Where the Past Meets the Present and Where it does Not: Carlyle, Racism and Virtue Signalling
Quinlan Mann
4. Feb. 2021
Arrangement in Grey and Black,
No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, c.1873–74
(James McNeill Whistler, Glasgow Museums, 671)
Browsing the internet one idle afternoon during the second lockdown, I came across an announcement for an online exhibition in Glasgow entitled ‘Legacies of Slavery in Glasgow Museums and Collections’. Managed by curatorial staff at Glasgow Museums, the site presents a wide range of objects, paintings, and documents as a timely reflection on Scotland’s role in slavery and as testament to ‘this grim part of our collective heritage’. Among them is Whistler’s well-known portrait of Thomas Carlyle, ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black, no 2’ (1873-4), painted not long after the thinker’s public involvement in the Governor Eyre controversy. As the curator of British Art, Dr Jo Meacock, notes, aesthetically, its design, like its forerunner, a portrait of the artist’s mother completed two years earlier, is a masterpiece in tonal harmony: in terms of its message, however, ‘dialogue around this painting, whose very title positions itself in terms of colour, needs to acknowledge the noxious prejudice and racism of both artist and sitter.’
The caption chosen for the curator’s detailed accompanying notes to the Carlyle exhibits (in addition to the portrait there are three sculptures*) reads: ‘Thomas Carlyle, historian, writer, racist.’ Consistent with much of the literature on Carlyle, the comments spotlight his concerns for the urban poor in Victorian Britain and his indictment of greedy industrialists. Importantly, they also recognize the need to contextualize the ‘distressing imperialist metaphors’ framing the scurrilous racial content of his 1849 Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question. Contemporaries such as John Stuart Mill, Dr Meacock notes, may have been deeply shocked by Carlyle’s essay, but their own advocacy of equality, likewise, subscribed to a colonial worldview; ‘even among liberals’, racial superiority was deeply ingrained.
This concession to contextualization is a point which requires further elaboration and demands some account of Carlyle’s underlying intentions when he set out to write what he surely knew was an inflammatory essay. Was he really using his fictionalized narrator to mask (thinly) his pro-slavery, ‘racist’ sentiments or was it a device to expose what, in his opinion, were hollow public displays of outrage at social injustice and misplaced philanthropy – what nowadays we might call ‘virtue signalling’ or gesture politics? Perhaps, then, we should re-read him, and endeavour to understand why, in the Occasional Discourse, he was so crude, provocative, and prejudicial.
In Carlyle’s day, the term ‘racist’ did not exist; it gained currency, as the OED tells us, in 1903, superseding ‘racialism’ which had been around since the 1880s. Of course, this does not exonerate Carlyle, whose message was that: ‘the Black gentleman is born to be a servant, and, in fact, is useful in God’s creation only as a servant’ (OD 1853, 28). But, from a line-by-line reading we discover that Carlyle’s primary targets were not black people as such; rather, he was taking aim at emancipated blacks whose new status had disproportionately benefited them to the detriment of colonial and domestic whites. In his view, the ones responsible for these inequalities were some of his London-based peers – the upper-middle class, ‘Exeter Hall’ activists. Carlyle’s takeaway point is very clear: instead of focusing on ways to lift the urban poor out of poverty, here, at home, Exeter Hall was engaging in a performative and, ultimately, pointless act of philanthropy abroad. Crusading for the rights of black Jamaicans, he argued, brought Exeter Hall activists the symbolic capital (reputation) that went with gestures of public philanthropy without impinging on their material status as beneficiaries of what Carlyle so aptly labelled the ‘Dismal Science’, viz., the logic of supply and demand, of laissez-faire capitalism, which ‘reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone’ (OD 1853, 9). In other words, here was a clear case of what Charles Dickens called ‘telescopic philanthropy.’
