[CARLYLE, THOMAS] — ROBERT BURNS | Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. London: A. Strahan, T. Cadell, and W. Creech, 1787

[CARLYLE, THOMAS] — ROBERT BURNS

Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. London: A. Strahan, T. Cadell, and W. Creech, 1787

8vo (8 1/8 x 5 1/8 in.; 205 x 130 mm). Frontispiece portrait, glossary at end, pencil annotations likely in the hand of Thomas Carlyle; lacking half-title, closed marginal tear to frontis neatly repaired, minor foxing, minor offsetting. Full brown calf, gilt-lettered red morocco label to spine; upper joint splitting but holding, vertical cracks to spine, overall rubbed, ink stain to fore-edge, front free endpaper detached. Custom green morocco slipcase.

Thomas Carlyle's copy, first London edition

Thomas Carlyle was one of the 19th century's most influential figures, making his mark in the fields of literature, mathematics, and philosophy. Born forty years apart, Robert Burns and Carlyle have each endured as two of Scotland's most celebrated literary and intellectual personages. Carlyle was a great devotee of Burns, and addressed the importance of the poet in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History (1841), and in his essay "The Life of Robert Burns." The present copy, which bears Carlyle's marginalia, was likely used as a point of reference as the polymath composed his works. 

After his move from Dumfriesshire, Scotland, to London in 1831, Carlyle became known as the "Sage of Chelsea", and regularly socialized with the likes of Leigh Hunt, John Stuart Mill, and many other members of Victorian Britain's intelligentsia. Carlyle also counted Ralph Waldo Emerson as a close friend. As he moved in literary circles of the first order, Carlyle wrote of Robert Burns: "You would think it strange if I called Burns the most gifted British soul we had in all that century of his: and yet I believe the day is coming when there will be little danger in saying so. His writings, all that he did under such obstructions, are only a poor fragment of him" (Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes). Carlyle goes on to note that "the chief quality of Burns is the sincerity of him. So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The song he sings is not of fantasticalities; it is of a thing felt, really there." Carlyle deems the defining and most valuable element of Burns’ verse to be his "tragic sincerity. A sort of savage sincerity,—not cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things." Carlyle finishes his appraisal of Burns by opening this notion up, elevating the poet fully to the station of hero as he declares: "In that sense, there is something of the savage in all great men."

Beyond Carlyle’s assessment of what ought to constitute a hero for the modern age, the philosopher was also preoccupied with Burns in relation to his broader appraisal of the literature of the period. In an 1829 review of the poet, Carlyle posits that before Burns “literature was, as it were, without any local environment—was not nourished by the affections which spring from a native soil" (Thomas Carlyle, "The Life of Robert Burns"). Interestingly, it is this line that is cited by the OED as the first use of the term “environment”. As Carlyle suggested that good literature was shaped by the surroundings that formed the poet, he was engaging with both the emerging biological and social sciences of the Victorian period, which stressed the need to understand life in terms of a process of interaction between the individual organism and environment. Indeed, this is our modern conception of environment that Carlyle is here articulating as he explores the nature of Burns’ poetry, and what distinguishes him from his predecessors and contemporaries alike.  

James William Ellsworth was an American industrialist, and served as president of both the Caxton Club and the Jekyll Island Club.

An important and rare association copy

PROVENANCE

Thomas Carlyle (bookplate to front pastedown) — James William Ellsworth (bookplate to front free endpaper)