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Perspectives victoriennes

“Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers”: Carlyle and Southey — The Saint-Simonians and Industrial Feudalism

« Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers »: Carlyle et Southey — Les Saint-Simoniens et le féodalisme industriel
Jude V. Nixon
p. 452-463

Résumé

On s’est beaucoup intéressé, et de façon approfondie, aux relations entre Thomas Carlyle et les Romantiques anglais et allemands. Mais, à ma connaissance, aucune étude n’a été consacrée aux liens d’amitié étroits qui unissaient Carlyle et Robert Southey et à la façon dont ces liens façonnèrent le regard de Carlyle sur la société. Les écrits de Carlyle sur ses rencontres avec Southey sont éloquents et ses Reminiscences permettent d’avoir une idée de la nature de leurs nombreux entretiens. Carlyle met en avant le sens du Romantique de Southey et, sous l’influence de celui-ci, il est amené à s’interroger sur l’angoisse existentielle qui caractérise les grands écrivains. Cet article prend en compte l’essai critique de Southey, Letters from England, ainsi que Sir Thomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress of Society, et les met en relation avec “Signs of the Times,” “Chartism,” Past and Present de Carlyle, ainsi qu’avec la correspondance de ce dernier, et décrit brièvement les relations d’amitié entre les deux hommes, notamment la façon dont leurs échanges sur les Saint-Simoniens se rejoignaient autour d’une théorie médiévale et féodale du travail. Leurs idées modelèrent la politique d’anti-républicains tels que Lord John Manners, membre des Young Englanders conservateurs, lesquels considéraient que l’organisation féodale des ouvriers constituait la réponse aux déplacements qui leur étaient de plus en plus souvent imposés dans l’Angleterre industrielle, les privant de leur droit électoral. Gerard Manley Hopkins, qui desservait plusieurs paroisses dans les villes industrielles du Nord de l’Angleterre, rejoignait Carlyle par ses lamentations similaires sur le sort des ouvriers spoliés, qu’il appelait les « Undenized ». Mais, comme Carlyle, qu’il critique, par ailleurs, Hopkins n’est pas favorable à la disparition de l’ordre ancien, bien qu’il reconnaisse volontiers que cet ordre était dans l’incapacité d’améliorer la condition des travailleurs pauvres.

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Texte intégral

En l’honneur de René Gallet / In Honor of René Gallet

1In a 2 August 1871 letter to Robert Bridges, Gerard Manley Hopkins admitted “always thinking of the Communist future” (27). He found the idea appealing because it might correct social imbalances and redress social wrongs. Hopkins valued Thomas Carlyle’s earnestness, regard for the sacramental nature of conscientious labor and lamentations over a polluted England, but he disagreed with Carlyle’s protestations in “Shooting Niagara,” a work trenchantly unsympathetic to the democratic gains (Niagaran leap) of the working class effected by the second Reform Act. Expressing a nostalgia for a mythical, once-heroic Old England, Carlyle’s tirade is filled with class and racial bigotry, even despite his admirable stance against cosmetic treatments and a quick fix for grave social problems. Following Carlyle, who sensed the birth of a “New Era,” Hopkins augured some great revolution, but admitted ignorance of the crucial socio-political issues (“I live in bat-light and shoot at a venture”). Still, building upon justice instead of charity (the distinction is Ruskin’s), Hopkins found it “dreadful” that a rich nation subjugate the largest group of its citizenry to “a hard life without dignity, knowledge, comforts, delights, or hopes in the midst of plenty” (Letters to Bridges, 27-28). But Hopkins did not advocate elimination of the old order, though he readily admitted its failure to ameliorate the conditions of the working poor; in fact, aristocratic gains derived from increased exacerbation of already destitute conditions.

2Carlyle’s relationship with Robert Southey was built around similar concerns for the plight of working class. But whereas their answer was a return to a feudal organization of labor, Hopkins, instead, advocated what René Gallet is fond of calling “divine action,” a regard for the individual as God’s “bonniest,” “clearest-selvèd spark” (“Heraclitean Fire”). Regardless of the subject he is addressing, Hopkins “never lost his theological basis” (Gallet, 69). These issues played themselves out in Hopkins’s theory of labor and poeticizing of the subject in “Felix Randal,” “Harry Ploughman,” and especially “Tom’s Garland,” where the second coda focuses on Tom’s social status. Excluded from earthly esteem and ease and economically disenfranchised, Tom is “Undenizened,” a virtual nobody. But this essay is not about Hopkins. Instead, it charts briefly the friendship between Southey and Carlyle and how their exchanges on the Saint-Simonians coalesced around a medieval and feudal theory of labor, which both men entertained as answer to the growing disorganization, displacement, and disenfranchisement of workers in industrial England.

