Sartor Resartus

Summary

Sartor Resartus ("the tailor re-tailored") is Thomas Carlyle's first book and the strangest of the major Victorian prose works. An anonymous English Editor has been sent a German treatise, Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken (Clothes, their Origin and Influence), by Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Professor of Things in General at the University of Weissnichtwo ("Know-not-where"). He resolves to introduce this 'Philosophy of Clothes' to the British public, and the book we read is his digest of it: long translated extracts, interrupted by the Editor's puzzled, admiring and sometimes exasperated commentary. Book I sets out the philosophy itself. Clothes, Teufelsdröckh argues, are what make society possible; man is a 'Tool-using Animal', and dress is his first tool. Gradually the metaphor widens until every visible thing, from a judge's wig to a national church to the human body, becomes a garment through which something unseen shows itself. Book II, assembled by the Editor from six paper bags of scraps sent by the Professor's friend Hofrath Heuschrecke, is a biography. A foundling left with the childless Futterals of Entepfuhl, the boy is schooled at a dreary Gymnasium and university, drifts into law, is jilted by the woman he calls Blumine, and wanders Europe in despair. In the three chapters at the heart of the book he passes through the 'Everlasting No' (a moment of defiance on a Paris street that he dates as his spiritual new birth), the 'Centre of Indifference', and the 'Everlasting Yea', where he renounces the demand for happiness, resolves to do the duty nearest him, and turns to work. Book III applies the philosophy to church, state and society: the Quaker George Fox's suit of leather, symbols, the old-clothes shops of Monmouth Street, 'Natural Supernaturalism' (the claim that custom hides the miracle of the everyday), and a satirical contrast between the 'Dandiacal' sect and the Irish 'Poor-Slaves'. The Professor finally vanishes from Weissnichtwo after the July Revolution of 1830, and the Editor suspects he is in London. Written at Craigenputtock in 1830–31 and refused by London publishers, the book appeared in Fraser's Magazine in 1833–34 and first as a volume in Boston (1836), through Emerson's efforts, before the London edition of 1838. Its interest for students lies in three places: its form, a deliberately disordered book about the way order is clothed; its spiritual narrative, which Carlyle later admitted drew on his own crisis of the early 1820s; and its argument that inherited forms wear out but the realities they clothed do not. Readers should note that the Everlasting Yea is written in biblical language yet stops short of the creeds; Carlyle's 'God' and 'Duty' are offered as what survives doubt, and teachers can ask whether that is enough.

Plot or Argument

• Book I, Chs. 1–4: The Editor finds his Professor

  The Editor explains how the volume on Clothes reached him, recalls meeting Teufelsdröckh over the academic beer Gukguk at the Green Goose inn, describes his attic watch-tower above the town, and records the single time anyone saw him laugh, at a passage of Jean Paul.

• Book I, Chs. 5–9: The world in clothes and out of them

  Clothes are traced from tattooing and ornament to aprons and fashion. Man is defined as a 'Tool-using Animal'. In 'The World out of Clothes' and 'Adamitism' the Professor imagines a naked House of Lords to show how much social authority rests on dress, a passage the Editor fears will unsettle 'Hypochondriac men'.

• Book I, Chs. 10–11: Wonder and the plan

  'Pure Reason' argues that wonder is the basis of worship and that a scientist without it is 'a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye'. The Editor decides he cannot present the philosophy without the man, and asks Heuschrecke for biographical documents.

• Book II, Chs. 1–4: Foundling, schoolboy, Auscultator

  Six paper bags marked with the southern signs of the zodiac yield the life: a stranger leaves an infant with Andreas and Gretchen Futteral at Entepfuhl; the boy's idyllic childhood gives way to the Hinterschlag Gymnasium and a university of 'rational' professors; Andreas dies; the young man becomes an unpaid law clerk and meets the cynical Herr Towgood.

