Coda: ‘There is no end to machinery’

Abstract

Following a brief summary of the preceding arguments in the book, the coda turns to a trilogy of essays by Thomas Carlyle written in the final years of the 1820s – ‘State of German Literature’ (1827), ‘Burns’ (1828) and ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829). These works postulate a Britain riven between the inhuman mores of Enlightenment and a degraded popular culture, looking to ideal truth (‘pure light’) and its secular expression in poetry as a means of salvation. ‘Signs of the Times’, notably, was published in the last issue of the Edinburgh Review edited by Francis Jeffrey and provides a subversive counterpoint to and unravelling of the journal’s Whig ideology. Taking up a critique of the Scottish Enlightenment that had been made by John Gibson Lockhart in Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819) and in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Carlyle attempts to recover a sense of ideal truth from what he viewed as a culture of dry rationalism. Improvement, in this account, had suffocated Scotland. Carlyle’s analysis of what he calls the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘dynamical’ in opposition to one another (rather than dialectical tension) effectively performs an elision of Enlightenment and Romanticism. This provides a counterpoint for the book’s very different reading of literary texts that are adapting cultures of improvement within a set of changing historical circumstances.