Thomas Carlyle

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Thomas Carlyle arrived at the University of Edinburgh in November 1809 by walking one hundred miles from his home village in Dumfriesshire. He was not yet fourteen years old. That solitary march set the tone for everything that followed: a mind that refused to accept the world as it was, a man who would become the undisputed head of English letters and then spend the second half of his career being argued about, distrusted, and written off.

  Born on the 4th of December 1795 in Ecclefechan, a village in southwest Scotland, Carlyle would go on to found the London Library, help establish the National Portrait Galleries in London and Edinburgh, and receive the Pour le Merite from Otto von Bismarck. His books shaped novelists, painters, trade unionists, abolitionists, Indian industrialists, and, controversially, German nationalists. He coined the phrase "Dismal Science" for political economy and was the first writer to use the expression "meaning of life."

  He was also a man whose private correspondence and domestic life, exposed after his death by his friend James Anthony Froude, would nearly erase his reputation entirely. How a stonemason's son from a Scottish village became the defining intellectual presence of the Victorian era, and how that presence became a problem the world could not stop arguing about, is a story that begins with a faith lost and a long walk taken.

• 2. The Education of a Doubter

  ›

  James Carlyle, Thomas's father, was a stonemason turned farmer whose personal maxim was that "man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream." His son would spend a lifetime speculating, feeling, and dreaming, but the work ethic embedded by that maxim never left him.

  At Annan Academy, which Carlyle attended from around 1806 to 1809, he was severely bullied until he fought back, giving "stroke for stroke." He remembered the first two years there as among the most miserable of his life. At Edinburgh, studying mathematics under John Leslie and moral philosophy under Thomas Brown, he showed exceptional talent, and was credited with the invention of the Carlyle circle. He was also reading voraciously in the university library: philosophy, history, literature of the eighteenth century.

  The first serious crack in his faith came when he read Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. As he later recalled, "I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw that Christianity was not true. Then came the most trying time of my life." He had enrolled in a theology course at Divinity Hall in 1813, with a ministerial career planned. By May 1817 he abstained from re-enrolment, news his parents received with, in his word, "magnanimity."

  His mother Margaret, pious and devout, had always hoped her eldest son would become a minister. She had taught him to read despite being barely literate herself. Carlyle's break from the church was, quietly, also a break from her deepest wish for him. He would carry the weight of that deviation into everything he subsequently wrote about faith, doubt, and the spiritual condition of modern humanity.

• 3. Languages, Letters, and German Revelation

  ›

  In the autumn of 1817, Carlyle read Germaine de Stael's De l'Allemagne, published four years earlier, and immediately sought out a German teacher to learn the pronunciation. That decision changed the course of English literary culture.

  By September 1819 he was reading Goethe. By the autumn of 1820 he had added Italian to his languages and was working through Vittorio Alfieri, Dante Alighieri, and Jean Charles Leonard de Sismondi, though German literature remained his primary enthusiasm, having "revealed" to him a "new Heaven and new Earth." His translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship appeared in 1824, followed by a biography of Friedrich Schiller in 1825. These brought him what had previously eluded him: a decent income and a modest reputation.

  In late 1817, reading in Irving's library, he encountered the works of David Hume and Gibson, which hardened his religious scepticism. But German Romanticism gave him something to replace Christian orthodoxy: a philosophy of what he called "Natural Supernaturalism." In his framing, all things are "Clothes" that simultaneously reveal and conceal the divine. Duty, work, and silence are the essentials. He was not atheist so much as re-enchanted on different terms.

  His first published writings appeared in October 1820 in David Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, articles he had written the previous March. From there came a stream of essays on German authors, introducing readers of English to figures who were then almost entirely unknown to them. By the time he met Jane Baillie Welsh in May 1821, introduced by his friend Edward Irving in Haddington, she was already calling him "my German Master."

• 4. Sartor Resartus and the Breakthrough

  ›

  Carlyle's "Conversion" began on a specific day in early July 1821 during what he described as "those 3 weeks of total sleeplessness", while bathing on the sands between Leith and Portobello. Something happened as he walked down toward the water on Leith Walk, a moment he later described as authentically taking the Devil by the nose and flinging him behind him. He finished the process at Hoddam Hill, the cottage farmhouse his father had leased for him near Ecclefechan, where he later called the year spent there "perhaps the most triumphantly important of my life."

  Sartor Resartus, the semi-autobiographical philosophical novel that grew from this period, was finished in late July 1831. Carlyle left for London to find a publisher in early August. No publisher took it. He and Jane spent the winter at 4 Ampton Street, Kings Cross. His father died in January 1832, and Carlyle could not attend the funeral, an absence that moved him to write the first of what became the Reminiscences, published posthumously in 1881.

  Sartor was eventually published in serial form in Fraser's Magazine between November 1833 and August 1834. It was largely ignored and often received badly. Ralph Waldo Emerson, however, had been deeply affected by Carlyle's essays and arranged for the book's first publication in book form in Boston in April 1836, where it sold out its initial run of five hundred copies. The French Revolution: A History, finished in January 1837, was a different matter. When the manuscript of the first volume was accidentally destroyed by Mill's housemaid, taken for wastepaper with only "some four tattered leaves" surviving, Carlyle received the news from Mill, who appeared at his door "unresponsive, pale, the very picture of despair." Carlyle accepted one hundred pounds from Mill and rewrote the volume from nothing. The published book made him a celebrity.

