Scottish Authors > Thomas Carlyle Historian, Essayist & Critic 1795-1881

Thomas Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan on 5th December 1795, son of a hard-working and pious stonemason. Father and mother both destined their eldest son for the Church, and were to be lifelong influences: they instilled a strong sense of belief, of divine order, of the importance of hard work. They also helped by example to sharpen a formidable style, both spoken and written.

Edinburgh University followed local schools; rapidly losing any ambition for the Church Carlyle tried school teaching, translation, scientific writing, tutoring, the law - slowly working his way to modest success as essayist, translator, biographer, and by the late 1820's to public notice as author of important essays Signs of the times, Characteristics and an astonishing early work, Sartor Resartus in which Carlyle anticipates many features of twentieth century writing, stripping off the rotting fabric of belief in his own age, and calling for a radical re-think and renewal.

Carlyle was among the first critics to see the dangers of relying too much on the mechanical marvels of his age.

"Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here too nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by the old natural methods ... Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand."

Carlyle devoted his writing career to countering that mechanising tendency in society and in individuals. He produced outstanding histories (notably of the French Revolution, but also of Cromwell and Frederick the Great) and works which pungently attack the spiritual deadness of the times - Latter-day pamphlets, Past and present. Perhaps his most effective writing is in Heroes and hero-worship, a call for renewal in the nineteenth century on heroic principles, the identification of heroes to lead a society which has lost its way.

As he grew older Carlyle moved to the Right, losing his earlier radicalism in an insistence on order in a society which often seemed to veer towards revolution. Carlyle, after all, had grown up in the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution. His readers split between those who supported him, and those who felt he had lost touch with the needs of his age. But his core reputation remained, and remains. His effect on contemporary writers was extraordinary, and above all the Victorian novel bears the imprint of his analysis of the times - Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Disraeli all could not have written as they did without his example.

He died in 1881, and after decades of eclipse his reputation is steadily rising. Not only is he a formative Victorian, a great Scottish writer who outlived most of his contemporaries; he and his gifted wife Jane Welsh (1801-1866) are being revealed, in their collected correspondence, as among the greatest letter-writers ever. Together, they knew a cross-section of Victorian Britain which makes their writings and letters a priceless introduction to an age of change and enormous energy.

Ian Campbell

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