• Book II, Chs. 5–6: Blumine and the wanderings

  He falls in love with Blumine at a garden party of the aristocratic Zahdarm circle, is rejected, and later sees her pass in a carriage as Towgood's bride. He sets out on aimless travels across Europe, which the Editor compares to those of the Wandering Jew.

• Book II, Chs. 7–9: Everlasting No, Centre of Indifference, Everlasting Yea

  In unbelief and 'pining fear' he is held back from suicide only by an 'after-shine' of Christianity; on the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer he defies fear and the Devil. He then surveys battlefields and cities with detachment, falls into a 'healing sleep', and wakes to renounce self-seeking happiness for 'Blessedness', duty and work.

• Book II, Ch. 10: Pause

  The Editor steps back, doubts the reliability of the bags, and argues that the life explains the philosophy: a man who has passed through such a conversion will see all institutions as clothing.

• Book III, Chs. 1–7: Symbols, churches and the Phoenix

  George Fox stitches himself a leather suit to escape the world's demands; churches are the clothing of religion and now hang in rags; symbols both conceal and reveal; society is a Phoenix burning in order to be reborn, and 'Organic Filaments' of new life are already forming in the ashes.

• Book III, Chs. 8–12: Natural Supernaturalism to Farewell

  Custom 'doth make dotards of us all', hiding the miracle of time, space and ordinary existence. The Dandiacal Body and the Poor-Slaves are described as rival religious sects. After praising tailors, the Editor reports Teufelsdröckh's disappearance following news from Paris and takes his leave of the reader.

Characters

• Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, philosopher, subject of the book

  Professor of Things in General at Weissnichtwo; his surname means roughly 'devil's dung'. Silent, smoking, given to sudden prophetic outbursts, he is the author of the Clothes treatise and the subject of the spiritual biography in Book II.

• The Editor, narrator

  An English reviewer who translates and arranges the Professor's work. He is sceptical, practical and frequently baffled, and his comic resistance lets Carlyle anticipate a British reader's objections.

• Hofrath Heuschrecke, Teufelsdröckh's friend

  A thin, nervous Court Councillor ('Heuschrecke' means grasshopper) who sends the biographical paper bags; he is also the author of a pamphlet on the repression of population, satirised in Book III.

• Andreas and Gretchen Futteral, foster parents

  A retired grenadier sergeant of Frederick the Great and his wife, who raise the foundling at Entepfuhl; Andreas's death gives the boy his first sight of mortality.

• Herr Towgood (Toughgut), friend and rival

  A young man of quality who befriends Teufelsdröckh at university and later marries Blumine.

• Blumine, beloved

  The 'Flower-goddess' whom Teufelsdröckh meets among the Zahdarm family; her rejection precipitates his wanderings and despair.

• George Fox, historical exemplar

  The seventeenth-century Quaker founder, whose leather suit opens Book III as an image of a soul refusing the world's clothing.

Lessons

• Garments that wear out

  The Clothes Philosophy holds that churches, laws, ranks and customs are clothing for invisible realities: necessary, made by human hands, and liable to become rags. Carlyle's point is not that forms are worthless but that a dead form can no longer carry what it once did. Students should test whether the argument licenses reform, revolution, or simply a deeper attention to what forms are for.

  • George Fox makes himself a leather suit in Book III. Is the Editor's admiration for him sincere, ironic, or both?
  • Carlyle says a symbol both conceals and reveals. Give an example from church or civic life where the same form does both.
  • If clothes can wear out, who decides when a garment is rags? What answer does Book III give?

• The Paris street and the new birth

  Book II, Chapter 7 compresses a long despair into one moment: a man afraid of everything asks what the worst could be, answers 'Death', and refuses to be ruled by fear. Carlyle calls this a 'Baphometic Fire-baptism' and a 'Spiritual New-birth'. Students should notice that it is a protest, not yet a faith; the positive turn comes two chapters later.

