ABSTRACT
One of the pleasures for the visitor to Greece is to discover words that in English are rarified, engaged there in everyday activities: so postboxes may have different slots for ‘esoteric’ and ‘exoteric’ letters, that is, for inland or overseas; removal vans are labelled ‘Meta-phorikon’, transports. Reading Carlyle gives something of the same pleasure of substantiating: abstract words become concrete; metaphors perform homely dramas. These performances generate new kinships between ideas. Realization cuts across boundaries and challenges categories. So the Carlylean transports of my title are not only those of euphoria and hyperbole (certainly marked characteristics of his writing). The transports are also the transcategorial activity of extended metaphor: the rumble of removal vans across country, bearing a heterogeneous clutter of household goods into new places where they will be disposed in new arrangements, arrangements which call our attention to what has been unobserved because taken for granted. In Carlyle’s writing, moreover, not only goods but people are moved.
Carlyle was greeted by his contemporaries as a philosopher and a historian; yet his methods were not those of logical argument, and his translation and selection of source material was sometimes extravagantly interpretative. He preferred the oceanic to the measuringline. He dislimned boundaries. He disturbed the authority of the present. He questioned current categories and even the activity of categorizing itself. He acknowledged only a few capacious and, in his understanding, irreducible orders.In her unsigned Leader review in 1855 George Eliot prefaced a
