Sartor Resartus

Sartor Resartus is an 1836 novel by Scottish historian and social commentator Thomas Carlyle. It was intended to be an entirely new genre: both fact and fiction, both satirical and serious, both fantasy and historical, filled with self-aware commentary on its own tropes and structure. The book was first published in serial format from 1833 to 1834 in Fraser Magazine. The title is taken from the Latin for “the tailor retailored,” and the work presents itself as a commentary and analysis on the works of a fictional German philosopher, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. The novel is, in part, a parody of German Idealist philosophy, but Carlyle also expresses some serious ideas of his own.

Sartor Resartus pretends to be an unnamed editor’s review of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh’s book Clothes: Their Origin and Influence for Fraser Magazine. At the beginning of “Book 1,” the editor rambles, complaining that the current, post-Enlightenment scientific view of the world takes the mystery out of concepts like “the Creation of a World.” He feels that the scientific way of looking at the world has ignored its most important “tissue”: clothing. To that end, he is translating Teufelsdröckh’s book on the subject from German to English. Carlyle hides many jokes in the names and places he invents: Diogenes Teufelsdröckh translates to something like “god-born devil-dung,” and the man teaches at Weissnichtwo, or “Know-not-where,” University, where he is the professor of Things in General.

The editor says that he has written letters to the author in Germany requesting autobiographical information that he feels might shed light on the book, which he does not seem to understand fully. Following this are some quotations from Teufelsdröckh’s book, the editor’s frustrated commentaries, and quotations from other authors, such as Goethe and Shakespeare. Book 1 of Sartor Resartus ends with a reply from Teufelsdröckh’s office: several bags, each marked with a different symbol of the Zodiac. In the bags are jumbled scraps of paper with tidbits of the autobiographical information the editor has requested.



In Book 2, the editor has painstakingly sorted and assembled these scraps into something coherent and relates Teufelsdröckh’s life story. As an infant, he was found on the doorstep of a couple, Andreas and Gretchen Futteral, along with some gold and a birth certificate displaying his full name. Teufelsdrockh ponders the meaning of names, comparing a man’s name to the first item of clothing that he wears. He claims that all language is a form of naming, giving meaning to objects and abstract ideas. In fact, he says, a man’s name might determine the course of his life, and he says that his own name led him to create his philosophy of clothes.

As a child, Teufelsdröckh is instilled with spiritual discipline, and is recognized as intelligent. Consequently, he is sent to Hinterschlag, or “Slap-Behind,” Gymnasium for an education. He is academically gifted and admired by teachers but bullied by his fellow students. The adult Teufelsdröckh is grateful for his education but frustrated with its limitations; he feels it did little to build his moral character.

After completing his education, Teufelsdröckh flounders. First, he tries his hand at law, but quickly gives it up. He searches fruitlessly both for meaningful work and for meaning in his life, keenly aware of how much time is passing him by. In time, he finds a teaching post, where he is able to find some recognition among the German nobility. He meets a woman named Blumine, or “Goddess of Flowers”—the editor interjects his belief that this name is a pseudonym—and falls in love, abandoning his post to pursue her. However, Blumine is in love with a British man named Towgood, which thrusts Teufelsdröckh into a spiritual crisis. He tries wandering the countryside in despair, only to encounter Blumine and Towgood blissfully enjoying their honeymoon. Teufelsdröckh feels insignificant, finding his life meaningless, and becomes deeply depressed, sinking into something called the “Everlasting No,” Carlyle’s term for disbelief in God and the divine.



The editor then has some trouble piecing the fragments together but surmises that Teufelsdröckh went on to fight in a war, either literally or figuratively. His philosophical journey takes him from the moment of “Everlasting No” through a spiritual “Center of Indifference,” reflecting detachment from religion and from life in general. Eventually, Teufelsdröckh moves through this indifference to an affirmation of life in the “Everlasting Yes,” finding meaning and purpose through a belief in the divine.

In Book 3, the narrative veers from Teufelsdröckh’s autobiography back into philosophy. The first few chapters discuss the history of clothing and fashion, and then the importance of symbols. Teufelsdröckh believes that adopting a symbolic worldview (rather than the scientific one that the nameless editor laments at the beginning) is the only way for humankind to glimpse a higher truth.

Next, the book lays out the two types of men Teufelsdröckh believes are exemplary as wearers of clothing: beggars and dandies, sartorial opposites. He says that both wear a “peculiar Costume.” Here, the editor interrupts and says that Teufelsdröckh cannot be serious in his philosophy; his viewpoint must be a satirical one.



The final chapter discusses “the Tailor,” who is “something of a Creator or Divinity,” expanding on the metaphor of clothing as a philosophy and a metaphor for life. The editor ends with a few comments of his own, mocking Teufelsdröckh’s use of metaphor and his disorganized autobiographical fragments. He notes that Teufelsdröckh disappeared somewhere around the time of the French Revolution of 1830, suggesting that Teufelsdröckh joined in that fight.

The book is dense but has drawn much praise for its unusual approach to meaning and symbolism. Literary critic Harold Bloom compared the book to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, written over a century later in 1939, saying the two were remarkably thematically similar. Rodger L. Tarr writes that Sartor Resartus’s influence on American literature is “difficult to overstate.”