OLLI – Carlyle Notes – A. J. Drake's Shakespeare Site

Course title: Victorian Literature and Culture (1837-1901)

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Notes on “Signs of the Times” (1829)

Thomas Carlyle published “Signs of the Times” in 1829, right around the start of the agitation for the First Reform Bill of 1832. This was a difficult time socially and economically for the United Kingdom, and both democracy and material progress are important issues. The Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister from 1828-1830. He was for Catholic emancipation but opposed the Reform Bill. Parliament, however, was already working towards the passage of this bill, which was eventually passed by the Whig leader Earl Grey in 1832.

Carlyle had grown up in the home of a mason by trade, and his father was a Calvinist in religion. It was a large family, and Carlyle was bullied as a boy at Annan Academy. In 1809, he attended Edinburgh University, but did not take a degree because he didn’t have the money to continue his studies. He taught at the Academy where he had gone to school as a youth. His religious doubts led him to study the German Romantic movement, and he married Jane Welsh in 1826. From 1828-1834, Carlyle and his wife lived at Craigenputtock in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. After that period, they moved to Chelsea, England.

In terms of literary fame, Carlyle was rather a late bloomer — Sartor Resartus was too odd a book to make him famous, and such status only came to him upon the publication in 1837 of his masterpiece, the two-volume French Revolution.

The piece we are examining now is an early one. “Signs of the Times” offers the analysis of late 1820s society as what the author calls “mechanical.” Everything, he says, has this quality. But what does the word mean to him? The Greek word μηχανή bears within itself some reference to ability, not to a dead machine but rather to the craftiness of contrivance. Carlyle probably wants us to understand that this connotation is part of what he is getting at. He writes, “We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils” (89).

Carlyle is aware of something about humankind’s relationship with nature that his contemporaries are starting to feel, too: the Industrial Revolution marked the human species’ victory over the natural world, when for centuries they had lived in fear of nature’s great forces and menacing creatures. The ancients could see the beauty of the natural world as well as we can, but at the end of the day, for them it was full of forces and things that could kill a human with terrifying ease.

In socio-economic terms, of course, Carlyle’s word “machinery” refers to the development of early industrial capitalism: the steam engine, the cotton gin, the first railroads, and so forth. He is referring, too, to the concentration of wealth (“capital”) into very few hands that comes with capitalism. It is from his meditations mainly on this phenomenon—early industrial capitalism, that is—that Carlyle derives the great question he means to put to his fellow citizens: since we have a new kind of economy and a society that seems to be shaping itself around that economy’s needs, what is the purpose of such an order of things?

To put this in a way that captures the strong, quasi-religious moralism of Carlyle’s work, we have accomplished a great many admirable, and even wonderful, things, but at what spiritual cost have we accomplished them? It seems as if, Carlyle tells his readers, we have signed off on the idea that everything we engage in—education, religion, whatever—should be done in a “mechanical” way, with an organized, competitive, ruthless manner. As he says, every “little sect” in the U.K. must have its periodical, its magazine, and so forth (90). The Unitarians have one, the Utilitarians, the Phrenologist enthusiasts—everyone’s belief system or quirk will get its share of attention.

What Carlyle is describing is a sort of busybody collectivism that yet turns us all into mere atoms smashing into one another in spite of our physical and mental propinquity. We systematize everything and set it to run on autopilot, so to speak. “Systems” usurp the human province of meaning and purpose, leaving to us nothing but a felt sense of emptiness and lack of social cohesion. There’s a “rage for order,” to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, but it’s all for naught if no livable values provide the ground.

The trouble with systems, Carlyle knows well, is that they really can keep going round and round even if they accommodate very few people, or perhaps none at all. Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, Book 1says that “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Systems can serve themselves, and simply exclude everyone and everything that doesn’t serve them. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what most of us believe a social system should do: it should serve us, not the other way around!

For Carlyle, where there is no genuine “individual endeavor,” there will be no heroism—a major element in his thinking throughout his career. As he writes in “Signs,” “Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand” (91).

What is the answer, then, as far as the Thomas Carlyle of “Signs” believes? He sets forth his hopes for the development of something over against the mechanical in its basest form: that something is dynamism (δύναμις, dunamis power, capability) a transformation of mechanism into a living, spiritual power within human individuals and whole societies. Capitalism and industrial production can’t just be about “Profit and Loss” (91), he insists; it must be about something that stirs the human spirit and gives purpose and a certain intelligibility to life.

Will democracy be able to harness the power of industrial production, which has, after all, begun to crush the ancient problem of inadequate production of life’s necessaries? Well, Carlyle isn’t exactly an “fan” of democracy. As the nineteenth century wears on, he can see which way the wind is blowing, and it’s blowing towards greater participation of the lower classes in English life. In 1829, Carlyle suggests that democracy is not, perhaps, the key to progress—it’s just being pursued, he thinks, like another machine, another system that will most likely serve itself more than the humans who put so much hope and effort into it.

Carlyle doesn’t appear to believe that a government shapes its people. The contrary is true, he supposes, and writes, “it is the noble people that makes the noble Government …” (92). He continues, “On the whole, Institutions are much; but they are not all” (92). So it is not to government, then, that the people should look for the purpose in their lives, or for a way to solve the problem that society is nowadays treated like a big machine, with no room for genius or heroism.

Towards the end of “Signs of the Times,” Carlyle turns to the field of literature, saying that the periodical journalism of the U.K. is probably, in 1892, the closest thing there still is to a Church that can instruct all of the people as needed. Ultimately, though, while Carlyle will continue to believe in the power of literature (in the broadest sense of that word) to effect some healing and inculcate purpose in life, more and more as his career goes onward, he will look to a kind of idealized neo-feudalism or paternal socialism to heal the rifts and the alienation in his society. In the 1840s text Past and Present, Carlyle will look to men he calls “Captains of Industry” to take hold of society and give it meaning and direction. But these solutions are not on tap in this early essay, “Signs of the Times.” Carlyle will never be a great admirer of raw capitalism or total democracy. In the latter case, he would surely insist, there is a lack of regard for excellence, and that principle is replaced by smug, self-satisfied ignorance pretending that by itself, unaided by anyone who stands “on the higher eminences of thought” (Mill’s phrase in On Liberty) it is adequate to determine the “good life,” which is what Aristotle said politics should help us achieve.