3Southey’s review of the Doctrine de Saint-Simon (1828-1829) expanded his already broad historical interest in religion. “I am reading the Doctrine de Saint-Simon, preparatory to a paper upon that subject,” he announced on 14 March 1830. “The subject is very curious, and the book written with great ability” (Life and Correspondence, 488). The review finds this French socialist sect founded by Henri Saint-Simon attempting to establish through savants, artists and economists “a New Christianity” (Nouveau Christianisme) based entirely on the political: “Moses promised universal fraternity to mankind” and “Jesus prepared it; Saint-Simon realises it” (Review, 424-25). A quite accommodating system, Saint-Simonianism “appeals not to miracles for its proofs,” but, instead, advocates “a comfortable preparation of self-wisdom and self-righteousness.” It teaches “a finished salvation, not for the ‘wicked man who turneth away from the wickedness which he had committed,’ but for the whole race!” (Review, 430). Southey attributes to the Saint- Simonians a version of French socialism, which “make[s] over the whole right of inheritance to the state,” transferring to it “all goods and chattels whatsoever, as well as all landed property,” which are then “distributed” or “allotted.” The Saint-Simonians also advocated sexual equality, the “perfect Androgyne” (Review, 438-39, 443). Using language familiar to Carlyle, Southey also touches on the Saint-Simonians’ hatred of idleness and advocacy of the right to work: “there is to be no idle person in the Saint-Simonian commonwealth. Saint-Simon has come to say to the do-littles and do-nothings of the world, those who neither toil no spin, ‘Your idleness is unnatural; it is impious; it is hurtful to others and to yourself: ye must work!’ ” (439).

4But Carlyle felt that Southey got the Saint-Simonians and the entire French religion question wrong. The only thing he got right were areas where Saint-Simonianism conflicted with orthodox Anglicanism. Carlyle always saw Southey as staunchly Church of England, hostile to Roman Catholicism and largely intolerant of other religions, even despite Southey’s attraction to Orientalism, evident, for example, in Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama. It is “an altogether miserable Article,” Carlyle said of the piece, “written in the spirit not of a Philosopher but of a Parish Precentor: he knows what they are not, so far at least as the thirty nine Articles go; but nothing whatsoever of what they are.” The rest of the review shows little improvement, “despicable enough: blind, shovel-hatted, hysterically lachrymose” (Letters, 5: 427). Carlyle’s estimation of the review did not change one year later. In February 1832, it was still “trivial, purblind, and on the whole erroneous and worthless” (Letters, 6: 117). Carlyle was clearly put off by the association of Saint-Simon to Bentham and Saint-Simonianism to Utilitarianism. He thought Southey’s representation of the Saint-Simonians a bastardization, especially the view that “society is only an assemblage of individuals pursuing each his own course for his own ends, regardless of the commonweal, and in disregard of others, or in opposition to them.” And he would have been bothered by Southey’s ultra-simplistic, reductionist view that for the Saint-Simonians “A DIFFERENT DISTRIBUTION OF PROPERTY IS ALL THAT THEIR SYSTEM REQUIRES” (Review, 433). Carlyle would also have been troubled by Southey’s overly optimistic, Darwinian view of humanity, which, says Southey, “never has retrograded” but rather “has continually advanced in obedience to its own physiological law, the law of progressive development, the law of human perfectibility” (Review, 431).

5Carlyle began reading the writings of Saint-Simon in 1827, and commenced a correspondence with the sect when “Signs of the Times” appeared (1829). In harmony with the teachings of the Saint-Simonians, “Signs” critiques a culture of disbelief, the fragmentation of society, the mechanization of culture and thought and the accompanying demise of metaphysics, and the growth of economic disparity altering relations between the rich and poor. The Saint-Simonians recognized in the essay clear parallels to their teachings. Writing to them about the intersections, Carlyle expressed delight that “these views of mine find some acceptance with you.” Congruently, he found in their writings “little or nothing to dissent from: the spirit at least meets my entire sympathy — the opinions also are often such as I, in my own dialect, have been accustomed to cherish, and more or less clearly enunciate” (Letters, 5: 135-36).

