Abstract
In 1833 Thomas Carlyle published a long essay on Count Cagliostro in Fraser’s Magazine. It may seem an odd choice of subject — a Sicilian mountebank from the previous century, the source of whose lasting notoriety was a bit part in the Diamond Necklace Affair that rocked pre-Revolutionary France, and whose most enduring work was the confession extracted by the Roman Inquisition, a tome published in 1792, three years previous to Cagliostro—s demise in an Inquisitional cell. An obscure story, perhaps, but for Carlyle history’s unfoldings always concealed fruitful matter: not only heroes, but their shadows — not just true coin, but counterfeits — signified. Carlyle’s essay thus holds a great deal of interest for us, for in the act of identifying what was false about Cagliostro, Carlyle essays a version of the ‘true’, a separating of the wheat from the chaff that leaves us with Carlyle’s historical kernel. In the middle of this winnowing, the cultural and institutional formation we call ‘Romanticism’ begins to assume a shape. Viewing the process of Romanticism’s self-becoming it helps to focus on those moments where the Romantic encounters — throws down and expels — its necessary other. Carlyle—s essay on Count Cagliostro is just such an illuminating instance. The essay was written on the verge of the Victorian period (1833) about a figure whose career terminated in the 1790s.
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© 2008 Robert Miles
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Miles, R. (2008). The Romantic Abject: Cagliostro, Carlyle, Coleridge. In: Romantic Misfits. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582279_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582279_4
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