[Chapter 3, note 36, of the author's Carlyle and the Search for Authority, which the Ohio State University Press published in 1991. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright. indicates a link to material not in the original print version. GPL]

On the pervasive desire to escape history in Victorian culture, see Welsh, chap. 13. Carlyle's use of tripartite structures in Wotton Reinfred, The French Revolution, Past and Present, and elsewhere is also related to this tripartite historical model. The cyclical pattern of creation and destruction is most fully elaborated in the (organic) image of the phoenix that is reborn from its own ashes and in the organic cycle of growth and decay (SR, 244; see 40, 47, 56, 122, 177, 200, 216, 244).


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