  • 1  Shine believes that Carlyle’s interest in the Saint Simonians “seems to have been based entirely u (...)

6Carlyle ignored Goethe’s warning to avoid the Parisian sect, and soon found himself corresponding regularly with its members and reading their literature. He even translated their holy book, Nouveau Christianisme. Though not endorsing all of their views, he was quick to defend the Saint-Simonians and their beliefs, disagreeing, for example, with John Stuart Mill, who thought them eccentric and too politically conservative. It was also this anxiety that caused Carlyle to be critical of Southey, whose review of the Saint-Simonians was far more sympathetic than disparaging. But Carlyle was tetchy about any presumed attack on the Saint-Simonians, warning Mill, “let the St. Simonians remain unlaughed at,” and later wanting to know from Mill who the author was of “that most limited-triumphant Disquisition on the poor Saint- Simonians” (Letters, 6: 175, 239). Southey’s essay, which appeared in April 1831, came at a time when Carlyle was beginning to forge a friendship with the Saint-Simonians. He wrote to Gustave d’Eichthal on 17 May 1831 that he found himself “in friendly relation towards men of intelligence and devout mind, with whom or with the like of whom alone is friendship and fellowship possible.” Furthermore, “To see a little Brotherhood of such men, strong in Faith, uniting itself as a forlorn hope in the Good fight, and heroically, with such weapons and tactics as it has, making front against the boundless armaments of Evil, — this is a spectacle full of significance, perhaps to pathetic beauty, for all good men” (Letters,5: 277).1 His criticism of Southey’s essay would come five months later. But in an odd way, Southey’s caution, which Carlyle initially resented, was the very position he would later assume when he understood more the teachings of the Saint-Simonians.

  • 2  A poet of some renown at the time, Caroline Bowles Southey has been entirely neglected in the twen (...)

7A “Renegade” turned Tory, Southey had “gone over to the bad cause,” as Carlyle puts it in the Reminiscences (387). Carlyle, who cast himself among a group of “radicals in heart,” was put off initially by Southey’s new political position. It was a change, and the public rejection of it, which “had driven Southey to his fighting gear,” his “polemical pen.” Carlyle now found himself more inclined to Southey’s conservatism, presented as if Southey’s conversion followed his — the child as father to the man: “That bout of Pamphleteering had brought Southey much nearer me; but had sensibly diminished my esteem of him, and would naturally slacken my desire for further acquaintance.” The appearance of Thalaba, the Curse of Kehama, and Joan of Arc developed in Carlyle an even greater appreciation of Southey. Though not particularly admirable in Carlyle’s correspondence, Southey emerges quite favorable in the largely bilious Reminiscences: “I much recognised the piety, the deep affection, the reverence for God and man, which reigned in these Pieces; full of soft pity, like the wailings of a mother, and yet with a clang of chivalrous valour finely audible too. One could not help loving such a man [...] I always afterwards looked out for his Books, new or old, as for a thing of value [...] which was greatly according to my heart” (Reminiscences, 387-88). The remainder of the reminiscences chronicles Southey’s failed second marriage and sudden declension into death on 21 March 1843: “By degrees all intellect had melted away from him; and quietly, unconsciously he died” (Reminiscences, 399).2 To preserve his own impressions of Southey, Carlyle refused to read Life and Correspondence, the biography edited by Southey’s son, Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey. Carlyle’s last word on Southey is quite a tribute, focusing on Southey’s diligence and literary versatility, whether in poetry, verse plays, polemics, travel narratives, translation, biography, editions or essays:

Southey I used to construe to myself as a man of slight build, but of sound and elegant; with considerable genius in him, considerable faculty of speed and rhythmic insight, and with a morality that shone distinguished among his contemporaries. I reckoned him (with those blue blushes and those red) to be the perhaps excitablest of all men; and that a deep mute monition of Conscience had spoken to him, “You are capable of running mad, if you don’t take care. Acquire habitudes; stick firm as adamant to them at all times, and work, continually work!” This, for thirty or forty years, he had punctually and impetuously done, — no man so habitual, we were told; gave up his Poetry, at a given hour, on stroke of the clock, and took up Prose, etc.; and, as to diligence and velocity, employed his very walking hours, walked with a Book in his hand; — and by these methods of his, had got through perhaps a greater amount of work, counting quantity and quality, than any other man whatever in those years of his (Reminiscences, 399).

