Carlyle in Representations

by Mark Wallace

Interesting piece on Carlyle from Representations by Elisa Tamarkin. Title: “Why Forgive Carlyle?” Only the first few paragraphs provided at link, and I don’t yet have access to the full essay, but it promises to investigate one of the great paradoxes of Carlyle: his popularity amongst those who most disagreed with him, and who one might have expected to be most repelled by his violent authoritarianism. It will be interesting to see if Tamarkin ventures an answer to the question raised by Whitman in these paragraphs of what that “impalpable something” in Carlyle that provoked such admiration was.