About the Book
This is the first time that Thomas Carlyle's remarkable The French Revolution: A History has been published in a comprehensive scholarly form. The edition features an abundance of new critical features, including a critical text that presents the edition much as it appeared in the first edition of 1837, but with a detailed record of the emendations that Carlyle made in subsequent versions during his lifetime. These volumes also contain a variety of scholarly aids--literary, textual, historical, and photographic--to render The French Revolution more approachable and readable to twenty-first century readers. The edition takes seriously Carlyle's claim to have produced a history of the Revolution that is rooted in his primary French sources. The extensive annotations vividly testify to his deep engagement in a wide array of histories, pamphlets, memoirs, and biographies. The notes not only demonstrate his complex method of history, but they also shed fresh light on his artistry and his rich use of language. For the first time, readers will be provided with numerous samples of engravings that Carlyle used from Chamfort's Tableaux historiques and other sources to visualize the 'Flame Drama,' as it was conceived by revolutionary artists and printers. The appendices will also include an annotated version of Carlyle's essay, 'On the Sinking of the Vengeur' (1839), in which he offers a detailed response to controversy surrounding the events that occurred during the naval battle between France and Britain on 'the Glorious First of June,' 1794; an image and transcription of an unpublished MS holograph excerpt from The French Revolution located in the Harry Ransom Center, Texas; and a copy of a corrected proof of 'The Feast of Pikes' held in the Forster Collection of the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum.
Table of Contents:
Volume I
Introduction
The Sources
Note on the Text
Text of Volume I: The Bastille
Notes
Volume II
Text of Volume II: The Constitution
Notes and Appendices
Volume III
Text of Volume III: The Guillotine
Notes and Appendices
About the Author :
Mark Cumming is a Professor of English Literature at Memorial University, Newfoundland. He is the editor of The Carlyle Encyclopedia (2004), and author of A Disimprisoned Epic: Form and Vision in Carlyle's French Revolution (1988), as well as several articles on Carlyle's theory and practice of history. He served as editor of Carlyle Studies Annual from 1999-2004.
David R. Sorensen is Professor of English at Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia. He has published extensively on Thomas Carlyle and is a senior editor of the Duke-Edinburgh Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1970-ongoing, 46 vols.). His most recent work is an edited edition of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution for Oxford World's Classics (2019), with Brent E. Kinser and Mark Engel. He is co-editor of Carlyle Studies Annual and a co-founder
of the Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium (2011), a digital repository of Victorian life-writing.
Professional editor and independent classical scholar, Mark Engel was born in Los Angeles, and educated at Palisades High School and the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California. With Michael K. Goldberg and Joel J. Brattin, he edited On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1993), working through the many 19th century editions, to establish the authorized critical text, which is documented in the Note on the Text and the hefty textual apparatus. With Rodger L.
Tarr, he edited Sartor Resartus (2000), again leading the painstaking collation and discussion of variants that produced the authorized critical text, which is fully documented. A lifelong friend and colleague of
Gregory Bateson, he compiled and edited the paperback edition of Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Mark Engel also served on the International Bateson Institute Board until his death in December 2017. Working with David R. Sorensen and Mark Cumming, Mark Engel established the text of The French Revolution. Brent E. Kinser is Professor of English at Western Carolina University, North Carolina. He has published extensively on Thomas Carlyle and is the author of The American Civil War and the
Shaping of British Democracy (2011) as well as the co-editor (with David R. Sorensen) of Carlyle's On Heroes and Hero-Worship (2013). He is also co-editor of Carlyle Studies Annual (2006--) and a founding
director of The Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium (2012--).
Review :
The French Revolution has now been reissued in three handsome volumes by Oxford University Press. . . Mark Cumming and David R Sorensen, the editors of the new edition . . . remark on the inconsistency of Carlyle's prose in this history: 'Telling the story of the French Revolution forced Carlyle to draw on hall his strengths as a writer.' . . . The French Revolution is a work that one struggles to get through yet feels well rewarded for having done so. Its author . . . remains one of the strangest figures in English literature, a persistent moralist, obdurate in his opinions, not always intelligible, yet, somehow, indispensable.
...features a fine introduction to Carlyle's life and work. Carlyle's prose is thick with allusions to Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, "The Pilgrim's Progress" and especially the Bible; all are deftly referenced here. Moreover, Carlyle was writing only four decades after the revolution and assumed far more familiarity with its names and events than today's readers are likely to possess. This edition makes the work decipherable in ways it otherwise isn't.
A monumental undertaking, this comprehensive scholarly edition of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution appears in three volumes, each with an extensive apparatus of notes. [...] In the notes, the editors track in detail Carlyle's many sources, revealing that the author—contrary to received opinion—was indeed deeply engaged with his sources and that his range was broad. Among the text's generous offerings are a lucid explanation of its editorial policies, appendixes of related texts, a chronological summary of the revolution's course, a meticulous list of emendations, and a useful index.
This magnificent edition is a worthy monument to Carlyle's genius. Its scholarship appears faultless.
By any standards, the achievement of the three editors is both extraordinary and exemplary. Behind this comprehensive scholarly edition of Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, based on a newly edited critical text of the 1837 publication in three volumes, lie decades of collaborative scholarship, assisted by generous institutional support. [...] In short, these three volumes stand as a fitting tribute to the scholars who have collaborated and to Carlyle for a heroic attempt to capture the kaleidoscopic and ever-changing nature of an event whose echoes continue to reverberate.
