Carlyle, Thomas

Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881), was born in Dumfriesshire, the son of a stonemason. He was educated at Annan Academy and at the University of Edinburgh. He became a teacher but soon took to literary work, tutoring and reviewing. He studied German literature; his life of Schiller appeared in the London Magazine in 1823–4 and was separately published in 1825. This was followed by translations of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1824) and Wilhelm Meister's Travels (1827), the latter being included in his anthology of selections from German authors, German Romance (4 vols, 1827). In 1826 he married Jane Welsh (see above) and after two years in Edinburgh they moved to her farm at Craigenputtock. ‘Signs of the Times’, an attack on Utilitarianism, appeared in 1829 in the Edinburgh Review; Sartor Resartus followed in Fraser's Magazine in 1833–4. In 1834 the Carlyles moved to Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where he worked on his History of the French Revolution, which appeared in 1837; the manuscript of the first volume was accidentally used to light a fire while on loan to J. S. Mill, but Carlyle rewrote it. This work established Carlyle's reputation, and he from this time onward strengthened the position that made him known as ‘the Sage of Chelsea’. His series of lectures, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, delivered in 1840 and published in 1841, attracted glittering and fashionable audiences, and taught him to distrust (and indeed to abandon) his own blend of ‘prophecy and play-acting’. In Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843) Carlyle applied himself to what he called ‘the Condition-of-England question’, attacking both laissez-faire and the dangers of revolution it encouraged, and manifesting with more passion than consistency a sympathy with the industrial poor which heralded the new novels of social consciousness of the 1840s (see Gaskell, E. and Disraeli, B.). His evocation in Past and Present of medieval conditions at the time of Abbot Samson (see Jocelin de Brakelond) provided a new perspective on machinery and craftsmanship that was pursued by Ruskin and W. Morris, but Carlyle, unlike some of his followers, turned increasingly away from democracy towards the kind of feudalism which he saw expressed in the rule of the ‘Strong Just Man’. His ‘Occasional discourse on the nigger question’ (1849) and Latter-day Pamphlets (1850) express his anti-democratic views in an exaggerated form. His admiration for Cromwell was expressed in his edition of Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (2 vols, 1845), and for Frederick the Great of Prussia in a lengthy biography (6 vols, 1858–65). A more modest and, to modern tastes, more readable work, a life of his friend Sterling (with some remarkable reminiscences of Coleridge) appeared in 1851.

Jane Carlyle died in 1866, a blow which he said ‘shattered my whole existence into immeasurable ruin’. He gave her papers and letters in 1871, with ambiguous instructions, to his friend and disciple J. A. Froude, who published them after Carlyle's death, in 1883; Froude also published Carlyle's Reminiscences (1881) and a biography (4 vols, 1882–4). These posthumous publications caused much controversy, largely by breaking the conventions of Victorian biography (against which Carlyle had himself fulminated) to suggest marital discord and sexual inadequacy on Carlyle's part.

Carlyle's influence as social prophet and critic, and his prestige as historian, were enormous during his lifetime. In the 20th cent. his reputation waned, partly because his trust in authority and admiration of strong leaders were interpreted as foreshadowings of Fascism. His prose, which had always presented difficulties, became more obscure with the lapse of time; his violent exclamatory rhetoric, his italics and Teutonic coinages, and his eccentric archaisms and strange punctuation were already known by the late 1850s as ‘Carlylese’.