Raging on the Heath: Carlyle and the Fictions of Dialogue‪.‬

Abstract Anyone justifying the study of Carlyle today must come to terms with the "other Carlyle"--not the Victorian Sage of Sartor Resartus but the reactionary demagogue of "Occasional Discourse on the N****r Question." In some ways, however, the two Carlyles are one, even though their rhetorical manifestations changed over the course of Carlyle's career. If we are to identify the central core of value in Carlyle's works, we must recognize that what appears to be a "dialogic" openness in works such as Sartor belies their latent "monologism," which becomes more obvious in works like "The Nigger Question." An analysis of the opening paragraph of Past and Present illustrates the beginnings of the shift from apparent dialogue to undisguised monologue, from a voice seemingly willing to accommodate a variety of points of view to the strident misanthropy of Lear raging on the heath at a world from which he feds completely alienated.