‘Signs of the Times’

the essay in which Thomas Carlyle announced himself as an important critic of the industrial upheaval which convulsed the country throughout his lifetime.

WHEN Francis Jeffrey accepted the piece for the Edinburgh Review he was giving a relatively unknown author a sizeable platform for strikingly original ideas (ER 49:439-59).  It was an act of generosity which allowed Carlyle to formulate his ideas and reach a wider audience than his relatively constrained publishing career had managed till that time.  The essence of the article lies in the bold statement: ‘Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand’. The ironic opening which surveys the means by which the industrial revolution has penetrated every aspect of life, from the trivial to the important, metamorphoses in this statement into something more serious – a statement of the baleful side-effects of the revolution on the life of the working class whose labour sustained it.  Carlyle had grown up in rural Ecclefechan and, after University, taught in small-town Annan and Kirkcaldy; except for brief visits to London, Birmingham, and France, his other life had been spent largely in Dumfries-shire, so he wrote with an outsider’s vision of the negative effects of a revolution which those who lived in it, or accepted its benefits, scarcely noticed.  The result can be seen most clearly in the hands of Dickens who, in Hard Times (1854), explicitly develops the theme of mechanical education, management, and employment practices and their deadening effect on human beings.  ‘Signs of the Times’ resonates through much Victorian social criticism.

Ian Campbell, University of Edinburgh

 

William Gifford (1756-1826)

GIFFORD was born in Ashburton, Devon, of working-class parents, and in his teens was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but a patron enabled him to attend Exeter College, Oxford.  His poems, The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795), were satires directed against the Della Cruscan poets and contemporary playwrights.  His Epistle to Peter Pindar (1800) attacked a fellow-satirist, John Wolcot.  In 1797-98, Gifford edited the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, and in 1802 he published a translation of Juvenal’s satires.  His edition of the plays of Philip Massinger appeared in 1805.  Reviewing the book three years later, the Edinburgh attacked its cantankerous notes [ER, 12:99-119].  Gifford responded sarcastically to the Edinburgh in a lengthy “Advertisement” to his second edition of Massinger’s works (1813).  Despite chronic ill health, he later published editions of the plays of Ben Jonson (1816) and John Ford (1827).  Gifford is best known for his editorship of the Quarterly; his correspondence with its founders discusses how to make it an effective counterblast to the Whig principles of the Edinburgh.  Unlike Jeffrey, he wrote few reviews himself, but hostile early readers perceived the Quarterly to be driven by his acerbic spirit.  As editor of the Quarterly, Gifford was caricatured as “Mr Vamp” by Thomas Love Peacock in Melincourt (1818), labeled the “Government Critic” by William Hazlitt in A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. (1819), and impugned for his irritability by Leigh Hunt in Ultra-Crepidarius (1823).

K.W.