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Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody
-Bob Dylan
Most if not all of Thomas Carlyle's peregrinations have exasperated readers in various registers and contexts, but none of them has given as much offense as his 1849 "An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" and its 1853 pamphlet-incarnation "An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question."1 Early responses immediately gravitated toward hostility or praise. In the United States, horrified abolitionists who felt that the great Carlyle had defended the institution of slavery as a divinely mandated condition of humanity dueled intellectually with the forces who viewed Carlyle as great because he had recognized the universal value of Anglo-Saxon destiny as the foundation of the southern way of life, that is a justification for slaveholding. In Britain, the responses were equally bifurcated, albeit on slightly different grounds. Those sympathetic with the abolitionists were duly outraged, while others contended that Carlyle's true rhetorical mission in the piece was to reveal the tragic brand of "Telescopic Philanthropy" instilled by the misplaced interests of hyper- critical liberalism.2 During the intervening 160 years, various critics have struggled along yet another bifurcated track. They have explained Carlyle's vicious language and apparent support of slavery in various contexts and as a result have alternately apologized for him as a man of his times and/or vilified him on the grounds of universal moral outrage, all in the exasper- ating interest of understanding exactly what it was that Carlyle was trying to say in the "Discourse[s]." To illustrate, whereas Carol Collins interprets Carlyle's rhetoric as a "demandingly esoteric use of metaphor," Catherine Hall views the work as a product of Carlyle's "disturbed and enraged psyche" (24; 12). Whereas Chris Vanden Bossche claims that Carlyle's shocking rhetoric stems logically from his "despair at being unable to effect any meaningful change," Jude V Nixon calls it an ineffectively "crude concoction of sincerity ignorance, contradiction, semi-misanthropism, exaggeration, and conceit, all blended with a Dickensian eye towards cari- cature" (129; 101). The one apparent point of consensus in any review of the literature surrounding the essay/pamphlet leads to an overwhelming question: Why return to such a noxious declaration of Victorian racialism? Even in the context of "Carlyle...