Eccentricity begins at home: Carlyle's centrality in Victorian thought

Rather than regarding eccentricity as a marginal phenomenon, this essay considers it a crucial mechanism with which Western culture has been negotiating its dynamic margins while retaining confidence in an imaginary centre since the seventeenth century. The nineteenth century continued and refined this dialectic in order to balance its tensions between innovation and traditionalism, individualism and strong beliefs in the demands of society, historicist views of Englishness and its internal as well as external challenges. Thomas Carlyle, in his function as a controversial Victorian 'sage', embodies this 'centric' function fo eccentricity in his contradictory and digressive writings, especially On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Past and Present, but also his early novel Sartor Resartus. This makes his texts, sometimes against their own explicit intentions, early advocates of intertextuality and a poetics of culture as well as creating features in them that may be called 'deconstructive'.