January 11, 1996 Contact: Barbara McKenna (408/459-2495)

ANNUAL TALK ON THOMAS CARLYLE LOOKS AT "THE STUPIDEST NOVEL IN LONDON"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Hilary Schor is the featured speaker for the annual Norman and Charlotte Strouse Lecture on Thomas Carlyle and His Era at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Schor, an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California, will present a talk titled "The Stupidest Novel in London: Thomas Carlyle and the Sickness of Victorian Fiction." The talk, which is free and open to the public, takes place at 4 p.m. on Thursday, January 18, in Room 325 in McHenry Library. A reception follows.

Thomas Carlyle, a prolific essayist, historian, and social critic, is considered a leading force in the Romantic movement of nineteenth-century England. The title of Schor's talk refers to a comment Carlyle made in an essay titled "On Biography." "He said you could never dismiss another human being," says Schor. "You could walk by a person and think, 'That's the stupidest man in London,' but you could never be sure what was really inside. He believed that biography was a good genre to open all these worlds inside us."

As fond as he was of biography, Carlyle scorned fiction. He described the genre as the most trivial form of literature. Ironically, Schor says, such prominent novelists as Charles Dickens and George Eliot claimed their approach to fiction was influenced by Carlyle's work. "In spite of Carlyle's almost humorous lack of understanding of the goals of Victorian fiction, these novels--which continue to be important today--actually share Carlyle's sense of the mystery of life and worked to convey that to a variety of readers," Schor says.

Schor is the author of Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (Oxford University Press, 1992). She recently completed a book on Dickens and women to be published by Cambridge University Press. Schor has been an associate of the Dickens Project, based at UCSC, since 1984.

The Strouse lectures on Carlyle are given annually at UCSC to complement the Norman and Charlotte Strouse Collection of Thomas Carlyle, a rich holding of Carlyle's books, letters, manuscripts, and other items, established in 1966 and housed in Special Collections at the University Library. The collection continues to grow through support from an endowment from the estate of Norman Strouse. For more information on the talk, call (408) 459-2547.

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