Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881)

Thomas Carlyle, Scottish essayist and social historian.

Scottish essayist and social historian. His works include the partly autobiographical Sartor Resartus/The Tailor Retailored (1833-34), reflecting his loss of Christian belief; The French Revolution (1837); and the long essay ‘Chartism’ (1839), attacking the doctrine of laissez faire. His prose style was idiosyncratic, encompassing grand, thunderous rhetoric and deliberate obscurity.

Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. Leaving Edinburgh University without taking a degree, he supported himself by teaching while he devoted several years to intensive study of German literature. In 1821 he passed through the spiritual crisis described in Sartor Resartus, whose first part is a symbolic study of clothing. Carlyle translated the works of Goethe and wrote a life of the poet and playwright Schiller.

In 1826 he married Jane Baillie Welsh (see Jane Carlyle) and they moved to her farm at Craigenputtock, where Sartor Resartus and many of his most influential essays were written. His reputation was established with The French Revolution and in 1834 they moved to London. The series of lectures he gave in 1837-40 included On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (published in 1841).

In 1853 Carlyle began his History of Frederick the Great (1858-65). After the death of his wife in 1866 he edited her letters (1883) and prepared his Reminiscences (1881), which shed an unfavourable light on his character and his neglect of her, for which he could not forgive himself.

Other works include Past and Present (1843), the well-received ‘Letters and Speeches of Cromwell’ (1845), and the life of his friend John Sterling (1851). He also was a friend of the thinkers J S Mill and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Carlyle's vivid, rhetorical prose broke completely with the dry elegance which until then had been expected of a historian, and this led to some severe criticism. As a picturesque historian Carlyle has no equal. His reasoning is sometimes suspect, but he had the power to convey his thoughts vividly. He believed in the hero, in theory the individual with vision and courage to lead humankind out of its torpor and stupidity; in practice, ruthless characters like Cromwell, Frederick, or Napoleon. Carlyle's answer was that as the universe is ruled by ultimate justice, right must finally triumph and power must be a means to this end. His basic Calvinism predisposed him to look for the elect, yet it also inspired his moral earnestness and his anger at the hypocrisies and complacency of Victorian materialism and laissez faire. He was essentially a historian of the visualist school, not a philosopher: the logical consequences of his arguments are less important than the dramatic force with which he wrote them.