Carlyle, Thomas

Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881). Historian and man of letters. Born in Ecclefechan, the son of a strict presbyterian stonemason, and educated for the kirk at Edinburgh University, Carlyle showed a particular aptitude for mathematics, and earned a living as a tutor, schoolmaster, and journalist, developing a deep interest in contemporary German literature; his Life of Schiller appeared in 1823, his translation of Wilhelm Meister in 1824. His marriage to Jane Welsh Carlyle marked the beginning of a long, celebrated, and difficult marriage. By the late 1820s he had become a noted reviewer and commentator on contemporary politics, society, and morals, his collection Sartor resartus appearing in 1833–4. He abandoned Edinburgh for London in 1834 and began a career as a historian and political moralist. His essays on Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843) dramatized the moral demands subjects make on their rulers with remarkable power. His French Revolution (1837), his edition of Cromwell's speeches (1845), and his enormous study of Frederick the Great (1858–65) are brilliant imaginative accounts of the moral power of political leadership. By the end of his life Carlyle had become a fashionably unfashionable prophet who refused an honour from Disraeli and preferred burial at Ecclefechan to Westminster abbey.

Nicholas Phillipson