Carlyle, Thomas

(1795-1881), author, biographer, and historian

by Fred Kaplan

© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved

Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), author, biographer, and historian, was born on 4 December 1795 in the Arched House, Ecclefechan, Annandale, Dumfriesshire. He was the eldest son of James Carlyle (1757-1832), a hard-working stonemason whose father, Thomas (1722-1806), the husband of Mary Gillespie (1727-1797), had been a carpenter and tenant farmer; beyond that, the Carlyle family's genealogy cannot be accurately determined. James Carlyle married his second wife, Margaret Aitken (1771-1853), the child of a bankrupt Dumfriesshire farmer, in 1794; she gave birth to eight children after Thomas: Alexander (1797-1876), Janet (1799-1801), John Aitken Carlyle (1801-1879), Margaret (1803-1830), James (1805-1890), Mary (1808-1888), Jane (1810-1888), and a second Janet (1813-1897).

Early years and education, 1795-1814
Thomas's father pushed his children into literacy and propelled two sons into professional careers. While a young man, James Carlyle, with his brothers, was notorious for brawls; as an adult he attempted to live as if salvation could be approached only within the rules and spirit of the Burgher Secession church. Margaret Aitken's voice also resonated with the tones of the Old Testament prophets in terms appropriate to the daily needs of rural Calvinism. Combining within herself the theology of her church and the strong love of a devoted mother, she was 'the truest Christian Believer' her son had 'ever met with'. Born in the Arched House, Ecclefechan, a building designed and constructed by his father and uncle, Thomas soon discovered that his parents' world was circular, enclosing home, fields, family, meeting-house: the rural arches of Christian Annandale, the interwoven community of Presbyterian Scotland. As a boy he learned reading from his mother, arithmetic from his father; he attended a private school in Ecclefechan and then, at the age of six, the nearby Hoddam parish school. He immediately became the pride of the schoolmaster, the young person on whom approving adults and jealous schoolmates place the burden of differentness. For his parents that quality had its rightful place in the circle of tradition. If their son was to be a man of learning, he would be a minister of the Lord; within their society the alternative was either madness or apostasy. For the young boy there was worry, confusion, and resentment: growing up in the shadow of the local meeting-house he was taught to repress physical instincts, which came from the devil not from God. And he understood the essential message of his parents' example: 'A man's religion consists not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of, and has no need of effort for believing' (Latter-Day Pamphlets, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, 1896-9, 313).

His mother argued against sending Carlyle to Annan Academy. His father simply said that his son would go, and on '26 May 1806, a bright sunny morning' James Carlyle walked with his son the 6 miles to Annan. His mother had extracted a reaffirmation of her son's promise that he would never fight, but she did not forbid him to fight back with his tongue. He soon became expert at defending himself verbally, developing his talent for sarcastic retorts whose aggressive defensiveness became his most effective way of dealing with a hostile world. And, finally, when he fought back physically, the beatings decreased. Annan Academy specialized in training large classes, at low cost, for university entrance at the age of fourteen, the basic subjects being French, Latin, arithmetic, algebra, and geography. Mathematics soon became Thomas's strongest academic subject; he also found modern languages attractive, and in the next decades taught himself Spanish, Italian, and German. Turning increasingly to books, he discovered an extensive lending library of novels and romances. He soon read through Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Congreve, and the Arabian Nights. In 1808, his third year at the academy, he started to reap the rewards of academic effort. Soon the assumption that had been implicit in James Carlyle's decision to send Thomas to Annan became explicit: he was to continue his education at the University of Edinburgh. In November 1809 his parents accompanied their son to the edge of town; his mother gave him a Bible. It took the traveller three days to make the 80 mile journey to Edinburgh. By the beginning of the second day he had travelled further from Annandale than his father was ever to do in his life.

Carlyle was as unhappy and withdrawn in his first year at Edinburgh as he had been at Annan. His friends were the books he borrowed; his readiest defence was sarcasm and a retreat to reading. Nervous about sex, he later wrote that his emotional training 'forbade him to participate' in the 'amusements, too often riotous and libertine' of his generally coarse colleagues (T. Carlyle, Last Words, 1892 edn, 21-2). He now stood a little under 6 feet; a thin adolescent with light blue eyes, clearing complexion, small, recessive top lip, and thrusting jaw. In his second year he felt less emotionally vulnerable. Active distaste kept him awake in Professor Ritchie's class in logic: the worldly minister taught a combination of mechanistic philosophy and elementary logic inconsistent with the religious beliefs of Carlyle's parents. His mathematics class with Professor John Leslie was a different matter: an absent-minded eccentric who lectured brilliantly and taught mathematics as part of a holistic system of natural forces, Leslie devoted particular attention to his bright students. By the next session, when he enrolled in his newly found mentor's advanced mathematics course, Carlyle had glimpsed the possibility that in mathematics he might find a vocation that would help him support himself during his preparation for the ministry or as a substitute for it. In Leslie's mathematics, which appealed to Carlyle's problem-solving enthusiasm, one reasoned by comparison and analogy rather than by mechanical logic.

During 1812-13, his last year in the faculty of arts, Carlyle devoted his academic time to mathematics and his personal time to intensive reading. Though his lodgings were uncomfortable and the city unwholesome, he found himself growing used to the rhythmic movement between urban tensions and rural withdrawal. Since he did not accompany his family to the meeting-house, his parents became aware that their eldest son no longer shared their conception of religious duties. They assumed, however, that he was still preparing to attend divinity school, preferably the Burgher Divinity Hall in Selkirk. Carlyle preferred Edinburgh, where he had friends, associations, and challenges; at Selkirk he would be a lonely novice restricted by a parochial library. It made more sense, he thought, to go to the Divinity Hall of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh, where his personal life would be more rewarding and where he would have access to alternative academic and professional training. In November 1813, without completing the arts course, he enrolled in three classes in the Divinity Hall: making haste slowly, he chose the more drawn-out of two curricular alternatives, six years of unsupervised study after his residence with six annual appearances to present trial sermons. In 1813, and for several years thereafter, he read extensively in science, history, and literature.

Teaching in Annan and Kirkcaldy, 1814-1818
Carlyle's only alternative to earning his living as a minister was employment as a schoolmaster. Geometry still fascinated him; in the winter of 1813-14 he discovered that he could demonstrate his mathematical and literary skill by responding to articles on mathematics that appeared in newspapers such as the Dumfries Courier, in whose columns he engaged in a spirited mathematical controversy. The main attraction was not the objective discussion of geometrical problems but the satiric jousting of intellectual rivals: finally the editor expressed regret for having to suppress Carlyle's 'severe retaliation' (Collected Letters, 1.8-9). When he left Edinburgh for Dumfries in June 1814 he had neither an arts degree nor a theological vocation. At Dumfries, with a strong recommendation from Professor Leslie, he applied for the position of mathematics master at Annan Academy. The examiner found him superior to the only other candidate and offered him the job at £70 per annum. From the start Carlyle anticipated that he would dislike teaching. Moreover, he had to face the irony that Annan Academy was where he had been unhappy for most of his schooldays. One evening in late 1815 in Edinburgh he was introduced to a man he remembered having seen before, a native of Annan named Edward Irving, to whom the rest of the company seemed to defer. Intimately familiar with Annan, the dark-haired, handsome inquisitor, with a disquieting, uncontrollable squint, plied his new acquaintance with questions about recent events there. Insulted, Carlyle exploded: 'I have had no interest to inform myself about the births in Annan; and care not if the process of birth and generation there should cease and determine altogether!' (Carlyle, Reminiscences, 183-4). Irving's companion remarked, provoking general laughter, that such a development would soon put Carlyle out of business.