8Southey and Carlyle held similar views on industrialism, workhouses, and the working poor. When Carlyle writes about the industrial areas of the north and espouses a feudal view of industrialism, he parrots Southey to the letter, especially the Southey of the Boethius-styled Colloquies. But while Carlyle refused to acknowledge Southey as his source on this very Condition of England Question, Hopkins was far more generous. Confronting industrialism and the displacement of workers in Manchester, Leigh and Liverpool, Hopkins remarked that “[i]t is what Carlyle has long threatened and foretold” (Letters to Bridges, 27). But Hopkins did not know that these were the views of Southey, whom members of the Young England Movement of John Manners, Alexander Cochrane-Baillie and George Smythe looked upon as their champion of industrial feudalism with Carlyle as his acolyte. Past and Present (1843) protests at extreme poverty existing alongside enormous wealth: “With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow harvests.” However, the poor are “made ‘poor’ enough, in the money sense or a far fataler one [...]. We have more riches than any Nation ever had before [...]. In the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish; with gold walls, and full barns, no man feels himself safe or satisfied. Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers, all men, come to a pause; stand fixed, and cannot farther. Fatal paralysis spreading inwards, from the extremities of St. Ives’ workhouses, in Stockport cellars, through all limbs, as if towards the heart itself” (1, 6). Years earlier, in Letter 38 of Letters from England (1807), Southey had voiced the same lament. He remonstrated against the conditions of the working poor, including children, who lived in a kind of underground London, a familiar nineteenth-century image of subterranean life in the sewers: “these little creatures were playing in the machinery, half giddy myself with the noise and the endless motion: and when he told me there was no rest in these walls, day nor night, I thought if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment [...]. The dwellings of the labouring manufacturers are in narrow streets and lanes, blocked up from light and air. Here in Manchester a great proportion of the poor lodge in cellars, damp and dark, where every kind of filth is suffered to accumulate” (Letters from England, 208-10). Southey’s tale of two cities is one Carlyle would repeat, employing the same discourse of circulation, blockage, etiology, crime and incarceration. Southey remonstrates:

Wealth flows into the country, but how does it circulate there? Not equally and healthfully through the whole system; it sprouts into wens and tumours, and collects in aneurisms which starve and palsy the extremities [...]. But the number of the poor, and the sufferings of the poor, have continued to increase; the price of every thing which they consume has always been advancing, and price of labour, the only commodity which they have to dispose of, remains the same. Workhouses are erected in one place, and infirmaries in another; the poor-rates increase in proportion to the taxes [...]. Necessity is the mother of crimes; new prisons are built, new punishments enacted; but the poor become year after year more numerous, more miserable, and more depraved (Letters from England, 210-11).

9Southey also complained of the way workers were being displaced by machinery: “The introduction of machinery in an old manufacturing town always produces distress by throwing workmen out of employ, and is seldom effected without riots and executions” (Letters from England, 212). Carlyle’s many utterances concern this same labor economics. In “Signs,” he sees the “living artisan [...] driven from his workshop, to make for a speedier, inanimate one.  The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster [...] Even the horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet fire-horse yoked in his stead [...]” (“Signs”, 27: 59-60). Similar discourse on the displacement of workers by machinery appears in “Chartism”: “The huge demon of Mechanism smokes and thunders, panting at his great task, in all sections of English land; changing his shape like a very Proteus; and infallibly, at every change of shape, oversetting whole multitudes of workmen, and as if with the waving of his shadow from afar, hurling them asunder, this way and that; so that the wisest no longer knows his whereabout” (“Chartism”, 141-42).

10Southey became attuned to the social condition of England from his work Sir Thomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress of Society (1829). The Colloquies addresses topics in religion, morals, politics and the poor, subjects that would have appealed to Carlyle, along with the view that “religion is the only foundation of society, and governments which have not this basis are built upon sand” (1: 284). Southey’s reflections in the Colloquies are indebted in part to his reading on the Saint-Simonians and acquaintance with Carlyle’s “Signs.” The Colloquies questions whether manufacturing can achieve a utopian ideal, and laments the employment of children in the manufacturing system, whose exploitation creates “a new source of wealth and revenue”:

  • 3  Much of Hopkins’s parish work at St. Joseph’s, Leigh, involved youth and adult education. There wa (...)

