Thomas Carlyle
born Dec. 4, 1795, Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire,
Scot.
died Feb. 5, 1881, London, Eng.
British historian and essayist, whose
major works include The French Revolution, 3
vol. (1837), On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and
the Heroic in History (1841), and The
History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called
Frederick the Great, 6 vol. (1858–65).
Early life.
Carlyle was the second son of James
Carlyle, the eldest child of his second
marriage. James Carlyle was a mason by trade
and, later, a small farmer, a man of
profound Calvinist convictions whose
character and way of life had a profound and
lasting influence on his son. Carlyle was
equally devoted to his mother as well as to
his eight brothers and sisters, and his
strong affection for his family never
diminished.
After attending the village school at
Ecclefechan, Thomas was sent in 1805 to
Annan Academy, where he apparently suffered
from bullying, and later to the University
of Edinburgh (1809), where he read widely
but followed no precise line of study. His
father had intended him to enter the
ministry, but Thomas became increasingly
doubtful of his vocation. He had an aptitude
for mathematics, and in 1814 he obtained a
mathematical teaching post at Annan. In 1816
he went to another school, at Kirkcaldy,
where the Scottish preacher and mystic
Edward Irving was teaching. He became one of
the few men to whom Carlyle gave complete
admiration and affection. “But for Irving,”
Carlyle commented sometime later, “I had
never known what communion of man with man
means.” Their friendship continued even
after Irving moved in 1822 to London, where
he became famous as a preacher.
The next years were hard for Carlyle.
Teaching did not suit him and he abandoned
it. In December 1819 he returned to
Edinburgh University to study law, and there
he spent three miserable years, lonely,
unable to feel certain of any meaning in
life, and eventually abandoning the idea of
entering the ministry. He did a little
coaching (tutoring) and journalism, was poor
and isolated, and was conscious of intense
spiritual struggles. About 1821 he
experienced a kind of conversion, which he
described some years later in fictionalized
account in Sartor Resartus, whose salient
feature was that it was negative—hatred of
the devil, not love of God, being the
dominating idea. Though it may be doubted
whether everything was really experienced as
he described it, this violence is certainly
characteristic of Carlyle’s tortured and
defiant spirit. In those lean years he began
his serious study of German, which always
remained the literature he most admired and
enjoyed. For Goethe, especially, he had the
greatest reverence, and he published a
translation, Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship, in 1824. Meanwhile, he led a
nomadic life, holding several brief
tutorships at Edinburgh, Dunkeld, and
elsewhere.
Marriage.
On Oct. 17, 1826, Carlyle married Jane
Welsh, an intelligent, attractive, and
somewhat temperamental daughter of a
well-to-do doctor in Haddington. Welsh had
been one of Irving’s pupils, and she and
Carlyle had known one another for five
years. The hesitations and financial worries
that beset them are recorded in their
letters. It is interesting that Carlyle,
usually so imperious, often adopted a weak,
pleading tone to his future wife during the
time of courtship, though this did not
prevent him from being a masterful,
difficult, and irritable husband; and, in
spite of their strong mutual affection,
their marriage was full of quarrels and
misunderstandings. Those who knew him best
believed Carlyle to be impotent.
In the early years of their marriage the
Carlyles lived mostly at Craigenputtock,
Dumfriesshire, and Carlyle contributed to
the Edinburgh Review and worked on Sartor
Resartus. Though this book eventually
achieved great popular success, he had at
first much difficulty in finding a publisher
for it. Written with mingled bitterness and
humour, it is a fantastic hodgepodge of
autobiography and German philosophy. Its
main theme is that the intellectual forms in
which men’s deepest convictions have been
cast are dead and that new ones must be
found to fit the time but that the
intellectual content of this new religious
system is elusive. Its author speaks of
“embodying the Divine Spirit of religion in
a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture,”
but he never says very clearly what the new
vesture is to be.
London.
In 1834, after failing to obtain several
posts he had desired, Carlyle moved to
London with his wife and settled in Cheyne
Row. Though he had not earned anything by
his writings for more than a year and was
fearful of the day when his savings would be
exhausted, he refused to compromise but
began an ambitious historical work, The
French Revolution. The story of how the
partially completed manuscript was lent to
J.S. Mill and accidentally burned is well
known. After the accident Carlyle wrote to
Mill in a generous, almost gay, tone, which
is truly remarkable when Carlyle’s ambition,
his complete dependence upon a successful
literary career, his poverty, the months of
wasted work, and his habitual melancholy and
irritability are considered. The truth seems
to be that he could bear grand and terrible
trials more easily than petty annoyances.
His habitual, frustrated melancholy arose,
in part, from the fact that his misfortunes
were not serious enough to match his tragic
view of life; and he sought relief in
intensive historical research, choosing
subjects in which divine drama, lacking in
his own life, seemed most evident. His book
on the French Revolution is perhaps his
greatest achievement. After the loss of the
manuscript he worked furiously at rewriting
it. It was finished early in 1837 and soon
won both serious acclaim and popular
success, besides bringing him many
invitations to lecture, thus solving his
financial difficulties.