In our reading, other than the sunny warmth of Jamaica and the dank filth of Victorian slums there was, for Carlyle, little practical difference between the emancipated black and the jobless British poor whose experience he brings to life in the figure of the ‘Distressed Needlewomen’: whether by good fortune (a rich harvest) or force of circumstance, both were idle. His point of judgement – often missed – stemmed almost entirely from his ‘Gospel of Work’, and it was a blanket one: ‘Any poor idle Black man, any idle White man, rich or poor, is a mere eye-sorrow to the State’ (OD 1853, 41). Labour was something holy for Carlyle: ‘this is the eternal law of Nature for a man (…) that he shall be permitted, encouraged, and if need be, compelled to do what work the Maker of him has intended by the making of him for this world!’ (OD 1853, 13). It was not, then, so much the racial identity of the emancipated Jamaican blacks that fuelled Carlyle’s ire as his concern to protect a point of personal intellectual principle regarding the sanctity of work. In dismantling the existing system of labour in Jamaica, Exeter Hall had gone against the divine natural order of the world.[i] The sticking point for modern-day readers (and Carlyle’s contemporaries) lies with the language he chose to express these concerns: sarcasm, which he directed against his peers, and prejudicial assumptions about black people whom he discredited as innately lazy, expert only in shunning any form of work unless compelled by the governing whites. More than anything, it is the vitriolic language which we tend to remember after reading this piece.[ii]
Curator Jo Meacock concludes her note by reminding us that Carlyle ‘has always been a contentious figure both criticised and celebrated for his opinionated and partisan writings with their weighty rhetoric.’ In the setting of the Glasgow exhibition, however, her takeaway point is that discussions about his memorialisation in painting and sculpture ‘cannot turn a blind eye to the inexcusable racism underlying his philosophies.’ No, they cannot, we say, but nor should we ignore the overriding points he was making, even as these came at a cost to emancipated Jamaican blacks who were reduced to stereotypes in his polemic with Exeter Hall liberals. And it is worth restating that, on both sides of the aisle, the polemic was framed by racial hierarchies and prejudicial assumptions. The point of difference was that Carlyle co-opted them as a semi-satirical means to expose what he saw as the moral blind spots of the abolitionist campaign: failure to acknowledge the commonly shared prejudices regarding race and the (unwitting) repurposing of philanthropy to support the privileges associated with public image – in this instance, as progressive social leaders. Whether the performative activism of Exeter Hall for emancipation on the other side of the Atlantic was meant to impress onlookers or assuage a sense of guilt over the neglected ‘condition of England’ question, namely, the plight of poor men and women at home, was ultimately immaterial. Either way, it perpetuated the privileges of a class living in a state of denial. And this, it seems, is what irked Carlyle most: ‘In me too,’ he wrote, ‘the natural sources of human rage exist more or less, and the capability of flying out into “fiery wrath against oppression,” and of signing petitions; both of which things can be done very cheap. Good heavens, if signing petitions would do it, if hopping to Rome on one leg would do it, think you it were long undone! Frightful things are continually told us of Negro slavery, of the hardships, bodily and spiritual, suffered by slaves. Much exaggerated, and mere exceptional cases, say the opponents. Exceptional cases, I answer; yes, and universal ones!’ (OD 1853, 15).
Words are important, and there are many instances in the Occasional Discourse where one can only regret Carlyle’s choice of them. All too often they shock, and we have to remind ourselves that his ‘racially driven’ characterizations were, as Dr Meacock acknowledges, widespread in the Victorian intellectual sphere. But there are other remarks, too, such as the one just cited, which might caution the modern-day reader against philanthropism as a form of self-promotion. It is obvious that any discussion of Victorian intellectuals should acknowledge the underlying assumptions informing public debate, and that if we are to pass judgement we should, likewise, account for these. Was Carlyle anti-slavery? No – or possibly [iii]; racist? Yes, but so was ‘Exeter Hall’, so was John Stuart Mill, and so was the broad base of Victorian intellectual society. Carlyle was no exception or outlier, rather a prominent reminder that all historical figures should be contextualised, and that even the most controversial can raise valid, persistent concerns.
Quinlan Mann completed an MLitt in Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews in 2021.
Notes:
[i] As David Theo Goldberg writes, (p 205): ‘Carlyle's negrophobia was tied up with a critique of laissez faire capitalist political economy prevailing at the time. The failure of the potato crop due to extended drought had devastated Irish peasants (which he witnessed first-hand), and the mid-century recession had caused massive unemployment among the English working classes, represented in Carlyle's discourse in the forlorn figure of the "Distressed Needlewoman." Carlyle contrasted these desperately sad figures with the stereotype of the lazy, "sho' good eatin'" Negro. Just as lazy and indictable was the aristocracy (who do not work).’ Or as Ian Campbell says: ‘In sum, then, Carlyle's stand on the Negro Question is shown to be based in religious, not political or humanitarian ideas’ (p. 285). Source: David Theo Goldberg, ‘Liberalism’s Limits: Carlyle and Mill on “The Negro Question”’, Nineteenth Century Contexts 22:2, pp. 203-216.; Ian Campbell, ‘Carlyle and the Negro Question Again’, Criticism 13:3 (Summer 1971), pp. 279-290.
[ii] Emery Neff is one of several Carlyle scholars to attribute the shocked reaction of his audience to a dichotomy in literary, and not moral, sophistication. Carlyle's ‘dictatorial tone and paradoxical choice of illustration repelled sincere humanitarians, no longer accustomed to eighteenth-century satire, before they could perceive his foresight of the disasters involved in giving the Negro the illusory freedom of the competitive labor market, and before they could understand the parable as to 'free' labor in England.’ E. Neff, Carlyle (New York, 1968), p. 233
[iii] ‘My friends, I have come to the sad conclusion that SLAVERY, whether established by law, or by law abrogated, exists very extensively in this world, in and out of the West Indies; and, in fact, that you cannot abolish slavery by act of parliament, but can only abolish the name of it, which is very little!’ (p 17). But elsewhere in the Discourse, he writes: ‘That your relation to the Negroes, in this thing called Slavery (with such an emphasis upon the word) be actually fair, just, and according to the facts; – fair, I say, not in the sight of New England platforms, but of God Almighty the Maker of both Negroes and you. That is the one ground on which men can take their stand; in the long run all human causes, and this cause too, will come to be settled there. Forgive me for saying that I do not think you have yet got to that point...’ (p. 31-32). Source: Thomas Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the N**** Question, ed. Thomas Bosworth (London, 1853).