As he laboured in Annan at his teaching duties through the winter and spring of 1815-16 Carlyle felt that he was stuck in place, struggling with difficulties of both vocation and spirit. In May he was recommended for a teaching position at Kirkcaldy, which had the advantage of being only an hour's ferry ride from Edinburgh. Irving had recently moved there, but Carlyle was assured that 'Mr. Irving has the Academy, not the parish school ... in a town and neighbourhood so populous there is field enough for you both' (Kirkcaldy town minutes, 1816). He was told that there would be no duties except those of teaching Latin, French, arithmetic, book-keeping, geometry, navigation, geography, and mensuration, with some Greek occasionally. Agreeing to take the position, Carlyle returned to Annandale to spend the summer of 1816 with his family. Unfortunately, his mother was seriously ill from a 'fever' which seemed to threaten 'the extinction of her reason' (John Martin to Carlyle, 14 June 1816). By late summer Margaret Carlyle had sufficiently recovered from the worst of her breakdowns for Thomas to reveal to his parents that he had not enrolled and would never enrol at Divinity Hall.

Aimless in Edinburgh, 1818-1821
In November 1818, after a tedious, unhappy year at Kirkcaldy, Carlyle resigned and returned to Edinburgh. Soon he was preoccupied with his health: sometimes he could not digest food, while at other times he was constipated. That his health should become a problem seemed both unwarrantedly punitive and at the same time consistent with his pervasive difficulties. He felt better during the summer of 1819. Exercise, parental concern, and rural air were partial antidotes. In the autumn in Edinburgh he began to wonder if it would be possible for him to maintain a sound mind, a sound body, or even life itself. His vocationally aimless days of study and solitude depressed him. He regularly took medicines for his stomach; he assured his family that there was nothing wrong organically, that the 'digestive apparatus' was simply unpredictable, sometimes quite satisfactory, other times refusing 'to perform its functions'. He tentatively began to study German, making slow progress, working laboriously with a dictionary. Suddenly he discovered that he could read Goethe and J. G. Fichte, whose idealism appealed to him partly because of its apparent similarity to the idealism of his mother's beliefs. Goethe, of course, could hardly pass serious muster as a Christian, his European reputation being that of a humanist whose spiritual commitments flowed out of creative pilgrimage rather than authoritative theology. The vague Christianity that seemed to 'live again' in Goethe was the Christianity of heightened spiritual sensitivity to the patterns of human experience. Immediately identifying with Goethe the man rather than the philosopher, Carlyle warned Irving that if they were together he would talk of Faustus for hours not because of its aesthetic attractions or its religious doctrine but because Faust's pilgrimage was the very one that he himself had been experiencing. Disappointed in almost every aspect of his life, Carlyle felt as if Goethe were reading his soul.

Courting Jane Welsh, 1821-1824
In late May 1821 Irving proposed that Carlyle accompany him to Haddington to spend a few days with his friends the recently widowed Grace Welsh (1782-1842) and her nineteen-year-old daughter Jane (1801-1866) [see Carlyle, Jane Baillie Welsh]. He was welcomed for his friend's sake and for the enlivenment of a residence that both women found comfortable but boring. John Welsh, a competent, widely respected physician, had died of typhus less than two years before, leaving his wife to come to terms with loneliness and straitened circumstances. A sentimental, capricious woman, Grace Welsh was unable to organize her complex situation now that her dominant husband was dead. A 'tall aquiline figure, of elegant carriage and air' (Carlyle, Reminiscences, 98-9), she seemed the embodiment of a middle-class hauteur that Carlyle had never encountered before. The cherished only child of an assertive father, Jane Welsh could not hide her feeling that the parent who had loved her most was gone. His influence had determined that she be schooled; his confidence had elevated her sense of special merit. Since his death she was confronting the likelihood that, despite her talent and education, marriage was the only outlet for her energy. She desired to be learned and famous, but devoted a great deal of time to parties, suitors, and excursions. To her visitor she claimed that she 'was intent on literature as the highest aim in life' (Froude, Letters and Memorials, 1.129). Carlyle spoke that evening of his own reading, writing, and literary ambitions. Jane listened intently, impressed by his learning and amused by his Annandale accent and country awkwardness. An excellent mimic and storyteller, she refrained from exercising her natural bent for sarcasm.

Carlyle's imagination worked full force on Jane, and in June he sent her an aggressive, intimate letter. With his constant complaints about health, rustic manners, and lack of a practical vocation, he had little to recommend him except his 'genius' and his desire to serve. Frightened of marriage because, among other reasons, she was frightened of sex, Jane Welsh could not imagine that such a man could become her husband. Although Carlyle realized that she did not consider him a serious suitor, she concealed from him the extent of her pursuit by other suitors and the nature of her relationship with Edward Irving, from whom she expected to receive a proposal of marriage. Soon after assuming the mathematics tutorship at Haddington in 1810, Irving had been employed by Dr Welsh as special tutor to his precocious ten-year-old daughter, who idolized her teacher. After he had left Haddington--and despite an implied commitment to marry the daughter of a Kirkcaldy minister--he had not forgotten her and took every opportunity to visit her at a cousin's house in Edinburgh, while she was at finishing school there.

Corresponding with Carlyle against her mother's wishes, Jane Welsh felt 'as nervous as if I were committing a murder' (Collected Letters, 1.142). She concluded the year by inviting him to visit her at Haddington when he had finished a new review essay that he was writing and at least two dozen pages of the original book which he had been proclaiming he would start soon; as an additional proviso she demanded that he learn to write a letter which would not anger her mother. Several weeks later she reminded him of a lesson in life which she was to relearn from him during their marriage, especially during his years of fame: 'Patient suffering ... is the first lesson to be learned by one of the parties in a Romantic Friendship' (ibid., 2.21). Living on his savings and on occasional tutoring, Carlyle was offered and accepted the opportunity to tutor the two sons of Isabella and Charles Buller. Irving had proposed that the boys be enrolled in the University of Edinburgh under Carlyle's guidance. Much as he hated teaching, he could not turn down the prospect of bright students on a well-paid and regular basis (£200 per annum, about twice as much as his father had ever earned in one year). Despite Jane's warning that he would repent of it, Carlyle went to Haddington the first weekend in February 1822. The visit was a painful disaster: both mother and daughter resented the brash appearance of a young man who did not qualify as a suitor and who was too assertive to be welcomed as a friend. But his health, despite the regimen of assorted purgatives, was as good as it had been in years, and in his pursuit of Jane he managed to avoid complete failure, a testimony to his tenaciousness and to her interest in him.

Still, Carlyle felt restless and unhappy; he was angry with himself for being miserable and frightened, and his mood intensified. Going down Leith Walk in Edinburgh on a blazing afternoon in August 1822 he realized that he had been mistaken all along in believing that 'it was with Work alone, and not also with Folly and Sin, in myself and others, that I had been appointed to struggle' (T. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, 1896-9, 99). The purpose of work was to create a visible structure that would articulate the quality of the inner spiritual life. But it was his own 'inarticulate Self-consciousness ... which only our Works can render articulate and decisively discernible' which needed to be discovered and affirmed (ibid., 132). The search did not depend on logic or reason, and since the struggle was not with external problems but with inner states, could he not choose through some effort of the will to create both himself and at the same time a work expressive of himself? Unable to find emotional security in an act of traditional belief, Carlyle suspected that the world belonged to the devil, to matter and materialism. But, he argued, if man is free, he is free to deny both doubt and logic, on the essential ground of his trust in his own feelings: such a denial confirms that he has the freedom to deny whatever contradicts his spiritual needs, to reject the life-demeaning elements within himself and the external world. Such control over his own self-definition would, Carlyle came to see, enable him to defy whatever obstacles the world raised and to oppose any attempts to define him in terms which contradicted his basic sense of himself. 'And as I so thought', he wrote ten years later in Sartor Resartus, his fictionalized account of these experiences, 'there rushed ... a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god.' What religious belief had lost, personal will could provide.

