Thomas Carlyle | British Historian, Essayist & Philosopher | Britannica (original) (raw)

Thomas Carlyle (born December 4, 1795, Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, Scotland—died February 5, 1881, London, England) was a Scottish 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 the University of Edinburgh 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 Johann Wolfgang von 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 October 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.

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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. Carlyle had obtained much of the source material from his friend John Stuart Mill, who had been collecting it with an eye to perhaps eventually write such a volume himself. Mill was nonetheless amenable to Carlyle’s assuming the task and frequently discussed the work with him as it progressed. In 1835 Carlyle gave him a substantial portion of the manuscript to read. Mill arrived at the Carlyle residence one evening thereafter bearing the news that the draft had been accidentally burned by a servant. The exact circumstances under which the mistaken incineration occurred are unknown. One version of the story suggested that the pages had been in the care of Mill’s mistress at the time of their destruction, while another maintained that it had been Mill himself who carelessly left the work lying about.

Carlyle, who with his wife consoled the distraught Mill that night, later further reassured him in a generous, almost gay, missive. This forebearance was 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, having eventually accepted some financial compensation from his friend for the setback. 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, chapter 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 (Muhammad), as poet (Dante and William Shakespeare), as priest (Martin Luther and John Knox), as man of letters (Samuel Johnson and Robert Burns), and as king (Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte). 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 Aleksandr Ivanovich 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.