The first full-scale revaluation in nearly twenty years, this eloquent book highlights Carlyle's histories as the central expression of his genius. History, as Carlyle understood it, is poetry, prophecy, biography, and social criticism all in one. In the writing of history he found his vocation. The story opens with Carlyle's self-creation, during his years in the wilderness of Craigenputtoch, as a prophecy and exegete of the “scripture” of history. Carlyle conceived of his histories as modern prose epics; in The French Revolution, a seminal work in the development of nineteenth-century narrative, Carlyle came closest to realizing this ambition.

John Rosenberg's reading of Carlyle's masterpiece recaptures for the modern reader the excitement and power it exerted on the imaginations of writers as diverse as Mill and Emerson, Dickens and George Eliot, Thackeray and Whitman. The concluding chapters address the later, more problematic writings in which Carlyle's vision narrows and his compassion stiffens into contempt. His indictment of the brutality of laissez-faire capitalism in Past and Present inspired Dickens, Ruskin, and Engels; yet he supported slavery in the American South, and in our own century his Frederick the Great solaced Hitler during the final hours in the Berlin bunker.

Past and Present is Carlyle's last great work and the first in which he loses his way. His confidence in his ability to read the design of history falters, and as the past grows unintelligible, the present becomes intolerable. He retreats within himself, and the signs of that long withdrawal are evident in the fitful brilliance of Cromwell and Frederick the Great, his final meditations on history.

The Idylls of the King is one of the indisputably great long poems in the English language. Yet Tennyson's doom-laden prophecy of the fall of the West has been dismissed as a Victorian-Gothic fairy tale. John D. Rosenberg maintains that no poem of comparable magnitude has been so misread or so maligned in the twentieth century as Tennyson's symbolist masterpiece.

In The Fall of Camelot the author calls into question the modernist orthodoxy that rejects all of Victorian poetry as a Waste Land and ignores the overriding importance of Tennyson to the development of Yeats, T. S. Eliot,and the symbolists. Far from being an escapist medieval charade, the Idylls offers an apocalyptic prevision of the nightmare of modern history. Concealed under the exquisitely romantic surface of the verse is a world of obsessive sensuality and collapsing values that culminates in the "last dim weird battle the West." Perhaps the subtlest anatomy of the failure of ideality in our literature, the Idylls is not only about hazards of mistaking illusion for reality; it dramatically enacts those dangers, ensnaring the reader in the same delusions that maim and destroy the characters.



Rosenberg shows that Tennyson has created a new genre whose true originality criticism has yet to perceive. By employing landscape as a symbolic extension of character, Tennyson obliterates the gap between self and scene and frees himself from bondage toconventional narration.

Throughout the Idylls charactercannot be extricated from setting orsymbol, and neither has substanceapart from the narrative in which it isenmeshed. In essence, the narrativeis a sequence of symbols protracted intime, the symbolism a kind ofcondensed narration.

"Timescape" in the Idylls, like landscape, serves to bind all eventsof the poem into a continuous present.Arthur is at once a Christ figure andSun-King whose career parallels that ofhis kingdom, waxing and waningwith the annual cycle. At the heart ofArthur's story lies the dual cycle of hispassing and promised return.Incorporating this cycle into itsstructure, the Idylls is itself a kind ofliterary second coming of Arthur, aresurrection in Victorian England of thelong sequence of Arthuriads extendingback before Malory and forwardthrough Spenser, Dryden, Scott, andTennyson.