraft]. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Ed. Bennett, Betty T.. 3 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980–83.Google Scholar
Slater, Joseph, ed. The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle. New York: Columbia UP, 1964.Google Scholar
Southern, David. “The Carlyles’ Photograph Albums: Butler Library, Columbia University.” Carlyle Studies Annual 25.1 (2009): 151–73.Google Scholar
Sterling, John. Ed. Hare, Julius Charles. Essays and Tales. 2 vols. London: John W. Parker, 1848.Google Scholar
Tarr, Rodger L.Thomas Carlyle: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1989.Google Scholar
“Thomas Carlyle.” Hogg's Instructor n.s. 7 (1851): 81–86.Google Scholar
“Thomas Carlyle.” Illustrated Review 1.3 (11 Nov. 1870): 89–93.Google Scholar
Thwaite, Ann, ed. Portraits from Life by Edmund Gosse. Aldershot: Scolar, 1991.Google Scholar
Trelawny, Edward. Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. London: Edward Moxon, 1858.Google Scholar
Wilson, David Alec. Carlyle to Threescore-and-Ten (1853–1865). London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929.Google Scholar