Early literary contacts, 1824-1825
The Bullers, who had decided to return with their sons to London, gave Carlyle three months' leave before he was to join them there in spring 1824. In the spring of 1823 Carlyle's German studies had taken on a new dimension. Asked to write a short biographical sketch of Schiller for the London Magazine, he had successfully proposed to an Edinburgh publisher that he also undertake a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. It was published in 1824, and before leaving Edinburgh, Carlyle arranged to have copies sent to family and friends. On a visit to Haddington, he counselled Jane Welsh to 'be true to me and to yourself'. As he waited in early June 1824 for his boat to sail from Scotland on the five-day voyage to London, he wrote to her impetuously, for which she called him a 'rash, headstrong Man' who had forgotten to keep in mind that 'the continuance of our correspondence depends upon your appearing as my friend and not my Lover' (Collected Letters, 3.79). In London Carlyle's new friends were determined that the young genius should have the advantages of the best literary society. At a series of dinners and visits hosted by the Montagus, Stracheys, Bullers, and Irvings, Carlyle met Henry Crabb Robinson, who had studied German at Weimar, and Charles Lamb, among others. On a June morning he went to Highgate to be introduced to Coleridge, the reigning deity of the Montagu household. He followed along the garden paths as Coleridge talked about 'all conceivable and inconceivable things'. Coleridge's very presence awakened an antagonism that Carlyle struggled to cover with ordinary civility. Coleridge embodied characteristics which Carlyle had been taught to despise and which he fought against within himself, particularly lassitude, dependence, and self-pity. That much of the world worshipped Coleridge proved the dangerous tendency of the fallen individual and the fallen society to create one another in their own image. In his hostile response to Coleridge, Carlyle expressed the emotional patterns instilled in him by his judgemental, pietistic parents. Late in the month, his disappointing visit to the 'Sage of Highgate' still fresh in his mind, he sent an effusive letter and a copy of his translation of Wilhelm Meister to the 'Sage of Weimar'; the greater his disappointment in Coleridge, the more he turned to Goethe.

Marriage, life at Craigenputtoch, and Sartor Resartus, 1826-1833
By the beginning of 1825 Carlyle's desire to return to Scotland merged with his desire to establish a permanent home with Jane Welsh. His proposal that they keep house at Craigenputtoch, a small farm 20 miles from Dumfries which she had inherited from her father, seemed to her insane: the prospect of keeping house with him anywhere disturbed her. She brooded about whether she loved him in the way that a woman hopes to love the man she marries. Also, she had practical objections: she did not want to decrease her standard of living; and the prospect of such rural isolation seemed impossibly burdensome. At the end of May 1825, accompanied by his brother Alick, his sister Jean, and his mother, Thomas Carlyle went to live at a small farmhouse called Hoddam Hill, where he remained for almost a year. At the end of January 1826 he thought that he and Jane would soon be married. Two crucial matters remained unresolved--where they would live and what living arrangements would be made for Grace Welsh. Jane insisted on turning over to her mother the annual rent of about £200 from Craigenputtoch. Still, the matter of where the couple would reside remained to be settled: Carlyle urged Edinburgh or Haddington. Late in May 1826 Grace Welsh took the decisive step, renting for them a small house on Comely Bank in a north-western suburb of Edinburgh. On 9 October 1826 Thomas Carlyle received 'the last Speech and marrying words of that unfortunate young woman Jane Baillie Welsh' and sent in response his 'last blessing as a Lover ... my last letter to Jane Welsh: my first blessing as a Husband, my first kiss to Jane Carlyle is at hand! O my darling! I willst always love thee' (Collected Letters, 4.150-51). They were married on the morning of the 17th. Unescorted by family or servants, they arrived that day at Comely Bank to spend the first night of a marriage that was to endure for just a few months short of forty years.

Carlyle awakened on his wedding morning in a 'sullen' mood, 'sick with sleeplessness, quite nervous, billus, splenetic and all the rest of it' (Collected Letters, 4.152). Clearly, puritanical inhibitions and romantic idealizations were in the 7 foot-wide bed with two sexual innocents. Fragile evidence suggests that though they were able to express affection with whispers and embraces their sexual relationship did not provide physical satisfaction to either of them, despite their efforts during the first half-dozen or so years of the marriage. In December 1826 Carlyle confided to his private notebook both his bewilderment about his married state and his determination to get on with his work. Before the year was out he thought he had found a vehicle for those urgent voices. He proudly announced to his mother, 'I fairly began--a Book!', at the same time apologizing that it was 'only a novel'. Within six months of their marriage Carlyle again proposed that he and Jane move to Craigenputtoch, mainly because he fantasized that his ill health could be cured only by living in the countryside. They had no special need to reduce their expenses, and to go to Craigenputtoch because he felt lonely in Edinburgh was hardly a rational act. When the decision was tentatively made in the spring of 1827 they were even more secure financially, for he had been commissioned to write an article for the Edinburgh Review, which paid well. In January 1827 Bryan Procter, Mrs Montagu's son-in-law, had sent him a sealed letter of introduction to the editor of the Review, Francis Jeffrey. Carlyle's brief essay, ostensibly a review of a new life of C. F. Richter, was an impressive début in June 1827, one that Jeffrey and some of the readers of the Review recognized as an occasion.

Life at Craigenputtoch, where the couple resided for six years, was no more lonely than rural life in general. From the outset Carlyle intended to relieve the isolation with long excursions to Edinburgh, London, and even Weimar. The visit to Weimar never occurred; of the six years at Craigenputtoch, two winters were spent in more social locations, a nine-month visit to London in 1831-2 and a four-month residence in Edinburgh in the winter and spring of 1833. Still, if space, as Carlyle argued, is 'a mode of our Sense', then Craigenputtoch should be no more than an extension of the moral and imaginative strength of its inhabitants. And if time also is a 'mode of our Sense', a proposition to which he was attracted, then 'this solid world, after all, is but an air-image; our Me is the only reality, "and all is Godlike or God"' (Two Notebooks of Thomas Carlyle, ed. C. E. Norton, 1898, 161). He quite aptly identified his feelings with his reading of the quintessential English public myths. We are, 'as it were, a sort of Crusoe's Island, where the whole happiness or sorrow depends on the Islander himself' (Collected Letters, 4.427-8). Carlyle soon wrote articles on Voltaire and Novalis for the Foreign Review and then on Burns and Tasso, as well as 'Signs of the times', for the Edinburgh Review (June 1829). In a strikingly calm, controlled, and precise manner, he argues in 'Signs' for a balance between the dynamical and mechanical in an age in which the mechanical was dominant and in which the spiritual basis of the most important achievements of Western culture had been obscured by substituting external machinery for underlying 'spiritual Truth'. Revolutions that did not lead towards individual inner reformations had failed to do their most important work. In October 1830 he wrote what he had at first intended to be an article; it soon seemed too long unless divided into two sections; as he continued to write 'with impetuosity' on 'the strangest of all things' it appeared as if it would 'swell into a Book'. It was 'a very singular piece' that 'glances from Heaven to Earth & back again in a strange satirical frenzy' (Collected Letters, 5.175). By early November he had written to Fraser about publishing 'Teufelsdreck' as two articles. Soon he again changed his mind about the structure and length and decided it should be a full-length book. Snowbound for much of February 1831, he began to revise and lengthen it, extending the biographical section dealing with the fictional Professor Teufelsdreck's life and amplifying the sections on religion and society. He soon changed the title to Sartor Resartus ('The Tailor Retailored'), a philosophical play on the notion that clothes either do or do not make the man, on Carlyle devising a new, better garment for contemporary society, and on the relationship between the material and the spiritual.

