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Carlyle initially saw fetishism as a pathology of the French Revolution, but went on to develop this trope in envisioning a type of political attitude increasingly necessary for the British empire in the absence of stronger legitimation. By fetishism, Carlyle referred to the phenomenon of voluntary submission to one's own creation. Through this trope, Carlyle was able to acknowledge the growing political strength, restlessness, and productivity of British industrial labor, and the importance of maintaining political authority within the growing empire. In many essays but most notably in Past and Present, Carlyle turns to reading as an exemplary instance of self-forgetful labor — a labor that even confers a fetish-like autonomy on the text as object. Even in early works such as Sartor Resartus, self-disavowing labor and self-forgetful creation can be seen as Carlyle's chosen sequel to Romantic irony.

Chapter 5, ‘Scalar: Pugin, Carlyle, Dickens’, is about scale. It looks in detail at three writers in London who produced very different versions of the ‘modern’ in the late 1830s and early 1840s, but all of whom realized that something very big indeed was happening around them. Across different genres, Augustus Welby Pugin, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens all chose to represent democracy and reform specifically as a problem of scale. This chapter investigates their understanding of the seriality and scalability of market capitalism and the anxieties and opportunities that this revealed to them. Each took a different view, from Carlyle’s apocalyptic denunciation of a massification which soars vertiginously between the gigantic and the tiny; to Pugin’s insistence on a built and material ethics of the human scale; and Dickens’s cautious optimism about this moment of scalar derangement and the redistribution of the sensible.

This chapter examines the so-called contrast narrative, an unusual but influential historical genre in the early nineteenth century. It discusses the idea that historical thought involves a dialogue between two distinct moments but finds no acknowledgment in history's formal structure and the contradiction between history's conceptual underpinnings and its formal arrangements. The chapter also provides examples of contrasting narrative including Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present and Augustus Pugin's Contrasts which used doubled or ironic narratives for purposes of ideological critique.