Yonder children are on the way to a manufactory, where they pass six days out of the seven, from morning till night. It is likely that the little they learn at school on the seventh, (which ought to be their day of recreation as well as rest,) should counteract the effects of such an education, when the moral atmosphere wherein they live and move and have their being, is as noxious to the soul, as the foul and tainted air which they inhale is to their bodily constitution? (1:166-67)3.

11Southey blames this abuse on the pursuit of wealth. The language is Carlyle’s: “Commercial nations, if they acknowledged the deity whom they serve, might call him All-Gold. And if the sum of their sacrifices were compared, Mammon would be found a more merciless fiend than Moloch.” In More’s sarcasm, “The servants of Mammon are however wiser in their generation than the children of light. They serve a master who rewards them. [...] Yet their power of creating wealth brings with it a consequence not dissimilar to that which Midas suffered. The love of lucre is one of those base passions.” This “continual creation of wealth,” More sees, is no indication whatsoever of “public prosperity” (169, 177-78), a view Carlyle echoes in his indictment of the traffic in bogus currency, verbal as well as monetary:

If speech is the bank-note for an inward capital of culture, of insight and noble human worth, then speech is precious, and the art of speech shall be honoured. But if there is no inward capital; if speech represent no real culture of the mind but an imaginary culture; no bullion, but the fatal and almost hopeless deficit of such? Alas, alas, said bank-note is then a forged one; passing freely current in the market; but bringing damages to the receiver, to the payer, and to all the world […] with huge costs. The foolish traders in the market pass it freely, nothing doubting, and rejoice in the dextrous execution of the piece: and so it circulates from hand to hand (Latter-Day Pamphlets, 20:179-80).

  • 4  Carlyle’s and Foucault’s ideas on an economy of discourse might be traced through Immanuel Kant.   (...)

12The Colloquies observes a divide between the real and the representational, a trafficking in fraudulent ware whereby “paper currency” becomes “representative of real wealth”: “All wealth was real, till the extent of commerce rendered paper currency necessary, which differed from precious stones and pictures in this important point, that there was no limit to its production. [...] Your provincial bank notes, which constitute almost wholly the circulating medium of certain districts, pass current to-day; to-morrow, tidings may come that the house which issued them has stopt payment, and what do they represent then? You find them the shadow of a shade.” What results, says More, is something “neither real nor representative, but a mere fiction of policy and convenience” (1:178-79, 181). Alarmed, likewise, by the prospects of fraud, Carlyle analogizes controlled circulation to economic health: “How human affairs shall now circulate everywhere not healthy life-blood in them, but, as it were, a detestable copper as banker’s ink; and all is grown acrid, divisive, threatening dissolution” (Past,67, 169). A vital economy maintains an equilibrium between conservation and circulation, hoarding and spending, “careful regulation of the nation’s delicate circulation” (Alborn, 186). Michel Foucault and other economic theorists observe an analogous relationship between economic and literary discourse: “The analysis of wealth is to political economy what general grammar is to philology,” according to Foucault. “Money, like words, has the role of designating, yet never ceases to fluctuate around that vertical axis: variations of price are to the initial establishment of the relation between metal and wealth what rhetorical displacements are to the original value of verbal signs” (Order, 168, 202-3). Marc Shell puts it similarly in Money, Language and Thought, calling money “a system of tropes” and “an ‘internal’ participant in the logical or semiological organization of language, which itself refers to a system of tropes” (3). With much to say about the equation between money and speech, Carlyle calls discourse “the gold-bullion of human culture” and speech “the bank-note for an inward capital of culture.” Language thus becomes counterfeit when words, like coins, circulate without value: “Every word of man is either a note or a forged-note” (Latter-Day Pamphlets,179-80).4