For some years Carlyle had been recommending Goethe and God to his countrymen; with the completion of Sartor, for which he now sought a London publisher, he had reason to hope people would listen to his message. Irving urged him to come to London and 'purify' the literary world. The prospect excited Jane Carlyle, and, with the product of his most sustained period of writing, Carlyle left Craigenputtoch for London in early August 1831. At thirty-six his youthful, energetic, and idiosyncratically handsome figure--with his full shock of light brown hair, and aquiline, clean-shaven face--impressively embodied a personality that for all its inner struggles seemed to his London contemporaries bright with genius. Goethe's disciple was eager to become a master himself, but the London visit was disappointing. He stayed for much of nine months, renewing some old and beginning some new friendships, but he did not find a publisher for Sartor and London literary society did not seem congenial. Still, by October 1831 he had two new writing projects in hand, one of them an extraordinarily revealing and influential review essay for the Edinburgh Review (December 1831) to which he gave the title 'Characteristics'. Carlyle thought of it as 'a sort of second Signs of the Times'. It epitomized the controversial and 'Germanic' prose style that he had devised for his essays and for Sartor, which was to some degree an extension of his lifelong strategy of evading or obscuring crucial problems or questions by a stylistic code. It now seemed the appropriate garment for a radical message which, even in disguised form, was likely to provoke pained and painful responses. Out of his experience with physical illness Carlyle constructed a metaphor for the psychological, social, and spiritual illness that he considered characteristic of the modern world. Deep in man's unconsciousness, he believed, lie the roots of life, concealed in darkness by a beneficent nature that will try us constantly with death and pain. If the mind could be accepted in its true nature--mysterious, spontaneous, unconscious, in vital touch with both light and darkness--then man would be defined by how he accepts and manifests in all his activities the battle between faith and doubt. In modern society the balance has been tipped in favour of doubt, the disease of enquiry being so widespread that it threatens to triumph and destroy the dialectic between light and darkness.

The move to London, 1834
Soon after new year's day 1833 the Carlyles moved from Craigenputtoch to rented rooms in Edinburgh. But further residence in Edinburgh now seemed irrelevant to Carlyle's work, and early in May they moved back to Craigenputtoch. Late in August a completely unexpected visitor, bearing a letter of introduction from John Stuart Mill through Gustav d'Eichthal, 'found the house amid desolate heathery hills'. Ralph Waldo Emerson later described his host as 'tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow ... clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humour which floated everything he looked upon' (R. W. Emerson, English Traits, in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1903-4, 2.165). Eager for companionship, Carlyle was at his entertaining best: he impressed Emerson with his wide range of literary and philosophic knowledge and with the broad motifs of his non-sectarian spiritualism. Like Mill, who had met Carlyle in London, Emerson felt that Carlyle's charismatic presence and power for spiritual good overrode their differences of personality and belief.

The Carlyles turned toward London again. The strongest hold on them in Scotland was his family; Craigenputtoch now seemed a desert. In February 1834, as they were about to make up their minds to go, their servant announced that she would leave at the beginning of summer, regardless of their plans. Suddenly their long-deliberated and deeply felt desire to move to London became a settled decision. Thomas went at the beginning of May: as he entered London he hummed the defiant words of a ballad that his mother had frequently sung to him when he was a boy. With Leigh Hunt's assistance, he narrowed their choice of houses, after three weeks of searching, to one in Kensington and one in unfashionable Chelsea, the latter available for only £35 a year. When Jane Carlyle arrived early in June she found that the virtues of the house at 5 (now 24) Cheyne Row, Chelsea, had triumphed.

The French Revolution, 1834-1837
In September 1834 Carlyle began writing a book on the French Revolution that would occupy his energies for three years. The one volume which he had imagined would be finished by spring 1835 expanded into three. More than anything else he wanted to create a work of art rather than of expository logic or historical fact, a visionary and revelatory book that expressed the power of the supernatural within the natural, the patterns of providence within the facts of history. If he could deal effectively with both the drama and the significance of the French Revolution he would make a contribution that the world would have to notice. The patterns of that revolution were, after all, woven into the living fabric of contemporary society. Modern European man had had his clothes burned off by the revolution; he could be seen in his nakedness without the outworn symbols of the past, struggling in his contemporary affairs to find new symbols to express his changing condition. Within the powers of language, Carlyle felt, were the resources to create the purgative drama that would persuade society that the old could never be revived and that the new was in the process of being born. Since belief systems and the institutions that clothed them were at issue, it was not a matter of thought and logic but of feeling and faith. For Carlyle, history had become the sanction of the seer and the prophet: it enabled him to address the realities of the present and future while discussing the 'realities' of the past. For the Romantic artist, sanction came from personal rebellion; for the new Victorian seer, sanction was grounded in social involvement and historical fact. Until 1834 Carlyle felt he had 'absolutely no permission to speak!' (Collected Letters, 7.25). But the sustaining energy that came from his new certainty that the ultimate poetry was within history gave him the courage to believe that by writing a history of the French Revolution he could make a contribution that would authenticate the role he had chosen for himself.

When Carlyle began writing The French Revolution he saw developing under his pen a very personal and passionate narrative. His wife commented that what he had done so far seemed more readable than Sartor, and this encouraged him. He showed small sections of the first volume in progress to Mill, who had become his closest London friend. Mill had an influence on the book and a stake in it beyond that of anyone but the Carlyles. He had first suggested the topic, and over a number of years he had provided information and encouragement. Through his discussions with Carlyle he had actually helped to shape its imaginative contours. On the night of 6 March 1835 there was a knock on the door at Cheyne Row: Mill appeared, distraught--'The very picture of despair'. He told the Carlyles what seemed almost inconceivable: Carlyle's 'poor manuscript, all except some four tattered leaves, was annihilated!' Having been mistaken by a servant for waste paper, it had been put into the fire, where it made an ironic blaze of its own. Where the fire blazed was--and remains--unclear. If the accident occurred at the home of Harriet Taylor, the wife of John Taylor and Mill's intimate friend and adviser, it was most likely the result of leaving the manuscript beside her bed where it was mistaken for scrap paper and either tossed into a fire or used as kindling. Mill's account was that he had inadvertently allowed it to be used as waste paper in the kitchen at his home in Westminster. Mill's sister claimed to remember a search and her brother's extreme distress; she thought that some pages were found. The unattributable accusation that Mrs Taylor purposely destroyed the manuscript has not been substantiated. That Mill would have been eager to protect Mrs Taylor and take the blame himself, if there had been any need to do so, would have been as clear to Carlyle as to modern readers. When Mill left at midnight the strain of keeping up an appearance of good spirits for his sake had brought both Carlyles to the edge of nervous collapse. It seemed doubtful that the loss could be repaired, that he could go on with the book. In the morning he decided to try again. Except for some charred fragments the book now existed only in Carlyle's memory. Before the end of March 1836 he had finished the first section of volume 2 and returned to write volume 1 anew from the beginning. After a visit to Scotland he was back at his desk in November, and the work was soon almost complete. His target was new year's day 1837, with publication in March, two years to the month later than he had originally hoped. At ten o'clock in the evening of 12 January he finished, 'ready both to weep and to pray' (Collected Letters, 9.116). Instead he went out for a walk in the darkness. Published by James Fraser, the book appeared later that year.

