Sartor Resartus

ISBN: 9781841952789
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Imprint: Canongate Classics
Publication Date: Jun 2008
Format: PB
Price: £7.99
Stock Status: in stock

Sartor Resartus ('the tailor retailored') is at one and the same time an account of a personal spiritual crisis and a hilarious spoof on academic learning, early Victorian values and materialism. A fictitious editor retells the theories of an equally fictitious German professor who has come to the conclusion that human institutions and morals are only clothes to shield us from nothingness; clothes that can be changed as the whims of the age or fashion dictate. This radically deconstructive vision reveals the very highest symbols of belief as just that – merely symbols. How to believe in anything after such an insight is a question even more acute today than it was in Carlyle's time, when he first asked it in this masterpiece of invention, parody and profound laughter. This Canongate Classics edition incorporates illustrations by Edmund Sullivan, reproduced as they appeared in the 1898. Also included is the notable Emerson preface to the original American edition and a specially commissioned introduction from Alisdair Gray.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was born in Ecclefechan, the son of a stonemason. In 1809 he entered the Arts Faculty at Edinburgh University, graduating with a distinction in mathematics. His religious doubts would not let him accept the Ministerial path his parents had hoped for, and he left his studies to work as a teacher. Prone to insomnia and depression, he underwent something of a spiritual crisis during these early years, a crisis later recounted in Sartor Resartus. He married in 1826, and his intelligent and independent-minded wife, Jane, was to prove invaluable to this difficult and sometimes tormented man - her own letters are rightly famous. They settled in London from 1834 until both their deaths: Jane's, coming fifteen years before Carlyle's, was extremely painful for him.

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