  • What exactly does Teufelsdröckh say no to on the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer?
  • Why does Carlyle borrow the language of baptism and new birth for an act of defiance?
  • How does this compare with conversion narratives in Augustine or Bunyan, where the turning point is grace received rather than will asserted?

• Blessedness instead of happiness

  The Everlasting Yea argues that misery comes from inflated claims on life, so that the 'Fraction of Life' is improved by lowering the denominator. In place of happiness Carlyle offers 'Blessedness', found in renunciation, duty and work. The chapter quotes Ecclesiastes and John's Gospel, yet its God is never named in the language of the creeds, and students can weigh both its insight and its limits.

  • Restate the 'Fraction of Life' argument in your own words. Is it wise, or a recipe for resignation?
  • 'Do the Duty which lies nearest thee': why does Carlyle think the nearest duty clarifies the next one?
  • Is work an answer to doubt, or a way of no longer asking the question?

• Wonder against custom

  In 'Pure Reason' and 'Natural Supernaturalism' Carlyle argues that measurement without wonder is blind, and that custom hides the miracle of ordinary existence. This is his reply to what he called the mechanical age, and it shaped Emerson and Thoreau. Students can ask whether the argument honours science or belittles it.

  • What does Teufelsdröckh mean by 'a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye'?
  • Why does Carlyle call Custom 'the greatest of Weavers'?
  • Can you name something in your daily life that custom has made invisible to you?

• Why tell it through an Editor?

  The book is built like a puzzle: a German author we never read directly, an English Editor who distrusts him, paper bags of fragments, and footnotes that argue with the text. The form imitates its subject, since the truth is always reached through a garment. Studying the Editor's interruptions teaches students to separate a narrator's voice from an author's view.

  • Find a place where the Editor disagrees with Teufelsdröckh. Whose side does the book seem to take?
  • How does the disorder of the six paper bags affect your trust in the biography?
  • What would be lost if Carlyle had written a plain essay on symbols?

Context

Sartor Resartus belongs to the years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Reform Act of 1832, when British readers argued over industrial machinery, the Church of England's authority, Catholic Emancipation and revolution in France. Carlyle wrote as a Scot raised in a strict Burgher Secession Presbyterian home who had lost belief in its doctrines but not its moral seriousness, and who had found in German writers, above all Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul and Novalis, a language for faith beyond dogma. The book is his answer to what he had called, in the essay 'Signs of the Times' (1829), the Mechanical Age.

Composition

Carlyle wrote the book in 1830–31 at Craigenputtock, his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle's isolated farm in Dumfriesshire, and took it to London in 1831, where it was refused. It appeared in eight instalments in Fraser's Magazine from November 1833 to August 1834. The first book edition was published in Boston in 1836, arranged by Ralph Waldo Emerson; the first London edition followed in 1838. Carlyle's 1868 appendix reprints 'Testimonies of Authors', including a publisher's reader's dismissive report. In later reminiscences Carlyle identified the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer episode with his own experience in Leith Walk, Edinburgh, in the early 1820s; the book should still be read as a fiction, not as straight autobiography.

Reception

Fraser's readers largely disliked the serial, but the American edition found an audience among the Transcendentalists, and after The French Revolution (1837) made Carlyle famous the book became a classic of Victorian doubt and recovery. Writers as different as Emerson, Thoreau, Dickens, George Eliot and John Ruskin acknowledged its influence. Twentieth-century critics took a renewed interest in its self-conscious form, which links it backward to Sterne and Swift and forward to modernist experiments.

Comparisons

• Essays: First Series (Self-Reliance and Other Essays)

  Emerson arranged the 1836 Boston edition and his essay 'Nature' (1836) shares Sartor's conviction that the visible world is the symbol of spirit. Emerson states the idea serenely and in his own voice; Carlyle reaches it through a comic editorial frame and a narrative of near-despair.

• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

  The 1840 lectures develop Book III's hints about 'Hero-worship' and the Phoenix of society into a gallery of prophets, poets, priests and kings. Sartor supplies the spiritual biography on which that later hero-centred politics rests.

• Walden

  Thoreau's opening chapter, 'Economy', returns repeatedly to clothes, fashion and the tailor as signs of a life lived for others' opinion, an argument close to Carlyle's. Thoreau tests it by building a cabin; Teufelsdröckh only imagines George Fox's leather suit.

• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

  Carlyle admired Sterne, and Sartor's digressions, mock-scholarship and teasing narrator owe much to Tristram Shandy. Sterne's disorder is comic for its own sake; Carlyle's carries a prophetic argument underneath the play.

• Confessions

  Augustine's garden scene and Teufelsdröckh's Paris street are both remembered turning points after long restlessness. Augustine credits grace and the words of Scripture; Teufelsdröckh credits an act of defiance followed by self-renunciation, which makes a useful contrast for discussion.

• Faust, Part One

  Teufelsdröckh says he might, 'like a Faust', have imagined himself tormented by the Devil, and the Everlasting No echoes Mephistopheles' 'spirit that denies'. Carlyle's motto 'Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe' marks Goethe as the guide out of Romantic self-pity.

• Past and Present

  Written a decade later, Past and Present turns the gospel of work from a private conversion into social criticism of the 'Condition of England'. Comparing them shows how the Everlasting Yea became a political programme.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Every place where the Editor interrupts, doubts or apologises for Teufelsdröckh.
• How the meaning of 'clothes' widens from dress to institutions, the body and finally time and space.
• The three-stage sequence of Book II, Chapters 7–9 and the words that mark each stage.
• Biblical phrases in the Everlasting Yea, and where Carlyle departs from their original sense.

Key terms and names

Clothes Philosophy

Teufelsdröckh's doctrine that all visible forms, from dress to churches and states, clothe invisible realities and can wear out.

Everlasting No

The voice of denial that tells the despairing man he is fatherless and the universe belongs to the Devil; he answers it with defiance.

Centre of Indifference

The middle stage of wandering detachment between defiance and affirmation, ending in a 'healing sleep'.

Everlasting Yea

Teufelsdröckh's affirmation after renouncing the claim to happiness: love God, do the nearest duty, work.

Natural Supernaturalism

The claim in Book III that custom hides the miraculous character of ordinary nature, time and space.

Weissnichtwo

'Know-not-where', the imaginary German university town of the Professor.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How do the Professor's papers reach the Editor, and why does the biography arrive in six paper bags?
2. Comprehension What happens on the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer, and what name does Teufelsdröckh give the experience?
3. Interpretation Why might Carlyle have needed a German professor and an English editor to say what he believed?
4. Interpretation In the 'Fraction of Life' passage, what is the numerator and what is the denominator, and why does Carlyle want to shrink the second?
5. Interpretation Is the Dandiacal Body chapter satire on fashion, on religion, or on class? Support your answer from the text.
6. Big Question Carlyle says forms wear out but what they clothe endures. Which forms in your own life are living garments, and which have become rags?

Faith Connections

• John 9:4 (Scripture)

  Carlyle closes the Everlasting Yea with Christ's words about working while it is day; ask how the meaning changes when the saying is detached from the healing of the blind man that it introduces.

• Ecclesiastes 9:10 (Scripture)

  'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might' is woven into 'Produce! Produce!'; compare the Preacher's setting of that counsel among vanity and death with Teufelsdröckh's use of it as a cure for despair.

• Augustine, Confessions VIII (Great Conversation)

  Set Augustine's garden conversion, where the will is freed by grace, beside Teufelsdröckh's Paris street, where the will frees itself by defiance.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Every human institution is a garment for an invisible reality; when the garment wears out a person may pass through denial and indifference, but the right response is to renounce self-seeking, do the nearest duty and work, not to cling to rags or to go naked.