Carlyle and London life
With the death of Edward Irving in 1836 an epoch came to an end for Carlyle. The friends of his youth were gone, but his need for company and conversation was greater than he usually admitted. Although he idealized fellowship, he often simply needed to avoid loneliness. London was a place where he could always find people with whom to talk; and in the small world of literary London he was a man of whom others were aware. In the winter of 1834-5 Henry Taylor fulfilled his promise to introduce him to Southey and Wordsworth; in March and April 1835 the now aged Francis Jeffrey visited frequently. But it was to Mill that Carlyle owed his introduction to the man who became his most cherished friend of the next decade: he met John Sterling, a young clergyman and writer, much influenced by Coleridge, and the son of the editor of The Times, at Mill's India House office in February 1835. Soon the Carlyles saw 'a good deal' of Sterling and some of Sterling's friends, among them Frederick Denison Maurice; though Carlyle bewailed that 'Coleridge is the Father of all these', he was delighted to have their acquaintance (The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, 1964, 176). Another treasure came to Carlyle directly through Mill: Godefroy Cavaignac, a young Frenchman 'intense in everything', a volatile republican whose opposition to Louis Philippe had brought him into exile in England (Collected Letters, 8.337). Late in November 1836 Harriet Martineau made the first of her many visits to Cheyne Row.

Having imagined at various times in his life that his health was shattered, Carlyle realized with moderate surprise that he had few reasons to complain about it between 1834 and 1841. Still, he kept a sensitive emotional thermometer always in his mouth. Perhaps the very recognition that much of his past illness had emotional causes helped him to find the strength to incorporate into his conscious life the conviction that the unconscious was the dominating force in determining health. As his own health improved, Jane's declined. As Carlyle lost his conviction that he was ill, Jane apparently caught the idea. She too, at frank moments, ascribed her frequent sickness to 'a bad nervous system, keeping me in a state of greater or less physical suffering' (Froude, Letters and Memorials, 1.96). Except for the most serious bouts of influenza, and in later years a mental as well as physical collapse, her health was never so bad that she could not function and never so good that she could function without tiredness and pain. Hardly a winter passed without a siege of flu and then a number of serious relapses. Sickness and insomnia exhausted her, and, like her mother, she had frequent migraine headaches and heavy menstrual bleeding. Aware of his wife's abilities, especially as a letter writer, Carlyle was ambivalently conscious of what they both had lost by Jane's illnesses and her lack of vocation. 'It is a pity, and perhaps not a pity, that so lively a pen did not turn itself to writing of Books ... My coagitor too might become a distinguished female' (Collected Letters, 9.259).

Carlyle as lecturer, 1836-1840
Carlyle had long flirted with the idea of gaining bread and influence by lecturing. When in December 1836 friends suggested that a lecture series be arranged for him in London, he responded positively. By March 1837 it had been settled that, starting in May, he would speak between three and four in the afternoon on two days each week at a rented hall until his six lectures were completed. Since he had little time to prepare, it struck him that he could make effective use of his unpublished history of German literature. He had spent years studying and writing about the subject. He had made some effort to dissociate himself from an exclusive identification with German literature, and the success of that effort, which he expected to be crowned by the publication of The French Revolution, encouraged him to feel that he could now lecture on German literature without increasing his public connection with a foreign culture. He had already praised the high virtues of Teutonic culture and personality to the British public; the lectures provided an opportunity to elaborate on his insistence that the glories of British culture were basically Teutonic, not Celtic. Carlyle would remind his audience that the strength and energy of Britain derived from this tradition. The lectures were moderately successful. Curiosity-seekers, cultural enthusiasts, and the well-to-do who either found it de rigueur to attend such occasions or had been alerted to the peculiarities of the speaker were apparently entertained by his mannerisms. Scattered in the audience were friends and disciples, some of them young men who found the message as exciting as the presentation was testing. If he seemed nervous, eccentric, somewhat foreign, even extravagant, he was still clearly on their side and one of them: it was Britain he was praising. Both The Times and The Spectator reported favourably. Although he preferred not to suffer the torment of lecturing again, it was his only secure source of money, and the new literary star still had minor financial problems. Sartor was at last published in England in 1838, and an American edition of Critical and Miscellaneous Essays and American and English editions of The French Revolution were out by the end of the year. Still, the only money he received was from Emerson, who acted as his literary agent in America. Much as he disliked lecturing, the reward and the need were large enough to impel him to do so again. At the end of April 1838 he gave the first of twelve lectures on European literature; he lectured again in the spring of 1839 and the spring of 1840.

Hero-worship, 1841
In the autumn of 1839 Carlyle worked on an 'Article on the working people' (published as Chartism in 1841) that he had been long contemplating. Two other projects absorbed his energy: organizing a committee to create the London Library and preparing for the delivery in the spring of 1840 of what he vowed would be his last lecture series. Working through the winter and spring, he had sensed that 'Heroes and the heroic' would synthesize ideas and feelings he had been developing for a long time. Having in mind perhaps the writing of a full-scale biography of Oliver Cromwell, he thought that the section of the lectures devoted to Cromwell might provide an occasion to articulate the central ideas of a new book, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). Drawing his heroic figures from disparate cultures, he would have the opportunity to delineate the underlying forces of personality and nature whose basis was the unconscious and the mysterious. Always fascinated by the relationship between spiritual and secular power, Carlyle believed that men such as Napoleon and Cromwell had succeeded as leaders to the extent that they had incorporated in their conscious and unconscious acts the central spiritual truths. Might did not make right in any simple sense; political and military power might be used for good or for evil. To the extent that such leaders had an element of God within them, their power would be in the service of right. But whatever had been built on wickedness was, in Carlyle's eyes, neither lasting nor right. If there was a providential God, then why doubt that in the long run all visible and invisible things would finally manifest the goodness and justice of that divine power? Stripped of sectarian and theological matters, the premise of Carlyle's religion (which some of his contemporaries would not call religion at all) was that there is an element of divinity in each human being. In some the conflict between the divine and the anti-divine force plays itself out in personal anguish and public disaster; in others the divine force triumphs and shows itself in great works. For the vast majority of mankind, without the energy and the character of greatness, the supreme victory is its recognition of the divinity within such God-inspired human beings as Jesus, Muhammad, Shakespeare, and Cromwell.

Carlyle in the 1840s
Having broken the closed circle of his parents' world, Carlyle felt with new force the challenge of his own precarious position and the broad threat to traditional European culture. In the revolutionary decade of the 1840s the Victorian Carlyle emerged, an explosive paradox: the visionary radical, tortured by personal and public misery, and the visionary conservative, furious at what seemed solutions which could only make matters worse. No matter how hard he 'studied to remain silent' he often found that an inner urgency forced him to speak out in ever more controversial public statements, culminating in 1850 in Latter-Day Pamphlets, a shriek of satiric and Swiftian despair. Carlyle feared that at some level 'progress' was a bargain with the devil, and he vaguely sensed that part of his anxiety stemmed from his suspicion that, in rejecting his parents' religion and embracing a literary career, he had himself entered into a Faustian agreement. But power could be used for good as well as for evil ends, and his pen had the potential to influence others for good, perhaps even directly. Although he feared both the misuse of his power and the dangers inherent in political commitment, he even flirted several times in the next decade with direct involvement in government, hoping that he would be offered a government position supervising educational reforms. Underlying his ambivalence was his pervasive fear that, whatever they did, whether speaking from the sidelines or actively engaged, he and his contemporaries would be the victims of power. None the less he began the decade with at least some hope that they might yet be able to beat the devil.

To Carlyle one of the immediate answers to poverty and overpopulation was emigration. But the radical party opposed emigration, for reasons that seemed to him narrow and ideological. For over six years he was to watch the badly led workers of the Chartist movement search for effective political leadership. Their energy, however, proved sufficient only to help persuade the government to repeal the corn laws, not to give positive shape to new policies for a new age. Carlyle believed that without effective leadership mass movements could do nothing more than clear away the old. For 'a man willing to work, and unable to work, is perhaps the saddest sight that Fortune's inequality exhibits under the sun' (T. Carlyle, Chartism, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, 4.135). And if work were not available in Great Britain, because the government foolishly declined to create jobs, then it should be sought in the colonies, with the active support of the government. But in his personal life he wanted as little government assistance and interference as possible. He did not see why he should even vote in such a corrupt society; it would only lend support to a partisan and materialistic system. But, for the country as a whole, laissez-faire seemed to Carlyle a disastrous policy; the present social and economic problems were so serious and widespread that only national programmes funded by the government could provide effective solutions. At the same time he doubted that the corrupt web of business, bureaucracy, aristocracy, and government would support practical solutions. He increasingly felt that he was looking down a deep, widening, and magnetic chasm into which everything was destined to be pulled or to fall.

