Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), was a Scottish essayist and historian. He once was considered the greatest social philosopher of Victorian England. Carlyle’s reputation declined in the 1900’s, but his works are still read for his distinctive ideas on democracy, heroism, and revolution.
Early career.
Carlyle was born on Dec. 4, 1795, in Ecclefechan, near Dumfries, Scotland. In 1819, he moved to Edinburgh and began writing articles on science and literature for the city’s leading magazines and encyclopedias. In 1826, he married Jane Welsh, the daughter of a Scottish physician. Two years later, the couple moved to Craigenputtock, Jane Carlyle’s farm near Dumfries.
At Craigenputtock, Carlyle wrote Sartor Resartus, which was published in 1833 and 1834. This work brought him fame and is still considered his most original and enduring achievement. The book is an elaborate work of fiction about a German professor. Through this character, Carlyle poured out his own ideas and experiences. He thus made Sartor Resartus one of the greatest—and one of the most incomprehensible—autobiographies in literary history. The work introduced readers to Carlylese, a writing style that used a rich vocabulary and complex sentence structures.
Carlyle moved to London in 1834 and began writing a history of the French Revolution. He lent the completed manuscript of the first volume to the philosopher John Stuart Mill, and it was accidentally burned by a housemaid. Carlyle then rewrote The French Revolution largely from memory and published it in 1837. In The French Revolution, Carlyle discussed both the dangers and the promise of revolution. He also delivered many public lectures, including a series he published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). In On Heroes and Hero-Worship, as the book is often called, he stated that the main cause of social progress is a strong, heroic leader.
Later career.
In the 1840’s, Carlyle turned to what he called “the condition-of-England question”—the problem of mass poverty existing alongside increasing middle-class wealth. In Past and Present (1843), he attacked political and social conditions. He called for a revival of certain medieval ways of life before the development of machines. The book inspired many people in Victorian England to try to correct the social ills. He then wrote Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations (1845), a study of Oliver Cromwell, England’s strongest leader at the time of the English Civil War of the 1640’s. Carlyle discussed his ideas on the need for a hero to lead social change and solve the United Kingdom’s problems.
In 1848, the United Kingdom stood on the brink of revolution because of Chartism, a movement to extend the vote to workers (see Chartism). The prospect of violence over electoral reform turned Carlyle and other formerly progressive intellectuals into conservatives on social issues. Carlyle wrote against electoral reform and the possibility of a society dominated by the working class in Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) and the biography Frederick the Great, published from 1858 to 1865. Many readers agreed with Carlyle’s conservative views. But others disliked the extremism of his later writings. These works contributed to the decline of his reputation.
In his later years, Carlyle received many public honors, and his writings were widely read. But he remained uneasy over the continuing growth of democracy in the United Kingdom. He died on Feb. 5, 1881.
