The Story of The Carlyle EncyclopediaFEATURE
Behind-the-Scenes with Mark Cumming, Editor
I first announced plans for the encyclopedia in 1995. I had done a good deal of work on one of Thomas Carlyle's most important texts, his wonderful and engaging history of the French Revolution, and wanted to expand my own knowledge of Carlyle to cover the full extent of his career and the full range of his activities. I quickly learned how little I knew and how much there was to learn: -about Carlyle's family relations with Jane Welsh Carlyle, his parents, his brothers and sisters -about his extensive literary relations in Scotland, England, Germany, and the United States of America -about his personal friendships with writers, aristocrats, politicians, and artists -about his reading of German authors, such as Goethe, Richter, Novalis, and Fichte -about his response to contemporary political and social issues. It occurred to me that, while there were a number of useful sources for finding out about the Carlyles (the marvelous new edition of their Collected Letters, the Strouse Edition of TC's major works, and modern biographies by Fred Kaplan and others), there was no single, one-volume reference source for them. Working with over fifty contributors from the United States, Britain, Canada, and Germany, I worked over the course of almost ten years to make The Carlyle Encyclopedia to fill that gap in Carlyle studies. I knew from my own experiences working on Carlyle as a graduate student that there are a host of key phrases and concepts that Carlyle either coined or found in his extensive reading (the Everlasting No, the Everlasting Yea, Natural Supernaturalism, the Divine Idea of the World, the Worship of the Divine Sorrow), and I thought that it would be invaluable to have some compendium of basic information which would help to introduce new students to the world of the Carlyles and even help Carlyle scholars to review all the people and concepts and relations which made up that world. From the beginning, our plan was not to reduce Carlyle's achievement to one form of writing or one philosophical outlook or one narrow period of his life. We wanted to reflect the variety of his life and his achievement. At the same time, we wanted to acknowledge Jane Welsh Carlyle's literary achievement as a writer in a more private sphere than that of Thomas Carlyle.
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Portrait of Thomas Carlyle by Samuel Laurence © National Trust Photographic Library