Posted on 08/20/2020 2:50:39 PM PDT by karpov
The most famous fiasco in literary history occurred when Thomas Carlyle gave John Stuart Mill the first part of his great work The French Revolution to critique. Mill’s maid thought the manuscript was wastepaper and threw it into the fire. The loss was total. Carlyle had no copy.
Carlyle and his formidable wife, Jane, were newly arrived in London from Scotland, with scant savings in their purse. The loss of the book, and its anticipated revenue, threatened them with ruin. Carlyle (who had just been introduced to high society, and was keeping company with grandees such as Mill and Wordsworth) manfully resolved to work as a laborer.
Mill commendably insisted upon paying for the loss. After fierce entreaties, Carlyle accepted half the sum that Mill had proposed. He set himself to rewrite the manuscript, imagining God as a stern Scots schoolmaster tearing up an assignment and saying, “No, boy! You must do better!”
The task of recomposition was staggering. It was far more difficult than rewriting a conventional history. The power of the book is in its imagery. Carlyle’s work is Dantesque in its sheer range of allusion: mythological, biblical, literary, historical — a compendium of Western culture.
Here are some representative images. The Paris working class, before the revolution, sets off fireworks on the fall of a royal minister: “gamboling merely, in awkward Brobdingnag sport, . . . yet in its huge half-vacant laugh lurks a shade of grimness.” The Bastille falls, not so much by force as by the roar of the encircling crowd, “like the City of Jericho, . . . overturned by miraculous sound.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Bkmrk
Today’s left has forgotten the lessons of the French Revolution and the Russian revolution; history will just repeat itself, as it always does, because mankind never learns from history...
Carlyle was a nut job.
They may learn history, but are sure it will be different this time.
It reminds me of the 1948 Democratic primary which Lyndon Johnson won by 87 votes, after initially losing by 113 votes. The outcome changed because of an additional 201 votes found in one county. Remarkably, the voters had voted in alphabetical order, all but one for LBJ, but unfortunately the list got thrown away by the maid before it could be examined by investigators.
Hippolyte Taine's volumes on the same subject are much more approachable and informative. And free on Gutenberg.org: Hippolyte Taine - The French Revolution - vol. 1
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