Thomas Carlyle Add a review

Thomas Carlyle (4 December 1795 – 5 February 1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian, philosopher, and mathematician. Known as the "sage of Chelsea", he exerted a profound influence on Victorian-era art, literature and philosophy.

Born in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, Carlyle attended the University of Edinburgh, where he excelled in the natural sciences, formulating the notion of the Carlyle circle. After finishing his course in the arts he prepared to become a minister in the Burgher Church while working as a schoolmaster. He quit these and several other endeavours before settling on literature, writing for the Edinburgh Encyclopædia and working as a translator. He initially gained prominence in English-language literary circles for his extensive writing on German Romantic literature and philosophy. These themes were explored in his first major work, a semi-autobiographical philosophical novel entitled Sartor Resartus (1833–34).

After relocating to London, he published The French Revolution: A History (1837). Its popular success found him wide recognition, prompting the collection and reissue of his earlier essays under the title of Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838-39). His subsequent works were highly regarded throughout Europe and North America, including On Heroes (1841), Past and Present (1843), Cromwell's Letters (1845), Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), and Frederick the Great (1858–65). He founded the London Library, helped to establish the National Portrait Galleries in London and in Edinburgh, became Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh in 1865 and received the Pour le Mérite in 1874, amongst other honours.

Carlyle occupied a central position in Victorian culture, being considered not only, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the "undoubted head of English letters", but a "secular prophet". Posthumously, a series of publications by his friend James Anthony Froude damaged Carlyle's reputation, provoking controversy about his personal life and his marriage to Jane Welsh Carlyle in particular. His reputation further declined in the aftermaths of the First World War and the Second World War, when his philosophy was seen as a precursor of both Prussianism and fascism. Growing scholarship in the field of Carlyle studies since the 1950s has improved his standing, and although little-read today, he is yet recognised as "one of the enduring monuments of [English] literature".