ABSTRACT
Grinning, gap-toothed, lounging on a rail, Thomas Carlyle leers out at the viewer in Ford Madox Brown's painting Work. Carlyle is a grotesque, his position that of the playful, perverse marginalia of the Gothic prayer book. The workers' single-minded action is countered by his ironic self-consciousness, which threatens to disturb their efficient performance of allotted tasks. Leslie Stephen, writing authoritatively in the Dictionary of National Biography complained that Carlyle's 'language of grotesque exaggeration' made his work unintelligible; the reader found it 'difficult to distinguish between the serious and the intentionally humorous'. Stephen's liberal-democratic distaste for Carlyle has characterized twentieth-century responses to Carlyle, who is construed as a disturbed presence in intellectual history. Sartor Resartus is a structurally complex work which operates through the form of proliferating marginal commentary. The revolutionary conditions described by Carlyle in The French Revolution are the continual generation of the grotesque. Sustainable social and cultural representation is impossible.
