CARLYLE, THOMAS. — Scottish writer, b. at Ecclefechan on 4 Dec. 1795, d. in London on 4 Feb. 1881. After failing in attempts to enter the ecclesiastical career and later the legal profession, he faced a hard life through elementary teaching and contributions to various journals.
His first volumes, the translation of Goethe’s *Wilhelm Meister* (1824) and *The Life of Schiller* (1825), reveal his inclination toward German culture, which also dominates *Sartor Resartus* (1833–34, published in book form in 1838: a kind of spiritual autobiography built around the “philosophy of clothes,” a search for what is transient and illusory and what is substantial and eternal in the world) and in *History of Frederick II of Prussia* (1858–65). In 1865 Carlyle was appointed rector of the University of Edinburgh. His fame as a historian, begun with *The French Revolution* (1837), was reaffirmed with *Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches* (1845). In 1841 he published the lectures *On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History* (1841), which encapsulate his antidemocratic conception of history as the creation of superior spirits. In *Past and Present* (1843), he contrasted the sad present, created by economic and social revolution, with the idealized Middle Ages, especially as embodied in the orderly community of its monks. Everything he saw around him sharpened his irritation and inspired the fury of his writing, which included in its condemnation both the Oxford Movement and Darwin’s researches. As for Christ and Christianity, Carlyle had the good sense not to include Jesus among his human heroes. Chesterton thus defined Carlyle’s religion: “… truly he had a certain sympathy for the vast and vague gods of that sad but virile religion of nature which seems to have filled the darkness of the North before the coming of the Roman Eagle or the Christian Cross. This was joined in him, considering certain skeptical omissions, with the terrible God of the Old Testament, of whom he had heard in the tattered Sundays of his childhood; and thus he proclaimed (against rationalists as against Catholics) a kind of pagan puritanism: Protestantism stripped of its Christian elements.”