historian, essayist, and philosopher (1795–1881). Autograph letter signed. Chelsea. 3½ pp. 4to. With seal trace and address on fourth page. Fold and seal tear professionally repaired.
$ 5,238 / 4.500 €
(104943)
Important and highly personal letter to the then unknown officer, poet, and publicist David Lester Richardson (1801–1885) in Calcutta, who had sent Carlyle his collection Literary Leaves, or Prose and Verse. Carlyle thanks him warmly for the gift and praises the volume as a rare exception in an age of literary and intellectual decline. “[…] I have read your volume […] with true pleasure. It is written, as few volumes in these days are, with fidelity, with successful care, with insight and conviction as to matter, with clearness and graceful precision as to manner […]”. Carlyle contrasts Richardson’s work with the contemporary literary marketplace, lamenting the degeneration of criticism and public taste.
In a remarkable passage he explicitly refers to Dickens’s immensely successful Pickwick Papers: “[…] therefore the parlour firesides must even put up with Pickwick or what other stuff Chance shovels in their way, and read, tho’ with malediction all the time. It is a great pity, but no man can help it […]”. The letter develops into a profound meditation on alienation and modern existence, culminating in the striking formulation that gives this manuscript its special significance: “[…] You feel yourself an exile, in the East; but in the West too it is exile; I know not where under the sun it is not exile. Here in the Fog – Babylon, amid mud and smoke, in the infinite din of ‘vociferous platitude,’ and quack outbellowing quack, with Truth and Pity on all hands ground under the wheels, – can one call it a home, or a world? It is a waste chaos, where we have to swim painfully for our life […]”. Equally characteristic is Carlyle’s stoic and moral interpretation of suffering: “[…] sorrow was not given us for sorrow’s sake, but always and infallibly as a lesson to us from which we are to learn somewhat; and which, the somewhat once learned, ceases to be sorrow […]”. Toward the close, Carlyle urges Richardson to turn his attention to the literary and cultural riches of India, encouraging him to become an interpreter between East and West: “[…] The East has its own phases, there are things there which the West yet knows not of; and one heaven covers both […]”. The letter has previously appeared in print only in abridged form; notably, the explicit mention of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers was omitted in earlier editions..