In the eighteen-hundreds, Thomas Carlyle wrote some letters about Ralph Waldo Emerson. Two of these letters describe him in vastly different ways. One letter was written to John Stuart Mill, and the other to a Mrs. Baring. Carlyle’s point of view and respect for Emerson remains in both, however due to the different audience, his tone and use of language is incredibly different. The difference in audience was the main reason the letters were so different. In the first letter, Carlyle wrote to another Victorian writer, thus making his language much more formal. An example of this would be the way he says “was thro’ the whole Encyclopedia with us,” when describing Emerson to Mill. Carlyle wrote in a sense of recommending Emerson for a job, making Emerson seem extraordinary. In contrast, when Carlyle wrote to Mrs. Baring, he said that Emerson seemed to have a rule that “talk should go on incessantly except when sleep interrupted it.” When he wrote this letter, he seemed to be talking to a friend informally. …show more content…
The way his first letter was written, he almost seemed to be recommending Emerson for a job. His tone was very positive and proper, as he made Emerson appear to be an extremely pleasant man to be around. Fourteen years later, when writing to Mrs. Baring, he seemed to have changed his opinion of Emerson. The second letter was written in a fashion similar to two friends gossiping, as Carlyle wrote things about the way Emerson looked such as his “thin triangular face, no jaws nor lips, lean-hooked nose; face of a cock:” He then jokes saying that one cannot become intimate with him, but Carlyle told Mrs. Baring “to fall in love with him if you can!” These things created a gossipy and joking tone for his second