13Both Southey and Carlyle saw feudal industrialism as an answer to the conditions of poverty and misery in the industrial districts of Manchester and Birmingham. Their views influenced the politics of anti-Republicans such as Lord John Manners (1818-1906) of the conservative Young Englanders, who for a time included Benjamin Disraeli, whose Coningsby (1844) portrays Manners in the character Lord Henry Sydney. Manners emerged from his own pilgrimage to Manchester “convinced that legislative pressures should be brought upon captains of industry to insure that workers not be victims of a heartless supply and demand economic theory,” and became distressed over the slow pace of social reform, even as he defended the role of the aristocracy and the old social order. “ ‘The worst of this manufacturing feudalism,’ he wrote, ‘is its uncertainty, and the moment the cotton lord is done, there’s an end also to his dependants’ very subsistence’ ” (qtd. in Kegel, 693). Schooled by the medieval conservatism of Southey and Carlyle, Manners felt that the machine bound workers together: “there never was so complete a feudal system as that of the mills; soul and body are, or might be, at the absolute disposal of one man, and that to my notion is not at all a bad state of society” (qtd. in Whibley, 1:106).

14Southey’s Colloquies present “an attractive picture of the ‘kindly feelings and ennobling attachments’ of the feudal structure.” Carlyle’s “Chartism,” Heroes and Hero-Worship, and Past and Present, similarly, offer “ample praise of the feudal contract between master and man”. The twelfth century of Abbot Samson’s was heroic in part because it boasted a feudal aristocracy responsible for “superintending the cultivation of the land, and [...] the distribution of the produce of the land, the adjustment of the quarrels of the land; judging, soldiering, adjusting; everywhere governing the people” (Past,65). Rather than maintain the right (feudal) relations between planters and workers, democracy creates a “disorganised condition of society” and a “wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarranged manner” of working (Heroes,158). The “most perfect Feudal time,” according to Carlyle, was one where individuals knew their place and role and were rightly related: “soldier and captain,” “clansman and head,” “loyal subject and guiding king,” “the low related to the high” (“Chartism”, 162). Carlyle learnt much from Southey, whose review led him first to take the Saint-Simonians seriously and then to renounce them. From Southey he derived his critique of feudal industrialism, and learnt too about inept governmental leadership, bankrupt culture, economic disparity, dispossessed workers and the despised poor. Southey’s reward in all of this is how favorably Carlyle remembers him. Despite a certain shyness and nervous disposition, Southey emerges as affectionate, godly, empathetic, loyal, industrious and chivalrous. The stuff of which he was comprised was, Carlyle felt, “things rare and worth, at once pious and true” (Reminiscences, 388).

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Bibliographie

Alborn Timothy L., “Economic Man, Economic Machines: Images of Circulation in the Victorian Money Market”, in Philip Mirowski (ed.), Natural Images in Economic Thought, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 173-96.

Blain Virginia, Caroline Bowles Southey, 1786-1854: The Making of a Woman Writer, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998.

Carlyle Thomas, “Chartism”, 1839, Works, 30 vols., H. D. Traill (ed.), London: Chapman and Hall, 1896-99, Vol. 29, 118-204.

-----, Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850, Works, 30 vols., H. D. Traill (ed.), London: Chapman and Hall, 1896-99, Vol. 20.

------, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841, Works, 30 vols., H. D. Traill (ed.), London: Chapman and Hall, 1896-99, Vol. 5.

------, Past and Present, 1843, Works, 30 vols., H. D. Traill (ed.), London: Chapman and Hall, 1896-99, Vol. 10.

------, Reminiscences, K. J. Fielding & Ian Campbell (eds.), Oxford World’s Classics, London: Oxford University Press, 1997.

------, “Signs of the Times”, 1829, Works, 30 vols., H. D. Traill (ed.), London: Chapman and Hall, 1896-99, Vol. 27, 56-82.

 “Chapter the First — Inquisitive. Who IS the Doctor?”, Fraser’s Magazine, 16 (December 1837): 655-76.

Foucault Michel, The Order of Things, New York: Vintage, 1994.

Gallet René, “Hopkins’s Sense of Divine Action”, The Hopkins Quarterly, 1-4 (2004): 69-81.

Hopkins Gerard Manley, The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, Claude Colleer Abbott (ed.), 2nd imp. rev., London: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Kant Immanuel, “Was ist Geld?”, Die Metaphysik der Sitten. Immanuel Kants Werke, Ernst Cassirer (ed.), Vol. 7, Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922, 91-94.

Kegel Charles H., “Review of Lord John Manners and the Young England Movement: Romanticism in Politics”, The Western Political Quarterly, 14.3 (1961): 691-97.

