Thomas Carlyle 1795 – 1881

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher and one of the most prominent Victorian moral voices. After early labors as the introducer of German Romantic and idealist literature to English readers, he produced Sartor Resartus, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, and a vast history of the French Revolution that has remained in print for nearly two centuries. His prophetic, denunciatory style and his elevation of the great man as the engine of history have made him one of the most controversial figures in nineteenth-century thought.

Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795 at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, the son of a stonemason and a strict Burgher Calvinist mother. After Edinburgh University and a brief, unsatisfying career as a schoolmaster he settled in Edinburgh as a translator and reviewer, introducing British readers to Goethe, Schiller, and the German Romantics. In 1826 he married Jane Welsh; they lived from 1828 at Craigenputtock and from 1834 at Cheyne Row in Chelsea, where their household became a literary center.

His major works include the philosophical satire Sartor Resartus (1833-1834), The French Revolution (1837), the lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), Past and Present (1843), the long edition of Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845), the controversial Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), the Life of John Sterling, and the immense History of Frederick the Great (1858-1865). Honored late in life as the unofficial conscience of Victorian Britain, he was elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh in 1865.

Carlyle preached the heroic individual, condemned utilitarian and mechanistic civilization, and developed a highly idiosyncratic English prose modeled on Jean Paul and Luther. His enduring influence on Emerson, Ruskin, Dickens, Tennyson, and Mill — combined with the deep ambivalence created by his late writings on race and authority — make him one of the most contested figures of the nineteenth century. He died at Chelsea in February 1881.