'If it were in my power to help you”: Victorian Literary Patronage in Four Unpublished Thomas Carlyle Letters

摘要

AS A PUBLISHED WRITER MOVING IN THE PROFESSIONALIZED SPHERE of the nineteenth-century print market, Thomas Carlyle relied on the support of fellow authors at the same time that he granted them similar kinds of patronage in return. Ralph Waldo Emerson's promotion of Carlyle's books in the United States in the late 1830s and early 1840s is among the more well-known instances of the help Carlyle received from his writing colleagues, and while he has at times been depicted as failing to live up to the American's generosity, some recently discovered letters by Carlyle, here published for the first time, provide evidence that, just like Emerson, he was a committed patron and literary agent-even if the forms that some of his support assumed may at times have proved more harmful than beneficial. The four letters transcribed and annotated in the following testify to Carlyle's domestic and transatlantic efforts on behalf of other writers. Two of them—an 1844 letter to Emerson's English publisher John Chapman and a shorter note to Emerson himself, dated April 1857—have until now remained unknown.