Short answers, pulled from the story.
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher born on the 4th of December 1795 in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. Known as the "Sage of Chelsea", he was considered the "undoubted head of English letters" in the Victorian era and was the first writer to use the expression "meaning of life." His writings influenced figures as diverse as Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mahatma Gandhi, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Sartor Resartus is a semi-autobiographical philosophical novel published serially in Fraser's Magazine between November 1833 and August 1834. It presents Carlyle's philosophy of "Natural Supernaturalism", the idea that all things are "Clothes" that simultaneously reveal and conceal the divine, and that duty, work, and silence are essential. It was largely ignored on first publication but found early recognition from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who arranged for its first book publication in Boston in April 1836.
Carlyle was the principal founder of the London Library in 1841 and helped establish the National Portrait Galleries in London and Edinburgh. He became Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh in November 1865, defeating Benjamin Disraeli by a vote of 657 to 310, and received the Pour le Merite in 1874.
After Carlyle's death in 1881, his friend James Anthony Froude edited and published the Reminiscences and subsequently a four-volume biography that presented a highly negative image of Carlyle and his marriage to Jane Welsh Carlyle. Froude failed to excise comments offensive to living persons, and critics including Charles Eliot Norton and Alexander Carlyle argued that Froude had mishandled the entrusted materials deliberately and dishonestly. Owen Dudley Edwards remarked that by the turn of the century, "Carlyle was known more than read."
The Great Man theory is a philosophy of history, promulgated by Carlyle in his 1841 work On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, which contends that history is shaped by exceptional individuals. Carlyle developed the theory in longer studies including Cromwell and Frederick the Great. His view of history as a "Prophetic Manuscript" progressing on a cyclical basis was expressed through his distinctive use of the present tense in his historical writing.
Carlyle had long been celebrated in Germany, with passages from his History of Frederick the Great forming part of the German school curriculum. His support of Bismarck, his Great Man theory, and his criticism of democracy led Allied nations to regard him as a Prussianist during the First World War. In 1933, K. O. Schmidt described him as the first English National Socialist, and in 1945 Joseph Goebbels read passages from the Frederick the Great history to Hitler in the Führerbunker. Scholars including Ernst Cassirer, however, rejected the proto-fascist label, arguing that the moral underpinning of Carlyle's thought is incompatible with twentieth-century totalitarianism.