Rhetorical device: extended metaphor within a fictional editorial frame. The single figure of clothing is stretched from aprons and Dandies to churches, the body and time itself, while the Editor's protests keep the reader aware of how far the metaphor is being pushed.

Debate: Resolved: that Teufelsdröckh's Everlasting Yea answers his Everlasting No.

Memory Work

Do the Duty which lies nearest thee

Love not Pleasure; love God

Writing Prompts

Essay: Does the form of Sartor Resartus, with its Editor, paper bags and fragments, strengthen or weaken its argument about symbols? Argue from at least three passages.

Comparison with Confessions: Compare Teufelsdröckh's turning point in Book II, Chapter 7 with Augustine's in Confessions Book VIII. What does each man think has saved him?

Medical Lens

Sartor is not a medical book, but Book II is one of the best-known nineteenth-century accounts of a mental crisis told from the inside: anhedonia, diffuse fear, suicidal thought restrained by residual religion, and recovery after exhaustion and a 'healing sleep'. Carlyle's lifelong dyspepsia and insomnia, documented in his letters, lie behind the Editor's comic complaints about nerves and digestion. Modern readers sometimes read Teufelsdröckh's state as depression; that is an interpretation, and Carlyle himself frames the crisis spiritually, as unbelief answered by renunciation and work. The book is useful for the history of 'moral' and philosophical therapies that treated despair through purpose and labour.

• Book I, Ch. 9 (Adamitism)

  The Editor jokes that the naked-aristocracy fantasy should be withheld from 'Hypochondriac men' with a 'shattered state of the nerves'.

  Hypochondria
• Book II, Ch. 3 (Pedagogy)

  At Andreas Futteral's death the boy is clothed in mourning and in 'inexpressible melancholy', his first encounter with death and unshed grief.

  Grief Melancholia Depression
• Book II, Ch. 7 (The Everlasting No)

  Teufelsdröckh describes unbelief, a continual fear of everything, and the thought of suicide, from which an 'after-shine' of Christianity and his own indolence withheld him; the crisis breaks in an act of defiance on the Rue Saint-Thomas de l'Enfer.

  Melancholia Depression Neurosis Anxiety Suicide
• Book II, Ch. 8 (Centre of Indifference)

  Weary of life and indifferent to living or dying, he falls into a 'healing sleep' from which 'the heavy dreams rolled gradually away'.

  Sleep Insomnia Melancholia Depression
• Book II, Ch. 9 (The Everlasting Yea)

  Afflictions are described as 'benignant fever-paroxysms' rooting out a chronic disease of the self; renunciation, duty and work are prescribed as the cure for misery.

  Philosophy AS Therapy

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Make a 'sixth paper bag': collect five scraps (a list, a letter, a receipt, a diary line, a sketch) that would let a stranger reconstruct one turning point in a fictional life, then trade bags and write the biography.

• Essay

  Using Book II, Chapters 7–9, explain why Carlyle needs three stages rather than two. What is the Centre of Indifference for?

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation in which the Editor, back in London, meets Teufelsdröckh by chance and asks him whether the Everlasting Yea still holds.

• Classroom

  Take the paragraph on symbols in Book III, Chapter 3 and annotate every word that suggests clothing, hiding or showing. Then write a paragraph on how Carlyle's style practises what it describes.

Further Reading

• Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle

  Attached Project Gutenberg #1051 text, including the 1868 appendix and 'Testimonies of Authors'.

• Signs of the Times, Thomas Carlyle

  The 1829 essay on the 'Mechanical Age' that prepares Sartor's argument.

• Reminiscences, Thomas Carlyle

  Posthumously published memoirs (1881) relevant to the Leith Walk crisis behind the Everlasting No.

• Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Published in 1836, the same year Emerson brought out the American Sartor.

• Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of His Life, James Anthony Froude

  The first major biography, by Carlyle's disciple and literary executor.