Rethinking the Victorian Sage: Nineteenth‐Century Prose and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy

Abstract

AbstractThe label of the ‘Victorian sage’ has been employed increasingly widely in recent criticism to describe the tradition of oracular rhetoric in nineteenth‐century prose deriving from Carlyle. This ‘sage discourse’ has up till now only been defined in formalist terms, as consisting of certain characteristic assumptions about the use and validity of rhetoric. This article suggests that it is possible to historicize the notion of the ‘Victorian sage’ by linking it to the Scottish tradition of ‘Common Sense philosophy’ that was extremely influential in Britain up till the 1870s. The key feature of Common Sense philosophy from this perspective is the importance it attaches to the use of language in philosophical argument. Rhetoric in the Common Sense school's view embodies an implicit form of knowledge, an attitude which the article suggests also underlies the markedly rhetorical forms of argument used by ‘Victorian Sages’. Common Sense philosophy assesses philosophical arguments from an ontological perspective, namely what kind of relationship to a thinker's social environment a philosophy promotes, and this perspective can be seen to underlie the turn to biographical and autobiographical modes of writing in nineteenth‐century prose.