Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-fvjsw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-15T21:07:33.993Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Jeffrey: Mutilator of Carlyle's “Burns”?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Maxwell H. Goldberg*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts State College

Extract

For the persistence, since 1924, of contrasting opinions as to Jeffrey's treatment of the text of Carlyle's “Burns,” David Alec Wilson is in no small measure responsible. First, Wilson's violent partisanship apparently has led some critics of Carlyle to assume that they may disregard the Wilson Life without discrediting themselves. Second, Wilson's inadequate handling of the “Burns” episode itself has permitted continued divergences of opinion among those students of Carlyle who seem directly acquainted with the pertinent Jeffrey-Carlyle correspondence in the second volume of the Life. For, though Wilson quotes generously from this correspondence, and though he makes frequent references to details in it, he nowhere explicitly gives the conclusion to which his own fresh examination of the evidence may have led him. Wilson's inadequacy is reflected both in popular digests of his account of the Carlyle-Jeffrey clashes concerning the “Burns” and in Isaac Watson Dyer's bibliographical summary of this account.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1941

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable