ABSTRACT
Visiting Hungerford Castle, Thomas Carlyle informs us that he discovers two forgotten Cromwell letters hidden under 'masses of damp dust; unclean accumulation of beetle-and-spider exuviae'. The sense of being subsumed by the uncontrollable forces buried by history determines the way in which Carlyle writes about the experience of being in his narrative. Where both Hugo and Hegel identify the grotesque with the search for the numinous, the British Tory-Romantic discourse presents the grotesque as a form of pseudo-cornucopia: it is the detritus of artistic experience after the consumption of value. Brown's first experience of the Cromwellian environment is framed as an expression of caricature; this is a landscape that seems to parody the heroic or tragic grotesque of his master, Carlyle. Cromwell is dynamic, fertile, active, but he cannot understand or judge. Cromwell is grotesque because with him action is a form of infection, and, as a consequence, his life is a pollution of the Word.