True to his idea of history as a “Divine
Scripture,” Carlyle saw the French
Revolution as an inevitable judgment upon
the folly and selfishness of the monarchy
and nobility. This simple idea was backed
with an immense mass of well-documented
detail and, at times, a memorable skill in
sketching character. The following extract
is characteristic of the contorted, fiery,
and doom-laden prose, which is alternately
colloquial, humorous, and grim:
. . . an august Assembly spread its
pavilion; curtained by the dark infinite of
discords; founded on the wavering bottomless
of the Abyss; and keeps continual hubbub.
Time is around it, and Eternity, and the
Inane; and it does what it can, what is
given it to do (part 2, book 3, ch. 3).
Though many readers were thrilled by the
drama of the narrative, it is not surprising
that they were puzzled by Carlyle’s
prophetic harangues and their relevance to
the contemporary situation.
In Chartism (1840) he appeared as a
bitter opponent of conventional economic
theory, but the radical-progressive and the
reactionary elements were curiously blurred
and mingled. With the publication of On
Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in
History (1841) his reverence for strength,
particularly when combined with the
conviction of a God-given mission, began to
emerge. He discussed the hero as divinity
(pagan myths), as prophet (Muḥammad), as
poet (Dante and Shakespeare), as priest
(Luther and Knox), as man of letters
(Johnson and Burns), and as king (Cromwell
and Napoleon). It is perhaps in his
treatment of poets that Carlyle shows to the
best advantage. Perverse though he could be,
he was never at the mercy of fashion; and he
saw much more, particularly in Dante, than
others did. Two years later this idea of the
hero was elaborated in Past and Present,
which strove “to penetrate . . . into a
somewhat remote century . . . in hope of
perhaps illustrating our own poor century
thereby.” He contrasts the wise and strong
rule of a medieval abbot with the muddled
softness and chaos of the 19th century,
pronouncing in favour of the former, in
spite of the fact that he had rejected
dogmatic Christianity and had a special
aversion to the Roman Catholic Church.
It was natural that Carlyle should turn
to Cromwell as the greatest English example
of his ideal man and should produce the
bulky Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and
Speeches. With Elucidations in 1845. His
next important work was Latter-Day Pamphlets
(1850), in which the savage side of his
nature was particularly prominent. In the
essay on model prisons, for instance, he
tried to persuade the public that the most
brutal and useless sections of the
population were being coddled in the new
prisons of the 19th century. Though
incapable of lying, Carlyle was completely
unreliable as an observer, since he
invariably saw what he had decided in
advance that he ought to see.
In 1857 he embarked on a massive study of
another of his heroes, Frederick the Great,
and The History of Friedrich II of Prussia,
Called Frederick the Great appeared between
1858 and 1865. Something of his political
attitude at this time can be gathered from a
letter written in April 1855 to the exiled
Russian revolutionary A.I. Herzen, in which
he says “I never had, and have now (if it
were possible) less than ever, the least
hope in ‘Universal Suffrage’ under any of
its modifications” and refers to “the sheer
Anarchy (as I reckon it sadly to be) which
is got by ‘Parliamentary eloquence,’ Free
Press, and counting of heads” (quoted from
E.H. Carr, The Romantic Exiles).
Unfortunately, Carlyle was never able to
respect ordinary men. Here, perhaps, rather
than in any historical doubts about the
veracity of the gospels, was the core of his
quarrel with Christianity—it set too much
value on the weak and sinful. His fierceness
of spirit was composed of two elements, a
serious Calvinistic desire to denounce evil
and a habitual nervous ill temper, for which
he often reproached himself but which he
never managed to defeat.
Last years.
In 1865 he was offered the rectorship of
Edinburgh University. The speech that he
delivered at his installation in April 1866
was not very remarkable in itself but its
tone of high moral exhortation made it an
immediate success. It was published in 1866
under the title On the Choice of Books. Soon
after his triumph in Edinburgh, Jane Carlyle
died suddenly in London. She was buried in
Haddington, and an epitaph by her husband
was placed in the church. Carlyle never
completely recovered from her death. He
lived another 15 years, weary, bored, and a
partial recluse. A few public causes gained
his support: he was active in the defense of
Gov. E.J. Eyre of Jamaica, who was dismissed
for his severity in putting down a black
uprising in 1865. Carlyle commended him for
“saving the West Indies and hanging one
incendiary mulatto, well worth gallows, if I
can judge.” He was excited by the
Franco-German War (1870–71), saying “Germany
ought to be President of Europe,” but such
enthusiastic moments soon faded. In these
last years he wrote little. His history The
Early Kings of Norway: Also an Essay on the
Portraits of John Knox came out in 1875, and
Reminiscences was published in 1881. Later
he edited his wife’s letters, which appeared
in 1883 under the title Letters and
Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Prepared
for Publication by Thomas Carlyle. Although
Westminster Abbey was offered for his
burial, he was buried, according to his
wish, beside his parents at Ecclefechan.
A.O.J. Cockshut
