SOURCE: "The Early Development of Carlyle's Style," in PMLA, Vol. LXXII, No. 5, December, 1957, pp. 936-51.

In the following essay, Roellinger asserts that the eccentric style of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is absent from Carlyle's earlier writings. Roellinger maintains that a review of Carlyle's early writings shows that Carlyle "first mastered a rather conventional style, " patterns of which remain largely unbroken until the late 1820s.

In his admirable lectures, The Problem of Style, J. Middleton Murry illustrates one of the most common meanings of the word "style" by this remark: "I know who wrote the article in last week's Saturday Review—Mr. Saintsbury. You couldn't mistake his style." Here, according to Mr. Murry, "'style' means that personal idiosyncrasy of expression by which we recognize a writer."¹ This is a limited conception of style, but it is useful in studying the style of certain writers. Murry mentions Dr. Johnson, Gibbon, Meredith...