In his Romantic idealization of the power of the individual Carlyle looked to particular leaders and the concept of élite leadership rather than to the common denominator and the compromises of democracy. A new friend, with complicated problems of his own, saw the dilemma clearly. Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian revolutionary, had been introduced to the Carlyles in 1837. Both Carlyles liked Mazzini for his innocence, his virtue, and his courage; Jane found him especially attractive. Carlyle and Mazzini argued, on good terms, aware of the distance that separated them. Between 1839 and 1841 the intimacy increased, Mazzini being more troubled by Carlyle's ideas than Carlyle by Mazzini's. Jane Carlyle and Mazzini developed an increasing intimacy during the first half of the 1840s. Sensitive to her emotional needs, Mazzini treated her with warm admiration; she was a comforting presence who could provide him with both affection and consolation. The unhappy wife and the lonely exile engaged in the amorous rhetorical disguise of brother and sister, confiding in one another during long walks around London and quiet evenings by the Carlyle fireplace. Whether Jane expected more from Mazzini is unclear. The relationship changed suddenly and its intensity declined in the summer of 1846, the moment when the Carlyle marriage faced its most threatening crisis: Jane asked her friend's advice about whether or not to leave her husband, and Mazzini strongly advised her not to.

Cromwell and Past and Present, 1843
Cromwell had been much on Carlyle's mind from 1839 onwards, but his proposed biography seemed to him a less interesting subject than the French Revolution had been. In November 1842 he began to write, though much of his work went into the fire at first. But it was a book about the nineteenth, not the seventeenth century. By December 1842 he was writing intensely: England's pursuit of 'money, money, and one folly and another' took on dramatic form, a literary expression of his urgent call, 'Let us all repent, and amend. Let each of us for himself do it:--that is the grand secret!' (The Letters of Thomas Carlyle to his Brother Alexander, ed. E. W. Marrs, 1968, 543). By the end of December much of the book was done. It seemed comparatively easy to confess that 'no Cromwell will ever come out of me in this world. I dare not even try Cromwell' (Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 3.280). When Jane glanced at his confusing 'hieroglyphics' and saw what seemed to her a biography of someone called Abbot Samson, she asked him 'what on earth has all this to do with Cromwell--and learned that Cromwell was not begun ... He lets everybody go on questioning him of Cromwell and answers so as to leave them in the persuasion he is very busy with that and nothing else' (Jane Welsh Carlyle: Letters to her Family, 1839-1863, ed. L. Huxley, 1924, 79). Past and Present (1843) seemed to the author a product of the searing, furnace-like intensity in which he flourished as a writer. Rather than admit that it had satisfied the political and emotional needs that had previously been invested in the prospect of writing a biography of Cromwell, he still wondered whether or not he should return to his original intention. By late October 1843 his dilemma was still unresolved. 'A book on Cromwell is impossible! Literally so' (Collected Letters, 17.164). But he needed to try. The compulsion hardly seemed rational; his stubbornness, though, was intensified by his awareness that he could never write the book which he had originally planned. Through November and part of December 1843 he either faced a blank sheet or wrote unsatisfactory sentences. Shortly after the middle of December he gathered together everything he had written about Cromwell and committed it 'at one fell swoop to the fire' in the same room in which Jane was peacefully darning stockings. Once he had been the victim (and perhaps partly the beneficiary) of an accidental burning of his work; now he had deliberately put his own manuscript into the fire. Since he could not do as a biography what he believed he had to do in some form, he decided to produce an edition of Cromwell's speeches and letters. The puritan leader's words would speak for themselves. With much anxiety and complaint, Carlyle devoted the next three years to this edition: it proved the best strategy for dealing with failure.

Lady Harriet Baring
Carlyle met Lady Harriet Baring in late 1839. The wealthy and forceful Lady Harriet soon invited him to be an active member of the circle that she was attracting to her father-in-law's mansion, Bath House in Piccadilly, and gathering for holidays in Hampshire. During the next year Carlyle's relationship with Lady Harriet deepened. His friendship with Bingham Baring provided a normalizing background; the quiet, proud husband eagerly supported his wife's social extravagances. Despite Jane Carlyle's claim that she was incapable of jealousy, her resentment at 'how marvellously that liaison has gone on' (Collected Letters, 16.182-3) was certainly an emotion that could hardly be distinguished from jealousy. She had no reason to fear that her husband would have an affair with Lady Harriet: her position, his sexual reticence, and his puritanical sense of duty prevented that. But that Lady Harriet seemed to have no interest in her and that her husband had an extraordinary interest in Lady Harriet left her feeling rejected by both. Although Jane was seriously ill through much of 1844-5 Carlyle's frequent visits to Bath House continued. Unknown to his wife, Carlyle was writing extraordinary notes to Lady Harriet: he was the dark man of dross, dirt, and confusion; she was radiant with light. Associating himself with winter, failure, sin, and excremental dirt, one of his lifelong metaphors of anxiety, Carlyle found it comforting and exciting to play his exaggerated darkness off against her imaginary brightness. Jane wished herself rid of the whole matter--her jealousy, her resentment, her pain, and the pervasive unhappiness which closed in on her with the threat of madness, the hope of self-extinction. Late in June 1846 she told her husband how she felt and insisted that he could not have them both: he was astonished by and resentful of the depth and bitterness of her anger. In the end she made the best of Lady Harriet, though the best was often painful.

Carlyle's Cromwell and other works, 1845-1849
Friendship and work were Carlyle's shield against middle-age fears: neither proved totally satisfactory. For a man who tended to think of himself as alone and friendless, he had managed by the beginning of the 1840s to create a number of lifelong friendships. The record is deeply impressive and often moving: Milnes, Sterling, Thackeray, Browning, Tennyson, Forster, Dickens, soon Edward FitzGerald, and later John Ruskin--together with Carlyle they wove a rich texture of experience, talent, achievement, and mutual affection which created a family connectiveness of the sort that Carlyle thought essential for human relations. By early 1845 he had basically completed his work on Cromwell, which was published later that year as The Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell. Between 1845 and 1849 he wrote very little for publication. With sufficient income from royalties, he felt liberated from the need to write or lecture. The problems of leadership and change still preoccupied him. For Carlyle, all public revolutions were questionable; what the individual could not do for himself it seemed doubtful that society could do for him. During the 1840s his hope that society would become better through sudden changes diminished considerably. The most demanding challenge was to confront and make the most of the inevitable changes. Some of the public changes he confronted with keen perceptiveness, others with blunt hostility. Having grown up in a tradition of spiritual and intellectual élitism he did not see any wisdom in compromises that only made misery and the fallen state of mankind more bearable. Inevitably, he feared, the government of the lowest common denominator would be dedicated to materialism--to the 'good life' as defined in material terms.

