Since August 2016, in the mornings, after I get to work, get my coffee, fix my breakfast half-sandwich, and have my devotional time, I’ve been working on my bibliography of Thomas Carlyle’s compositions. I had done a lot of work on it before, and had almost all of his known works entered. But I wasn’t sure of their composition order; nor did I know whether there were other works that prior bibliographers missed.

I started work on this at least five years ago, but laid it aside when other items pressed. Then I worked on it from late 2014 to about September 2015, but laid it aside again. From August 2016 until this week, my morning routine has included a half hour with Thomas Carlyle. During these months I made significant progress. I had, back in 2014-15, done the main entries, then researched in his letters to put in order those compositions up to around 1830. Since August till last week I was up to 1841. I had moved from his years of writing mainly magazine articles to mainly books. So the compositions were fewer, and the research easier.

I know I’ve written about this before, but bear with me while I go through it again.

This work is tentatively titled Thomas Carlyle: A Chronological Bibliography of His Compositions—or something close to that. I want to get his works into the order they were written. His first bibliography, published the year of his death (1881), had his articles grouped by magazine, and his books chronological by publication date. But it missed a lot of his unattributed pieces. The next one, published in  1928 by Isaac Dyer, picked up most of those unattributed works, but arranged them alphabetically. He also had a chronology, but it didn’t include every composition.

From 1963 through 1965, G.B. Tennyson published a book and some related magazine articles on Carlyle. In these he included chronological bibliographies, of his prose and his poems, for the period up to the publishing of Sartor Resartus in 1834 (but going to 1840 with the poems). Then, in 1989, Rodger D. Tarr published what is seen as the definitive bibliography of Carlyle. It is arranged chronologically by date of publication, though contains many notes to help establish a chronology.

So, I’ve found these four bibliographies of Carlyle’s works. What need is there of another? Perhaps none. But none of them were what I wanted for my Carlyle research. I wanted to know the order he wrote things in to try to determine the changes in his writings and tie those to the events he was part of. I think I found one such key event, and I’m working on a book about it. But, to be certain, I needed to know the order in which he wrote everything. Not finding what I wanted, I decided to produce it myself.

I think I’m around 70% done with the bibliography. So why stop now, you ask? I’m just too busy. When I look at my writing/publishing to do list for 2017, and try to establish some priorities based on publishing, the bibliography is low on the list, and will likely be for two or three years. Other things are more important. In a future blog post I’ll again go through my 2017 plans, and update my readers on where I stand with them.

In fact, I’m not sure I’ll ever publish the bibliography. I don’t know that it has much commercial potential. Carlyle scholars are few. Those interested in his works may be a few more, but still not many. No, I’ll work on other stuff for a while. Maybe in six months or a year the urge to finish this will resurface, and I’ll get at it again. But for now, Carlyle and his works will have to lay dormant to me.