Thomas Carlyle

1795 - 1881

Thomas Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, Dumfries and Galloway, the son of a stonemason and small farmer. His parents maintained a strict, Scottish Calvinist household and Carlyle was much influenced by it. He entered the University of Edinburgh at fifteen, receiving his B.A. in 1813. He rejected careers in both the law and the ministry, eventually making his way as a writer and translator. After an impoverished period of struggle, he moved to London (with his sharp-tongued wife, Jane) and began to gain some recognition when he published Sartor Resartus in 1833-34. Part autobiography, part philosophy, it was written in a highly figurative and hortatory language that came to be known as 'Carlylese'. Thereafter, Carlyle's impact grew substantially, especially with his astonishing three volume history of the French Revolution (1837). In some ways he resembles R. W. Emerson (with whom he maintained an extensive correspondence). Like Emerson, he must be reckoned one of the most influential and most inventive writers of his time. The critic John Holloway in his book The Victorian Sage (1953) offers this helpful summary of the world of the world-view underlying much of what Carlyle writes:

The philosophy of Carlyle is simple, and it hardly changes all through his life. It is a revolt; or rather, a counterrevolution. In a word, it is anti-mechanistic. Its main tenets are:

1. the universe is fundamentally not an inert automatism, but the expression or indeed incarnation of a cosmic spiritual life;
2. every single thing in the universe manifests this life, or at least could do so;
3. between the things that do and those that do not there is no intermediate position, but a gap that is infinite;
4. the principle of cosmic life is progressively eliminating from the universe everything alien to it; and man's duty is to further this process, even at the cost of his own happiness.

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