Feeling History: Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, and the Melodramatic Mode.

Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution has since its release been regarded as an experiment of form, style, and vision. Carlyle's biographer James Anthony Froude said that its "form is quite peculiar, unlike that of any history ever written before, or probably to be written again" (76). The peculiarity of Carlyle's work has baffled critics since Froude, and while many have attached it to other generic forms like the epic and even the novel, very little work has tied it to the melodrama of the nineteenth century. By carefully reading The French Revolution through the melodramatic mode, the wavelength trajectory of Carlyle's work, its oscillations between scenes of dramatic action and stilled pictorial tableaux, and its radically conservative politics begin to make sense. This paper connects Carlyle to the popular melodramas of the period, such as those by Edward Bulwer Lytton, John Walker, and Douglas Jerrold, and finds in both their politics and the emotional economy of their works a melodramatic mode that The French Revolution emulates. Early Victorian society seemed on the brink of upheaval, and readers looked to The French Revolution to be moved, emboldened, and to try to make sense of the world around them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]