Carlyle had published The French Revolution at forty-two. It was not a young man's book, but it was the work of a Romantic visionary who had seen both the beauty and the terror of chaos. In 1849 he was fifty-four years old; the accumulated wear and tear of the years of psychogenic dyspepsia and the self-punishing compulsions of work and duty showed more in his emotional tenseness than in his physical presence. He usually dressed in dark clothes, softened by his distinctive wide-brimmed hats. He retained the strong frame and striking facial features of his youth. An artist whose expressiveness was inseparable from constant involvement with and comment on a rapidly changing society, Carlyle, from 1845 to 1849, gave much thought and energy to the Irish problem, partly because he was searching for a topic to write on. In September 1846 he made a lightning trip to Ireland, and in 1848 and early 1849 he seemed to be honing his pen to write at length on the topic. He published a number of brief newspaper articles in The Spectator and The Examiner, mainly attacking the maladministration of Ireland by the English landowners and by Lord John Russell's government, emphasizing that England had to solve the problem of Ireland or sink itself. By November 1849 he had finished an essay called 'Occasional discourse on the nigger question', which Fraser's Magazine published before the end of the year. By December he felt in the writing vein again, though not about Ireland. His subjects were democracy, work, labour, and modern government: his vision of the interplay between unalterable 'facts' and human manipulation. The main question was whether he ought to write a book or a series of pamphlets. By the new year, he had not only decided but had already begun what he conceived of as his own Tracts for the Times, a series of twelve pamphlets to be published in monthly instalments over the next year.

Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850
To many of Carlyle's contemporaries Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) represented a dividing point in his career. The sermon form and the serial procedure heightened the intensity of the separate parts and extended the period during which the work was the focus of excited attention. Whatever its actual qualities, the exaggerated response to the book was unfortunate for Carlyle's future stature as a writer. Some of the fault, of course, was the author's. Latter-Day Pamphlets has much sense in it and many merits: its failure is not that of substance but of literary form. In Latter-Day Pamphlets Carlyle's anger overwhelmed his artistry. But the deeper source of Carlyle's failure to make an artistic success of Latter-Day Pamphlets was the fatigue, anxiety, indecision, and anger that had brought him at the age of fifty-five to think that much of life was behind him, that satisfying human relationships were difficult if not impossible, and that neither his own frame of mind nor the condition of his culture permitted him the liberality of imagination and the concentration of intellect which great works of art demand. It seemed clear to Carlyle that the defeat of Presbyterian values at the end of the seventeenth century and the general victory of Counter-Reformation attitudes had marked the beginning of Britain's gradual descent into materialism and all that followed. With biting sarcasm he called it the 'Pig Philosophy'. The inevitable result, he insisted, was the unsatisfying pursuit of that which, if it could ever be realized, would prove abysmally unsatisfying. Whatever man's material and technological accomplishments, they would never answer, even for 'pigs', the need for spiritual achievement and communal harmony.

John Sterling, 1851
For some years Carlyle had been brooding about the significance of the life of John Sterling, who had died in 1844. In early 1851 he decided that he would put into practice his lifelong preoccupation with the nature of biography and write an appropriate evaluation and memorial. In comparison with Cromwell and Latter-Day Pamphlets this seemed a small, sweet task. At the end of March Jane Carlyle read it. Her friendship with Sterling had been particularly close, her relationship with the entire Sterling family intense: she warmly voted for immediate printing. The proof sheets were done in the late spring and early summer, completed just before the Carlyles left for the 'water cure' at Malvern and an extended summer holiday. Significantly, The Life of John Sterling (1851) contains a memorably vivid but hostile pen-portrait of Coleridge, based on Carlyle's visit to Highgate in 1824. The hostility was not entirely personal: it proceeded partly from Carlyle's need as an artist to make clear the grounds for Sterling's rejection of Coleridge's influence, as well as from Carlyle's need to put his own rejection of Coleridge in a favourable light. In order to elucidate the relationship between Sterling and Coleridge, Carlyle had to reveal his views on the church and Christianity. To some it came as a shock; to others it was also an affront. Despite the Christian resonances of Carlyle's prose there was no Christian substance, if substance was to be defined theologically. In the eyes of many Christians such a position was hardly to be distinguished from atheism.

Frederick the Great and Collected Works, 1851-1865
When Carlyle celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday in 1851 his major concern was finding some work that would sustain him through his remaining years. First he mulled over and dismissed as subjects William the Conqueror and the Norman episode in English history. The clear direction of his intention was to write a substantial work on some major figure in British or European history which would fulfil the intent of his never-realized biography of Cromwell. A book on Frederick the Great of Prussia had begun to seem a potential answer to his problem. Carlyle began serious reading on the subject in the late autumn of 1851. He had actually considered Frederick as early as 1830, when he had proposed to an Edinburgh publisher that he write a single-volume biography of the 'brave Fritz'. In the summer of 1852 he visited Germany for the first time; fortunately, despite his litany of regrets, the trip was a success, though it did not result in substantial progress in the writing of Frederick. For Carlyle, German culture was embodied in the piety of Luther, the sacred necessity of the Reformation, and the creation, by Goethe in particular, of Romantic idealism, a literary antidote to both eighteenth-century rationalism and modern materialism. He believed that the Anglo-Saxon hegemony would be based, like Britain itself, on Teutonic virtues of the kind which were best represented by his own father and which were deeply rooted in the racial inheritance of northern Europeans: piety, courage, reverence for work and legitimate authority, and the intuitive intelligence that recognizes and attempts to realize in daily life the consonance between man's needs and the facts of nature and the universe.

During the 1850s Carlyle gradually came to think of his new writing commitment as an inescapable misfortune; by 1854 he felt that 'enormous rubbish-mountains' surrounded him. Finally, in June 1858, volumes 1 and 2 were completed; they were published in the autumn, while their author glumly faced what he realized were at least two or three years' more work. From the beginning of his research on Frederick he had recognized that compulsion had triumphed over reason. With the death of his mother at the end of 1853 his tentative commitment to pursue the project to the boundaries of common sense and just a little beyond became an irreversible emotional necessity. Though the eighteenth-century world of Frederick II had none of the religious intensity of Luther's century, the subject was clearly an extension of his earlier attempts to contrast the corruption of modern Europe with Reformation spirituality. For Carlyle such work exemplified the values that his mother embodied: whereas she had found relief from painful grief in contemplating God and eternity, her son found it in work and history.

With individual titles of the 1857-8 edition of the Collected Works coming out a volume a month and overlapping with the first two of Frederick, even hostile critics, such as Herman Merivale, granted that Carlyle 'had become, while yet alive and at work among us, something of a classic' (Quarterly Review, July 1865). In an anonymous review George Eliot claimed in 1855 that 'it is not as a theorist, but as a great and beautiful human nature, that Carlyle influences us' (Leader, 27 Oct 1855, 1034-5); in October 1856, in the National Review, James Martineau, Harriet's influential brother, joined Carlyle to Coleridge and John Henry Newman as one of the three major influences on the religious spirit of the age. George Henry Lewes emphasized the power of genius to transcend its limitations, though 'our eyes ache a little in gazing at this constant glowing ... white heat' (G. H. Lewes, 'Carlyle's Frederick the Great', Fraser's Magazine, Dec 1858, 633-5). With much of the new Collected Works in his hands, James Fitzjames Stephen dismissed the question of politics and theology:

Regarded as works of art, we should put the best of Mr. Carlyle's writings at the very head of contemporary literature ... If he is the most indignant and least cheerful of living writers, he is also one of the wittiest and the most humane. (J. F. Stephen, 'Mr. Carlyle', Saturday Review, 19 June 1858, 638)
He is 'one of the greatest wits and poets, but the most unreliable moralist and politician, of our age and nation' (ibid., 640). Stephen's calm conclusion that 'no one but a man of real and great genius could have done this' (ibid., 638) aptly crystallizes that remarkable process whereby at some point in his career a great writer's reputation transcends the limitations of his individual works. Stephen was himself a historian, and for a long time under-secretary for the colonies, and his praise in the Saturday Review gave Carlyle the imprimatur of the establishment. By late 1858 the writer who for years could not find a publisher for Sartor Resartus and who just eight years before shocked the public with what were felt to be the mad barbarities of Latter-Day Pamphlets had been elevated to the Parnassus where classics reside.

