Thomas Carlyle

British historian and essayist

• Born: December 4, 1795
• Birthplace: Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, Scotland
• Died: February 5, 1881
• Place of death: London, England

As the most eminent man of letters in the Victorian age, Carlyle thundered against what he saw as the materialism and moral decadence of that age. The uniqueness of his vivid and emphatic style, and his ability to re-create the flavor and feeling of historical events, have earned for him a place among the masters of English prose.

Early Life

Thomas Carlyle was the eldest child of a stonemason who later became a small farmer. He lived in a large, close-knit family, and the influence of his early upbringing, in an atmosphere of stern piety and moral rectitude, was to remain with him all of his life.

Carlyle was educated at the local Annan Academy, as a preparation for his entry into Edinburgh University in November, 1809, at the age of thirteen. He was an able student, reading widely in English literature and excelling in the study of mathematics. He also developed the habit of supplementing his formal studies with long periods of solitary reading. In 1814, he became a tutor of mathematics at Annan School, and in the following year accepted a teaching post at Kirkcaldy. Carlyle disliked teaching, however, and resigned his position in 1818. With no clear vocation (he rejected the career that was expected of him, in the Church), he faced an uncertain future. For several difficult and frustrating years, during which he often complained of ill health, he survived by private tutoring and translating.

In 1819, Carlyle began his study of German philosophy and literature, and in 1820 his first-published work, a series of anonymous biographical essays, appeared in the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia. These were followed by his biography of the German poet Johann von Schiller, which appeared in the London Magazine in 1823, and a translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821). In 1826, he married Jane Welsh, an intelligent and talented young woman who came from a respected and fairly prosperous family in Haddington, which was a short distance from Edinburgh. They had first met five years previously; Carlyle, nearly six feet tall, with thick brown hair, intense blue eyes, and a strong jaw, had cut an impressive and unusual figure.

By 1827 Carlyle had become a regular contributor to the prestigious Edinburgh Review, and the groundwork for his major achievements of the next thirty years had been laid. The world would soon hear from this strong-willed, self-reliant, and hardworking Scotsman, a man who in his personal life could be sarcastic, irritable, and impatient, but who also possessed great kindness, loyalty, and a capacity for close and enduring friendships.

Life’s Work

From 1828 to 1834, the Carlyles lived at the farm of Craigenputtoch in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. It was here that Carlyle wrote his first major work, Sartor Resartus . Although the manuscript was completed by 1831, Carlyle was initially unable to find a publisher. It was eventually published in magazine form in London in 1833-1834, and the first book edition appeared in the United States in 1836, through the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Sartor Resartus remains the most widely read of Carlyle’s works and contains the essence of the philosophy that he espoused throughout his life. It is an extraordinary combination of novel—including strong autobiographical elements—and essay, written in Carlyle’s characteristic exclamatory, oratorical style, full of imagery and metaphor, a style so distinct that it came to be known as “Carlylese.” The central idea of Sartor Resartus is that humans must learn to distinguish between external appearances and true reality. Because everything in the time and space world is an emblem, or reflection, of an internal, spiritual condition, it is necessary to perceive the workings of spiritual laws in material forms and events. Carlyle calls this “Natural Supernaturalism,” and he develops the argument in terms of an extended metaphor of clothing. Outer appearances are like clothing; they obscure the essential reality that is hidden within them.

In 1834, the Carlyles moved to Chelsea, London, and in the following year Carlyle commenced work on his history of the French Revolution. Disaster struck when the entire manuscript of the first volume was inadvertently used by a maid to light the fire (an act for which Carlyle’s friend John Stuart Mill, to whom Carlyle had lent the manuscript, accepted responsibility). Only a few fragments survived. However, Carlyle, undaunted, rewrote the entire manuscript, and The French Revolution was published in three volumes in 1837. The vivid and dramatic narrative, in which the description of events took on the quality of eyewitness reports, was an immediate success.

Now with an established reputation as a historian and man of letters, Carlyle began to accumulate a wide circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the leading literary figures of the day. These included not only his contemporaries such as Robert Southey but also younger men such as Robert Browning; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Charles Dickens; William Makepeace Thackeray; Edward Fitzgerald; and the philosopher John Stuart Mill. In later years John Ruskin became a close friend.

In the next few years, Carlyle wrote a number of influential essays on contemporary political and social issues, such as Chartism (1839); Past and Present (1843), which was his response to the crisis of high unemployment and the poverty of industrial workers; and the controversial Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850). In all these publications Carlyle sternly opposed what he saw as the rampant materialism of the age, which was leading people further and further into moral and spiritual decay. He did not support the growth of democracy and called for a strong leader, a hero, who would rule according to nature’s laws, as a representative of the divine spirit that is immanent in all things. Individuals must also reform themselves and bring duty, work, order, and self-discipline into their lives, as well as an awareness of the spiritual dimension of their lives and actions. With this philosophy, vigorously espoused, Carlyle emerged as the great prophet of mid-Victorian England, at a time when many people feared that social unrest would soon lead to violent revolution.

Carlyle’s standing as the most prominent man of letters in England well established, Carlyle continued to produce major works. His edition of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell was published in 1845, and his biography of John Sterling in 1851—a book that remains one of his most readable and popular works. In 1854, Carlyle began his study of the eighteenth century Prussian leader Frederick the Great, a task that was to take him twelve years to complete. The first two volumes were ready by 1858, and volumes five and six by 1865. The effort involved had been prodigious and painful; Carlyle had never regarded writing as an easy or pleasurable task (although he tended to feel even more miserable when he was not working), and History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great turned out to be the hardest labor of all.