• 5. The Sage of Chelsea

  ›

  At 5 Cheyne Row in Chelsea, where the Carlyles moved in June 1834 and where they would spend the rest of their lives, Carlyle built the widest social circle of any intellectual in Victorian England. He became acquainted with scores of leading writers, novelists, artists, radicals, scientists, clergymen, and political figures.

  His conversational gifts were repeatedly remarked upon by those who knew him. Charles Darwin called him "the most worth listening to, of any man I know." Emerson described him as "an immense talker, as extraordinary in his conversation as in his writing, I think even more so." William Lecky noted his "singularly musical voice" that gave his strong Scots accent "a softening or charm." Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalled a "broad, honest, human laugh" that "cleared the air like thunder, and left the atmosphere sweet."

  His production in these years was enormous. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History appeared in 1841, drawn from his fourth and final lecture series. Past and Present followed in 1843, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches in 1845. Carlyle was the principal founder of the London Library in 1841, driven partly by his frustration with the British Museum Library, where he could not find a seat and complained of what he called the "museum headache" caused by enforced confinement with other readers, and partly by his specific antipathy toward Anthony Panizzi, the Keeper of Printed Books, whom he skewered in a footnote as the "respectable Sub-Librarian."

  History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great, which he began researching in 1852 and to which he made two expeditions to Germany, ran to six volumes when it was finished in 1865, though he had planned only four. Before it was done, a tremor had developed in his writing hand. On completion, it was received as a masterpiece. He was elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh University in November 1865, defeating Benjamin Disraeli by a vote of 657 to 310.

• 6. Grief, Politics, and Last Words

  ›

  At his inaugural address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh in April 1866, Carlyle concluded with a quotation from Goethe: "Work, and despair not." John Tyndall sent Jane a three-word telegram from the audience: "A perfect triumph." Within days of that triumph, still in Scotland, Carlyle received news of Jane's sudden death in London.

  Reading her letters and diaries afterward, Carlyle encountered her complaints about his neglect, his long absorption in Frederick the Great, and his warm friendship with Lady Harriet Ashburton. His guilt was severe and lasting. Mary Aitken Carlyle, his niece, moved into 5 Cheyne Row in 1868 to serve as his caretaker and assist with editing Jane's letters.

  The political controversies that had been gathering throughout his career continued. Carlyle had led the Eyre Defence and Aid Fund in 1865 and 1866, defending Governor John Eyre's violent repression of the Morant Bay rebellion, supported by John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Charles Dickens. The opposing Jamaica Committee was led by Mill and backed by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. In August 1867, Carlyle published "Shooting Niagara: And After?", opposing the Second Reform Bill.

  In March 1869, Queen Victoria wrote in her journal of meeting "Mr. Carlyle, the historian, a strange-looking eccentric old Scotchman, who holds forth, in a drawling melancholy voice, with a broad Scotch accent, upon Scotland and upon the utter degeneration of everything." In the spring of 1874 he accepted the Pour le Merite from Bismarck. That same autumn he declined Disraeli's offers of a state pension and the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. On his eightieth birthday in 1875, an address signed by 119 leading writers, scientists, and public figures was presented to him. On the 2nd of February 1881 he fell into a coma. He briefly regained consciousness, and his niece Mary heard his final words: "So this is Death, well..." He died on the morning of the 5th of February. He was buried, as he had requested, with his parents in Hoddam Kirkyard in Ecclefechan.

• 7. Influence and Its Discontents

  ›

  George Eliot, writing in 1855, framed Carlyle's impact in terms that later events would test severely: "There has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived." Lionel Stevenson called his impact "the most explosive in English literature during the nineteenth century." By 1960 he had become the single most frequent topic of doctoral dissertations in Victorian literature. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with the first quotation in 547 separate entries, the 45th-highest of all English-language authors.

  The writers he shaped directly include Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, and Rudyard Kipling, among many others. His German essays and translations were pivotal to the development of the English Bildungsroman. His concept of symbols influenced French literary Symbolism. His medievalist critique of industrial practice shaped both the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts movement; John William Mackail wrote that Past and Present stood as "inspired and absolute truth" for William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones during their years at Oxford.

  The political inheritance was more contested. His influence ranges across Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Mahatma Gandhi, Richard Wagner, Emmeline Pankhurst, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr. The Great Man theory he promulgated in On Heroes found admirers he would not have chosen. From Goethe's recognition of Carlyle as "a moral force of great importance" in 1827 to the celebration of his centennial as a near-national hero in 1895, he had long been admired in Germany. In 1933, K. O. Schmidt described him as den ersten englischen Nationalsozialisten, the first English National Socialist. In 1945, Joseph Goebbels read passages from Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great to Hitler during his final days in the Führerbunker.

  The counter-arguments came from within German culture and beyond it. Ernst Cassirer, in The Myth of the State published in 1946, rejected the notion of Carlyle as proto-fascist, emphasizing the moral foundation of his thought. G. B. Tennyson noted that Carlyle's anti-modernist and anti-egoist stances disqualify him from association with twentieth-century totalitarianism. The London Library, which Carlyle founded, has removed his bust from public display and stated that his racist views are completely unacceptable. What remains, underneath all the argument, is the observation Paul Elmer More made about Carlyle's standing: after Samuel Johnson, the greatest personality in English letters.