ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at humour, and what Dickens parodies: the fashionable novel of Bulwer and others which is parodied, under the inspiration of Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, through Jean Paul, an inspiration for Carlyle. Sartor Resartus shows Carlyle the anti-Utilitarian drawing fully on German romantic thought, on which he published and translated in the 1820s. Jean Paul’s presence in Sartor Resartus shows in what is characterized as ‘this piebald, entangled, hyper-metaphorical style of writing, not to say of thinking’ in which all things are seen ‘figuratively’. The entangledness of language in Nicholas Nickleby relates, perhaps indirectly, to Jean Paul as identifiable with humour, which contests mechanical thinking. In Nicholas Nickleby, dandies are aristocrats. The taste for fashion, and fashionable novels, Sartor Resartus parodies via Pelham.
