True Sun Daily Review (12 December 1833)

First published in The True Sun, 12 December 1833, p. 3; see headnote above, pp. 229–30. The present review is representative of several surveys of the magazines that Hunt published in The True Sun, but is especially notable for its positive reference to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which had pilloried Hunt so often in the past (see headnote above, pp. 3–4), and which now in the post-Reform era began to treat him with a good deal more favour (see headnote below, p. 286). Hunt remarks that, to Blackwood’s fictive editor ‘Christopher North’, he is ‘something of a kind of Christopher South’ (see below, p. 244). The review is also important for its notice of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, which was serialized in Fraser’s Magazine from November 1833 to August 1834. Carlyle had known of Hunt for several years, but the two did not meet until February 1832, when a firm if complicated friendship developed (for details, see Sanders, Early and Sanders, Late). In October 1833 Carlyle told Hunt that Sartor Resartus, a ‘cynical Extravagance of mine’, was ‘beginning to appear in Fraser’s’ (Carlyle, Letters, vol. vii, p. 29). Hunt responded with the present review, and a second, briefer notice two months later, where he observed, rather cryptically, that Sartor was

worthy to be studied by all seekers of wisdom, with their dictionary of sweet and bitter thoughts beside them, and the hard words of their experience; nay, and the soft, too, which shall be by far the most numerous, if the study is in the right spirit; for though there is a degree of knowledge that makes “a sadder and a wiser man,” there is a degree more which makes him wiser, and restores him to the arms of loving nature. (‘A Glance at the Magazines’, 7 February 1834, p. 4)

In April Hunt wrote directly to Carlyle concerning Sartor, and explained that, when it first appeared he was

mystified enough…to take it for a satire on ‘Germanism’ itself from the pen of the editor of the magazine, who nevertheless appeared to me to intimate a number of serious & deep things in it, for which I gave him a great lift in my imagination. I soon found out my mistake; but by some unaccountable chance I had overlooked – forgotten rather, that part of your letter in which you had advised me of it. I shall send you, when I think this letter has arrived…the numbers of the True Sun, in which I spoke of it. (Gates, Letters, p. 246)

241For Hunt’s seven-part Examiner review of Carlyle’s Lectures on the History of Literature, see below, pp. 353–65.