Sartor Resartus

Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Composed ca. 1831. Initial magazine serialization Fraser's Magazine Nov. 1833-August 1834, Nos. 47-56, except Jan. and May. First book publication, Boston, 1835; first British edn. 1838. Ed. and with Introd. by Clark S. Northup. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1921 (our source for biblio. data, xxxii).

Not SF, but what SR is is harder to say, beyond a fictional autobiography, satire in the mode of Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub, and philosophy in the Transcendental mode. Relevant here is the protagonist Teufelsdrökh in the depths of alienation and despair, toward the end of ch. 7, "The Everlasting No." In this very bad time, Teufelsdrökh sees himself as the only real person in a society of automata: "Now when I look back, it was a strange isolation I then lived in. The men and women around me ... were but Figures; I had, practically, forgotten that they were not merely automatic" (151). And as the microcosm is mechanized, so the macrocosm: "To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death!" Amidst this mechanism, Teufelsdrökh feels "savage also, as the tiger in his jungle," and "it seemed as if the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured"—combining mechanism and monsters, and also the demonic (152-53). (RDE, 02/08/99)