Thomas Carlyle

The British essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was the leading social critic of early Victorian England. Disseminating German idealist thought in his country, with Calvinist zeal he preached against materialism and mechanism during the industrial revolution.

Thomas Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, on Dec. 4, 1795. His father, a stonemason, was an intelligent man and a pious Calvinist. Carlyle was educated at Annan Grammar School and Edinburgh University, where he read voraciously and distinguished himself in mathematics. He abandoned his original intention to enter the ministry and turned instead first to school teaching and then to literary hackwork, dreaming all the while of greatness as a writer. A reading of Madame de Staël's Germany introduced him to German thought and literature, and in 1823-1824 he published a Life of Schiller in the London Magazine and in 1824 a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

Meanwhile Carlyle had passed through a religious crisis similar to the one he was to describe in Sartor Resartus and had met Jane Baillie Welsh, a brilliant and charming girl, who recognized his genius and gave him encouragement and love. Through a tutorship in the Buller family Carlyle made his first trip to London, where he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other leading literary figures. He returned to Scotland, married Jane Welsh on Oct. 17, 1826, and settled first in Edinburgh and subsequently at Craigenputtock, an isolated farmhouse belonging to his wife's family. It was during this period that he wrote a series of essays for the Edinburgh Review and the Foreign Review which were later grouped as Miscellaneous and Critical Essays. Among these were essays on Burns, Goethe, and Richter and the important "Signs of the Times," his first essay on contemporary social problems.

"Sartor Resartus"

It was at Craigenputtock that Carlyle wrote Sartor Resartus, his most characteristic work. Originally rejected by London editors, it was first published in Fraser's Magazine in 1833-1834 and did not attain book form in England until 1838, after Ralph Waldo Emerson had introduced it in America and after the success of Carlyle's The French Revolution. The first appearance of Sartor Resartus was greeted with "universal disapprobation," in part because of its wild, grotesque, and rambling mixture of serious and comic styles. This picturesque and knotted prose was to become Carlyle's hallmark.

The theme of the book is that the material world is symbolic of the spiritual world of ultimate reality. Man's creeds, beliefs, and institutions, which are all in tatters because of the enormous advances of modern thought and science, have to be tailored anew as his reason perceives the essential mystery behind the natural world. Carlyle's concern is to allow for a change of forms while insisting on the permanence of spirit in opposition to the materialistic and utilitarian bias of 18th-century thought. Part of his thesis is exemplified in the career of an eccentric fictitious German professor, Teufelsdröckh, whose papers Carlyle pretends to be editing. He progresses from "The Everlasting No" of spiritual negation, through "The Centre of Indifference" of resignation, to "The Everlasting Yea," a positive state of mind in which he recognizes the value of suffering and duty over selfish pleasure.

Career in London

Carlyle came into his maturity with Sartor and longed to abandon short articles in favor of a substantial work. Accordingly, he turned to a study of the French Revolution, encouraged in the project by John Stuart Mill, who gave him his own notes and materials. As a help in his researches he moved to London, settling in Chelsea. The publication of The French Revolution in 1837 established Carlyle as one of the leading writers of the day. The book demonstrates his belief in the Divine Spirit's working in man's affairs. Carlyle rejected the "dry-as-dust" method of factual history writing in favor of immersing himself in his subject and capturing its spirit and movement—hence the focus on the drama and scenic quality of events and on the mounting impact of detail. His ability to animate history is Carlyle's triumph, but his personal reading of the significance of a great event lays him open to charges of subjectivity and ignorance of the careful study of economic and political detail so admired by later schools of historical research.

Carlyle's great popularity led him to give several series of public lectures on German literature, the history of literature, modern European revolutions, and finally, and most significantly, on heroes and hero worship. These lectures were published in 1841 as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in Literature. This work reflects his increasing hostility to modern egalitarian democracy and his stress upon the inequality of men's wisdom and the incorporation, as it were, of divine purpose. Carlyle's insistence upon the need for heroic leadership is the reason why he was attacked—often mistakenly—as an apostle of force or dictatorial rule.

Late Works

Carlyle's hero worship is responsible for the two largest projects of his later career. He first intended to rehabilitate Oliver Cromwell by means of a history of the Puritan Revolution but later narrowed his project to a collection of Cromwell's letters and speeches connected by narrative and commentary (1845). And from 1852 to 1865 he labored on a biography of Frederick the Great (1865) against the mounting uncongeniality and intractability of the subject. During these years Carlyle exerted a great influence on younger contemporaries such as Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, and James Froude. He published a number of criticisms of the economic and social conditions of industrial England, among them Chartism (1839), "Latter-Day" Pamphlets (1850), and Shooting Niagara, and After? (1867). His most significant social criticism, Past and Present (1843), contrasted the organic, hierarchical society of the medieval abbey of Bury St. Edmunds with the fragmented world of modern parliamentary democracy. It hoped for a recognition of moral leadership among the new "captains of industry."

In 1865 Carlyle was elected lord rector of Edinburgh University, but in his last years he was more than ever a lonely, isolated prophet of doom. He died on Feb. 5, 1881, and was buried in Ecclefechan Churchyard.

Further Reading

The standard biography of Carlyle is still James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of His Life, 1795-1835 (2 vols., 1882) and Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, 1834-1881 (2 vols., 1884). For an account and assessment of the controversy occasioned by the biography see Waldo H. Dunn, Froude and Carlyle (1930). A short biography is Julian Symons, Thomas Carlyle: The Life and Ideas of a Prophet (1952). A good introduction to Carlyle's work is Emery Neff, Carlyle (1932). Also useful is Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies (1949). Recommended for general historical background are George Macaulay Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century and After, 1782-1919 (1922; new ed. 1937); David C. Somervell, English Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1929; 6th ed. 1950); G. M. Young, Victorian England: Protrait of an Age (1936; 2d ed. 1953); and Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (1957).

Additional Sources

Campbell, Ian, Thomas Carlyle, New York: Scribner, 1975, 1974.

Clubbe, John, comp., Two reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle, Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1974.

Conway, Moncure Daniel, Thomas Carlyle, Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1977.

Froude, James Anthony, Froude's Life of Carlyle, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979.

Garnett, Richard, Life of Thomas Carlyle, New York: AMS Press, 1979.

Kaplan, Fred, Thomas Carlyle: a biography, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Lammond, D., Carlyle, Philadelphia: R. West, 1978.

Nicoll, Henry James., Thomas Carlyle, Philadelphia: R. West, 1977.

Sagar, S., Round by Repentance Tower: a study of Carlyle, Philadelphia: R. West, 1977. □

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’.

Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881) Scottish historian and political philosopher. He worked as a teacher before starting to write articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia and critical works on German literature in the 1820s. His first major philosophical work was Sartor Resartus (1833–34), which dealt with social values and is written in a mannered prose style. He established his reputation as a historian with his History of the French Revolution (1837). Carlyle's influence on the development of social and political ideas in Britain during the 19th century was considerable.

Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, critic and historian. His most successful work, Sartor Resartus (1836), combined philosophy and autobiography. His histories include The French Revolution (1837). Influenced by Goethe and the German Romantics, he was a powerful advocate of the significance of great leaders in history. He was also an energetic social critic and a proponent of moral values.