Sanders Charles R., Kenneth J. Fielding & Clyde De L. Ryals (eds.), The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, 34 vols., Durham: Duke UP, 1970-2001.

Shell Marc, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Shine Hill, Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1941.

Southey Robert, Letters from England, London: Cresset, 1951.

------, Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, Charles Cuthbert Southey (ed.), New York: Harper & Brothers, 1861.

------, Review of “Doctrine de Saint-Simon”, Exposition. Première Année, 1828-1829, Seconde édition, Paris, 1830, The Quarterly Review, 45 (July 1831): 407-50.

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Whibley Charles, Lord John Manners and His Friends, 2 vols., Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1925.

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Notes

1  Shine believes that Carlyle’s interest in the Saint Simonians “seems to have been based entirely upon personal sympathy with Gustave d’Eichthal” (114).

2  A poet of some renown at the time, Caroline Bowles Southey has been entirely neglected in the twentieth and now twenty-first century due largely, says her biographer and editor, to “the changing literary fashion” along with “the negative effects of a too-assiduous cultivation of ladylike anonymity” (Blain, 5). In this work and in her entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Blain provides different dates for Bowles’s marriage to Southey. She is also mistaken on the date of Southey’s death.

3  Much of Hopkins’s parish work at St. Joseph’s, Leigh, involved youth and adult education. There was an enormous effort on the part of the Church to educate its members, with night schools held for working boys and young men as an “opportunity for self improvement.” Parents unable to pay the school fees “can get them paid by applying to the Relieving Officer without going before the Board” (28 September 1879, Notice Book). The belief that adult education would alleviate shiftlessness, drunkenness and other vices and make for an improved citizenry was clearly in effect.

4  Carlyle’s and Foucault’s ideas on an economy of discourse might be traced through Immanuel Kant.  In “Was ist Geld?” (“What is Money?”), Kant conceives of money as the thing, the use of which is only made possible in that it is placed into circulation, “veräußert.” In particular, he defines money as “the general means of exchanging people’s diligence amongst each other.”  Kant calls this function of money “empirical,” whereas the measure of the value, the stamp on the coin, is an abstraction of the coin’s materiality (my emphasis). “Therefore the empirical concept of money leads to an intellectual concept of the same” (“führt der empirische Begriff des Geldes dadurch auf den intellektuellen hinaus”). Kant also points out that it takes human labor to mine the metals of which money is comprised. For him, “the purpose of the circulation is not giving but mutual acquisition […] of all goods.” He assigns an “empirical” (“empirische”) and “intellectual” (“intellektuelle”) value to money, believing that money is both an “empirical” (means of exchange) as well as an “intellectual” (measure of the value of what is exchanged) concept (“Begriff”). Kant places the weight of the value of money on the image; money must be stamped, “marked with a sign of how much that value should be” (91-94). I owe this translation and its conceptualization to my colleague Ingrid Broszeit-Rieger.

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Jude V. Nixon, « “Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers”: Carlyle and Southey — The Saint-Simonians and Industrial Feudalism »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal, Vol. VII – n°3 | 2009, 452-463.

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Jude V. Nixon, « “Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers”: Carlyle and Southey — The Saint-Simonians and Industrial Feudalism »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], Vol. VII – n°3 | 2009, mis en ligne le 19 mai 2009, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/134 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.134

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Jude V. Nixon

Professor, (Rochester, MI, United States)
Jude V. Nixon is professor of English at Oakland University and director of The Honors College. He is the author of Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Contemporaries: Liddon, Newman, Darwin, and Pater (1994), editor of Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism (2004), co-editor of volume 6, The Sermons and Religious Writings, of the eight volumes of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (forthcoming Oxford University Press), and co-editor of Science, Religion, and Natural Theology, volume 3 of the eight volumes of Victorian Science and Literature under contract by Pickering & Chatto. His work has appeared in many journals, among them The Hopkins Quarterly, the Dickens Studies Annual, the Carlyle Studies Annual, Victorian Poetry, Modern Philology, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. Professor Nixon is a member of the editorial boards of The Hopkins Quarterly, the Dickens Studies Annual, and Victorian Poetry. He is also serves on the MLA executive committee on Methods of Literary Research. In July, Jude will assume the position of Dean of the Schools of Arts and Sciences at Salem State College, Massachusetts.

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