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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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'.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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'.

• 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.