Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 35 | Issue 1 Article 9 2007 Kenneth Joshua Fielding and the Carlyle Letters: A Rumination Past and Present Rodger L. Tarr Illinois State University, Emeritus Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Tarr, Rodger L. (2007) "Kenneth Joshua Fielding and the Carlyle Letters: A Rumination Past and Present," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 35: Iss. 1, 92–105. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol35/iss1/9 This Article is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Rodger L. Tarr Kenneth Joshua Fielding and the Carlyle Letters: A Rumination Past and Present My fIrst introduction to the Carlyle Letters Project was through Professor G. Ross Roy, my Bums and Scott (with kindly emphasis on Bums) mentor while I was laboring heavily in the vineyards of graduate school at the Univer­ sity of South Carolina. Dr. Roy, as he was then called (some might remember those days of welcome formality), engineered the purchase of a Carlyle letter to the Irish radical Henry McCormac and very generously asked if I would like to edit it for publication in Studies in Scottish Literature. It does not take an active genius to imagine how thrilled I was. My fIrst publication, and in my mentor's august journal no less. My mates (English graduate students were then housed, barned really, in a pipe-laden basement) were astonished, even a bit envious. I was overwhelmed. To be certain I would not commit the usual scholarly infelicities common among graduate students at Carolina, Dr. Roy insisted, rightly so, that I contact one Charles Richard Sanders of Duke University, who had undertaken since 1952, this was 1967, to collect the letters of Thomas and Jane Wel'sh Carlyle for eventual publication by the patrician Duke University Press. My portable typewriter shook, absorbing my anticipation and fear as I punched the keys and soon mailed the words north to request assistance from the much-heralded Pro­ fessor Sanders. To his credit Dick, as he was known to his intimates, answered immediately; to his discredit his response was perfunctory and offered scant encouragement. Of course, I did not realize at the time that I had treaded where no person dared to tread; I had innocently approached the God, some suggested Czar, of the Carlyle Letters, notably without formal invitation. Kenneth Joshua Fielding and the Carlyle Letters 93 Graduate students should know better; at least the graduate students at Duke, I gather, knew better. For such temerity I was branded, I learned years later, the "enfant terrible" by certain of the folks at Duke. To his very great credit, Ross Roy assured me that he would publish the letter after careful editing, which he would oversee. And he did. Ross's im­ primatur resulted in wonders never imagined, and upon graduation I soared over the head of Professor Charles Richard Sanders via Icelandic Airlines, destined for a post-doctoral year at the University of Edinburgh. All of this was made possible through the efforts of Ross and Professor John McQueen, a man of noble character who headed the school of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh. However, since I was determined to continue with my Carlyle studies, a choice that the stellar medievalist McQueen could barely fathom, I was assigned to the Saintsbury Professor of English Literature, Kenneth Joshua Fielding, a Dickensian of immense intellectual proportions, who forthrightly confessed to me upon my arrival in Edinburgh that the Carlyles were not his cup of tea. Still, he avowed at starting that he would do his best to make my stay a memo­ rable one. I shall never forget that initial meeting in Professor Fielding's office high atop David Hume Tower overlooking Arthur's Seat. His confession about the Carlyles, bravely honest I soon realized, threw me for a loop. I was benumbed. What exactly was I doing in this Gaelic land of red-cheeked folk with impene­ trable accents? "To study Dickens," chortled the prescient English-born pro­ fessor. "Study Dickens?" I silently despaired. As I escaped his paper-strewn office that fateful first day, he commanded in his partly pitched voice, "Read Pickwick Papers, and return in a week to discuss it!" To a British-born na­ tional such a command might seem reasonable. To an American-born heathen it bordered on the incomprehensible. But when it came to the Old Professor, as I came to call him decades later with deepest affection, respect, and love, his wish was nearly always my command. He sent me off to the Shilling Shop, a dank treasure trove over and down the hill from George Street, where he had spied, hidden in a comer, a complete set of Dickens for £3.50, then converting to approximately $7. Even from my perspective of poverty - Queen Elizabeth II had granted me £800 to make it through the year-this seemed an astonish­ ing bargain. I gathered together the gilt-stamped volumes in a box of ques­ tionable integrity, and headed uphill for Princess Street and Bus 25 to Corstor­ phine, where the Old Professor had so kindly secured for me a "semi-detached villa." "But what about the Carlyle Letters Project?" you demand? I am coming to it; I am coming to it! In fact, I will come to it right now. When I returned a week later-having been sufficiently warned by his compassionate secretary Millie that one dared never to be late-I had in hand a copiously annotated copy of Pickwick. The Old Professor was not in a cheery mood that day and snapped, "Why are you here?" He demanded that I sit and explain to him why I was .... I said, "Sir," an appellation he seemed to appreciate, "You asked that 94 Rodger L. Tarr we .... " Those words barely passed my lips when he snapped again, "We what ... we WHAT?" The Old Professor told me some twenty years later, when I raised this moment with him, that he was teasing, trying to get me out of my shell. Well, it did not work. Still, after further prodding he got me to enunci­ ate that we were (by his previous command) to discuss Pickwick. He seemed puzzled, almost appalled. Just why would a Dickensian of his stature, who always had forty projects going at once, want to discuss Pickwick with an American who had just completed his Ph.D.? Was I daft? What could he pos­ sibly learn?-a waste of his precious time to be certain. His eyes darted across his desk and wounded me deeply. Droll, almost bored, he asked, "What do YOU find of notice in the novel?" "Sir," I stammered, "I am struck by how much of it is after Carlyle." "What?" he exclaimed, almost coming from his chair while repeating with larger exclamation, "WHAT?" Haltingly, but with gathering resolve, I took him through the novel pointing out how the satiric language and clothes imagery were reminiscent of Sartor Resartus. And so began formally my thirty-five-year relationship with the Old Professor. I ex­ plained, introduced really, as I saw it, the essence of Carlyle to him. For the next nine months we read Dickens, but for him from a new light, through the lens of Carlyle. My profusely annotated copies of the novels remain to this day a record of our explorations. He learned more about Carlyle; I learned a good deal more about Dickens; and we formed a lasting bond never to be put asunder. The Old Professor soon became my Lord Jesus Christ. Literally! Not that the Old Professor (and I) did not make errors in judgment. Very early on I pointed out to him that my dissertation was on Carlyle'S influence on the writ­ ers of the day, and I urged upon him the notion that a valuable book could be written, Carlyle and the Victorian Novel as I titled it. In spite of his growing admissions that Carlyle was at the heart of Dickens, he cautioned restraint. Several years later, while I sought other Carlyle venues to pursue, two books on Carlyle and Dickens were published, almost simultaneously. Yet neither of them contains the depth of insight that transpired during our discussions, and in the years that followed both he and I published, he extensively, from our discussions. I was especially proud that I had convinced him that not only Dickens, but Mrs. Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, even Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, to name but a few, owed enormous debts to Car­ lyle. When I last visited the Old Professor in Edinburgh, he paused in mid­ sentence during a malt-driven discussion about the growing idiocy of critical theory and said, "Rodger, I was mistaken when I did not encourage you to write that book on Carlyle and the novel." His testimony still rings loud and bold, and gratefully, in my ears. In a touching sweep of emotion, he acknowl­ edged the importance to him of our conversations some thirty years before. As for the Carlyle Letters, the Old Professor (he was in 1968 a mere youngster in his forties) had inherited the project after the death of John Butt in 1965. At first he seemed almost reluctant when it came to the Letters. But Kenneth Joshua Fielding and the Carlyle Letters 95 soon his passion transformed from a labor of civility to a labor of love.