Carlyle, Thomas

views updated

CARLYLE, THOMAS

CARLYLE, THOMAS (1795–1881), Scottish historian, biographer, translator, and social critic.

Born in Ecclefechan in the Annandale section of Dumfriesshire, Scotland, Thomas Carlyle was raised by stern Calvinists of low social stature. Carlyle enrolled at the University of Edinburgh in 1809 to prepare for the ministry but turned instead to mathematics. In his early twenties, Carlyle studied German literature and idealist philosophy. He came especially to admire the writing of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. In 1821 he met the sharp-witted Jane Baillie Welsh, whom he married five years later, despite her family's higher social rank.

In August of 1822, Carlyle underwent a trans-formative religious experience on Leith Walk in Edinburgh. His personal vision convinced him that a transcendental, godly presence animated the universe and put him at odds with what he saw as the wicked materialism of the times and its adjutants: pride, secularism, agnosticism, liberalism, and democracy.

Carlyle came to regard poets and writers as the new prophets of the age. In 1824 he published an English translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, and in 1825 he published his own Life of Schiller. In 1827 he published four volumes of translations from the work of prominent German writers, known together as German Romance.

In 1828 he and his wife, Jane, moved to the isolated outskirts of Craigenputtock in Scotland. From there Carlyle wrote and published Sartor Resartus (The tailor retailored) when Fraser's Magazine agreed to serialize it in 1833–1834. His prose immediately stood out. It was combative, emphatic, satirical, highly allusive, metaphorically recursive and often boldly paradoxical, embedded in a loose, elliptical sentence structure. His book called for a redressing of the imbalance between spiritual and material values in modern European society through personal, inward reformation. In 1834 he and wife, Jane, moved to Chelsea, London.

The publication of The French Revolution in 1837 transformed Carlyle into a public figure. No dependable history yet existed in English of the French Revolution. Carlyle penned it in a fiery, momentous style that made his narrative palpable to readers. Characteristically, he ranked personalities and circumstances ahead of abstract analysis, contending that history was driven by the irrational and often dark emotions of individuals. Its completion was unexpectedly delayed by two years. In the

winter of 1835, he loaned the manuscript to his friend John Stuart Mill and Mrs. Harriet Taylor, in whose possession it was mysteriously burned. For Carlyle, social instability and violence in France as elsewhere could only be checked by strong, heroic individuals, a subject he elaborated upon in On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).

After The French Revolution, Carlyle turned to social questions in the form of essays and biographies. His 1839 publication on Chartism and his 1843 book, Past and Present, sharply attacked the social misery generated in England by the Industrial Revolution, especially that of women and children working in factories and mines. Past and Present targeted the "idle dilettantes" of the agricultural aristocracy who, he argued, ruled without virtue or talent. He also inveighed against the Corn Laws that kept the country elite enriched. He censured the unfeeling utilitarianism of the political economist Jeremy Bentham that championed a godless "profit and loss philosophy" and the laissez-faire policies that divided mankind into atomized cogs in vast profit-making machines. His social reformism was also motivated by fear of radical revolution from below. He derided democracy as mob rule.

Carlyle's later publications alternated between the biographical and the social, with Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845), Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), and his six-volume Frederick the Great (1858–1865). He was elected Rector of Edinburgh University in 1865, the year of his wife's death. That same year, Governor Edward John Eyre of Jamaica suppressed a rebellion of plantation workers in Morant Bay, allowing at least 439 people to be killed retributively. Between 1866 and 1869 Carlyle headed a committee that defended Eyre in a fierce public debate that pitted him and his colleagues Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, and Alfred Tennyson against Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and Herbert Spencer. In this same period, Carlyle renewed his attacks on popular representative government through debates on the Second Reform Bill of 1867. He died in 1881.

Carlyle influenced many later Victorians who first read him in the 1830s and 1840s. His impact is present in Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845), John Ruskin's Stones of Venice (1851–1853), and in Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–1853) and Hard Times (1854), the latter being dedicated to Carlyle. Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) was based largely on Carlyle's French Revolution, which Dickens claimed to have read hundreds of times.