The compensations, however, were many. Carlyle was now the world-famous “Sage of Chelsea,” at the center of the most brilliant literary circle of the day. Carlyle was a brilliant conversationalist. Although his talk was often a near monologue, the monologue was usually so compelling that others were happy to absorb it silently.

Carlyle’s major achievements were now behind him, but honors continued to come his way. In 1865, he was appointed Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, and his public speech of acceptance early the following year was received with wild enthusiasm by the university students. Only three weeks later, however, his wife, Jane, died, following many years of ill-health. Although the marriage had not been a smooth one, it had endured for forty years, and Carlyle was plunged into deep grief over his loss. He immediately wrote out his memories of her early years, as well as reminiscences of other friends such as Edward Irving and Francis Jeffrey. These essays were published posthumously as Reminiscences (1881). With the reminiscences, Carlyle’s literary work was virtually complete.

In 1874, Carlyle received the Prussian Order of Merit, but the following year he declined a baronetcy offered to him by Prime MinisterBenjamin Disraeli. He died on February 5, 1881, two months after his eighty-fifth birthday. Immediately after his death, he was universally hailed as one of the great men of the Victorian age, the Saturday Review calling him “the greatest writer of his time… a living teacher… a prophet.”

Significance

Thomas Carlyle lived during a time of rapid and bewildering social change. Great Britain had yet to come to terms with the massive changes that were occurring as a result of industrialization. There had been a huge drift of the population from the land to the cities, resulting in the creation of a new working class, who lived in poverty, cut off from their former stable foundations of life.

Acutely aware of the crisis, Carlyle responded to the urgent problem of social organization with vigor, eloquence, and prophetic fire. He spoke out against the dehumanizing effects of the machine age, and against what he saw as increasing chaos and disorder. He did not share the fashionable belief in “progress” and “prosperity” (“Progress whither?… prosperity in what?”), and what others saw as the growth of “freedom” Carlyle viewed as the destruction of authority. However, he did not merely advocate a return to established traditions—traditions, like clothes, wear out and must be replaced. Authority, he believed, must be held by the wise, who understand nature’s laws and the workings of the divine will. The hero-leader must achieve entsagen or Selbsttodtung (renunciation of self); otherwise, the power he holds is usurped, not genuine.

Carlyle’s prophetic and inspirational message, as well as the power and force of his prose, is well conveyed by some of the final words of his essay “Characteristics” (1831):

behind each one of us, lie Six Thousand Years of human effort, human conquest: before us is the boundless Time, with its as yet uncreated and unconquered Continents and Eldorados, which we, even we, have to conquer, to create; and from the bosom of Eternity there shine for us celestial guiding stars.

Carlyle’s Major Works

1822

• Essay on Goethe’s Faust

1823-1824

• Life of Schiller

1827

• Essay on Richter

1827

• State of German Literature

1828

• Life and Writings of Werner

1828

• Essay on Burns

1829

• Voltaire

1831

• Characteristics

1833-1834

• Sartor Resartus

1837

• The French Revolution

1838

• Sir Walter Scott

1838

• Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (4 volumes)

1839

• Chartism

1841

• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

1843

• Past and Present

1845

• Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations

1849

• Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question

1850

• Latter-Day Pamphlets

1851

• Life of John Sterling

1858-1865

• History of Friedrich II of Prussia (6 volumes)

1881

• Reminiscences

1882

• Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849

1882

• Last Words of Thomas Carlyle

Bibliography

Campbell, Ian. Thomas Carlyle. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974. Fair-minded, and despite its brevity, illuminating on many issues concerning both the man and his thought.

Carlyle, Thomas. A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle. Edited by G. B. Tennyson. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984. The best one-volume selection from Carlyle’s voluminous works. Representative texts from all periods and types of his writing, including his letters and journal, and the complete text of Sartor Resartus.

Collis, John Stewart. The Carlyles: A Biography of Thomas and Jane Carlyle. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971. Centers on the Carlyles’ marriage.

Desaulniers, Mary. Carlyle and the Economics of Terror: A Study of Revisionary Gothicism in “The French Revolution.” Montreal, Que.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. Carlyle has often been criticized for his dense, complex writing style. Desaulniers analyzes his use of language in The French Revolution, and argues that he deliberately used a “revisionary Gothic” style to discuss economic and political issues.

Froude, James Anthony. Froude’s Life of Carlyle. Abridged and edited by John Clubbe. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979. Condensation (largely through the omission of Carlyle’s letters) of Froude’s superb four-volume biography Thomas Carlyle (1882-1884), which created a furious controversy when first published. Froude was Carlyle’s close friend and appointed biographer. His biography contained revelations of Carlyle’s stormy relations with his wife, which did not show Carlyle in the best light.

Heffer, Simon. Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995. Heffer portrays Carlyle as an unlikeable person— selfish, obsessive, cruel to his wife — and an inaccessible writer.

Kaplan, Fred. Thomas Carlyle: A Biography. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983. The standard biography, replacing Froude. A mass of detail, including some previously unpublished material, welded into a comprehensive and readable study.

Rosenberg, Philip. The Seventh Hero: Thomas Carlyle and the Theory of Radical Activism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. Deals with Carlyle’s writings during the fifteen productive years that ended with Past and Present. Shows Carlyle struggling with problems that still confront political and social thinkers today.

Waring, Walter W. Thomas Carlyle. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Concise and straightforward introduction to Carlyle’s thought.