BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS: CONSTRUCTIONS OF IRISH RACIAL DIFFERENCE, THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS, AND REVOLUTIONARY POSSIBILITY IN THE WORK OF CARLYLE AND ENGELS

Abstract

In his 1839 pamphlet, Chartism, Thomas Carlyle assesses current class conflict and working-class radicalism in Britain and declares a national crisis. He articulates this crisis as urgent query facing the English nation: the condition of England question. To represent and to explore this national emergency, Carlyle imagines early Victorian England as a diseased national body.1 For Carlyle, Chartist politics and other manifestations of working-class discontent are outward signs of an illness ravaging England on the surface [which you abolish] to no purpose, if the disease is left untouched (120). Carlyle then qualifies this metaphoric pathologization of working-class insurgency by making a critical distinction between the chimera and the essence of the disease of unrest (119), between its legible symptoms and the deeper causes that they signify. By taking the essence of as his subject, Carlyle insists that his intervention is not another inadequate symptomology. Instead, he stages Chartism as an attempt to provide an epidemiology, a comprehensive study of the causes, transmission, and potential control of Chartist agitation; according to Carlyle, only such epidemiological attention to the origins of the disease will make prophylactic measures and a socioeconomic cure possible. It is not surprising that Carlyle relies on biom?dical discourse to represent the national significance of Chartist agitation. He is drawing on a long history of representations of England and Britain as a body politic as well as a discourse of the 'body social' emerging in early Victorian Britain.2 His metaphor of the infected national body also echoes the rhetoric of middleand upper-class panic about literal contagion in the 1830s, such as cholera and typhus, epidemics which were seen to emanate from urban working-class neighborhoods in urban centers and to contaminate Britain as a whole (Arac 29-30). In addition, Carlyle redeploys the figuration of revolutionary politics as a disease, a metaphor common in British conservative reaction to the French Revolution several decades earlier.