During the later years of Carlyle's work on Frederick, Jane went through the most serious crisis of her life. The death of Harriet Baring in 1857 relieved her of one emotional burden. But the habit of suffering had become entrenched; and there were other causes for pain. Carlyle's monomaniacal devotion to his work outlasted his devotion to Lady Ashburton, and Jane's own disappointments were complex and pervasive. Not only did she feel unloved but a series of neglects and deaths had left her without a sufficient number of people to love. In September 1863 she stepped off the pavement and fell heavily, tearing sinews in her thigh. Improvement came very slowly. She felt more than weak and physically ill: she felt deeply wounded as a person, as if her lifelong sense of guilt in regard to her parents and her own aborted career as a writer and her life as a woman now found its most physically symbolic residence. 'The malady is in my womb ... It is the consequence of that unlucky fall; no disease there, the doctors say, but some nervous derangement' (Froude, Letters and Memorials, 2.286). Jane struggled through, and in the last days of 1864 Carlyle realized that what seemed the worst year of his life had at least been merciful enough to return his wife to him alive and to bring him within moments of finishing the book which had made them both miserable for so long. Exhaustion and depression overwhelmed him. Despite all his efforts to like the Prussian king, he had been able to muster no more than respect; and his struggle to create order, both as a historian and as an artist, had been undermined by serious doubts as to whether order itself existed and whether efforts such as his had any value. Nevertheless Frederick pulsed with a vital energy that few of his contemporaries and fewer modern readers have had the perception or the patience to experience. At the edge of his own strength and certain that his own death was imminent, he could not help but accentuate the autobiographical impulse and track himself towards the grave as he described Frederick's old age. Early in 1865, after thirteen years of work, Carlyle finally completed the book. He did not plan to write anything more.

Jane Carlyle's death and its aftermath, 1866-1873
With the completion of Frederick at the beginning of 1865 Carlyle sank into lassitude, mingling relief with depression. In November he became preoccupied with the latest indication of his high status as a hero of culture. After serving two terms Gladstone had retired from the position of rector of the University of Edinburgh; a new rector was to be elected by the students. Two names were proposed, Carlyle and Disraeli. To his surprise Carlyle was elected to the office by better than a two-to-one margin. Speaking in his inaugural address to 'Young Scotland', Carlyle concluded with his favourite poem by Goethe. Tumultuous applause burst from the enthusiastic students: everyone was on his feet, arms waving, caps flying. A few days later, still in Scotland, he received the news that Jane was dead. About three in the afternoon the previous Saturday (21 April 1866) she had gone for her regular afternoon carriage ride in Hyde Park; after several circuits of the park the driver, alarmed by Mrs Carlyle's lack of response to his request for further instructions, asked a lady to look into the carriage. Jane 'was leaning back in one corner of the carriage, rugs spread over her knees; her eyes were closed, and her upper lip slightly, slightly opened' (Froude, Letters and Memorials, 2.391). She seemed dead, and a few minutes later medical authority confirmed the obvious.

Carlyle managed to be remarkably involved in literature and politics during the four years that followed his wife's death. His emotional depression and trembling right hand hardly kept him from work; and certainly the reminiscences that he wrote of his wife, Irving, Southey, Wordsworth, the Skirvings, John Wilson (Christopher North), and William Hamilton, the last three done in the winter of 1868, the annotations of Althaus, and the extensive annotations of Jane's letters, are among the most bold, vivid, and revealing writing he had ever done. Between 1866 and 1869 he became deeply involved in a controversy which developed when James Eyre, the governor of Jamaica, brutally suppressed a minor slave rebellion: it was further proof that Carlyle was still capable of vigorous engagement. In August 1867 he published in Macmillan's Magazine 'Shooting Niagara: and after?'. With scattered energy and in the Carlylean voice of visionary rhetoric and personal despair, it spoke against the 'leap in the dark', the Reform Bill of 1867. In 1870 the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, whose issues touched directly on his lifelong concerns, stirred the ageing 'Sage of Chelsea' into a public statement of his views expressed with much of the vigour that had characterized his comments on social issues during his most active years. With the help of David Masson, and with James Anthony Froude and John Forster as witnesses, he bequeathed Craigenputtoch to the University of Edinburgh for a scholarship fund for needy students. With the help of a new American friend, Charles Eliot Norton, he gave to Harvard University all his books on Cromwell and Frederick. In 1873 he inserted into his will the clause that 'since I cannot be laid in the grave at Haddington, I shall be placed beside or between my father and mother in the Churchyard of Ecclefechan'.

Last years, Froude's biography, and death, 1874-1881
Far from an invalid, Carlyle entered the last decade of his life with a strong constitution that sometimes seemed an ironic insult to his real desires: he talked with Froude about the nobility of the Roman style of suicide. In September 1874 he had a new literary task in hand, the last essay of his life, 'The portraits of John Knox'. On his eightieth birthday, in 1875, his contemporaries tried to draw the final lines of Carlyle's portrait, to memorialize for the last time--other than the funereal occasion itself--the great man who had been among them for so long. Over forty years before, Carlyle had been instrumental in having a medallion engraved and a collective letter sent to Goethe on the Sage of Weimar's eightieth birthday. His own friends now did the same for him, the medal by Jacob Boehm a handsome representation of the Sage of Chelsea, the testimonial letter signed by 119 of the great and near-great of Victorian intellectual society. Even in his old age, though, neither public memorials nor disappointment about his spiritual works could prevent him from perceiving and expressing the constant battle with self-identity which had been one of the great struggles of his life. One morning, getting out of his bath and drying himself, he looked into the mirror of self and exclaimed, 'What the devil then am I, at all, at all? After all these eighty years I know nothing about it' (W. Allingham, A Diary, 1907, 248).

While Carlyle's friends and family waited for the inevitable, two people in particular had a practical interest in his death. Neither Mary Aitken, his niece, nor James Anthony Froude expected anything beyond what they justly deserved. Mary, who had devoted over ten years to attending to her uncle, had no competence except that which he would provide. Froude had not only agreed to publish an edition of Jane Carlyle's letters but had also begun working on an edition of Carlyle's reminiscences and a full-scale biography, an immense investment of time and energy. By 1878 Carlyle had turned over to Froude most of his literary papers, particularly letters, for two express purposes--editing for publication Jane's letters and writing his biography. Froude's Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, with Carlyle's biographical annotations, was essentially ready for publication. In Froude's mind the only unanswered question was whether or not the volume should be prefaced with Carlyle's reminiscence of his wife, which was clearly Froude's property. In the next two years Froude completed most of the first two volumes of what was to be a four-volume biography, incorporating in part or in whole much of the material from the other letters and biographical writings. Whether or not a separate volume containing the various reminiscences of family, friends, and literary personalities should be published had been left to Froude's judgement, as had the decision whether such a volume should contain the memoir of Jane Carlyle. The reminiscences other than Jane's were clearly understood to be Mary Aitken's property, but the decision whether or not to publish them was to be left to Froude. When, after Carlyle's death, Mary Aitken (with her husband, Alexander Carlyle) and Froude sharply disagreed about how best to serve Carlyle's posthumous reputation, a series of publications brought to light claims and counter-claims about Carlyle's personality and his treatment of his wife. The Froude-Carlyle controversy, as it was called, damaged Carlyle's reputation among the late Victorians. After the First World War Carlyle's reputation suffered for other reasons: his criticisms of democracy along with widespread misunderstanding of his views about the nature of political leadership alienated many; twentieth century readers found uncongenial the intricacies and dramatic flourishes of his prose style. The widely read Victorian prose master came to belong mostly to professional students of literature, language, and history. Among them, his reputation recovered and by the late twentieth century the Carlyles had become a major point of scholarly interest, exemplified by Duke University Press's edition of the letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle.

Carlyle spent the summer of 1878 in Scotland, first at a rented house near Dumfries and then visiting near Ecclefechan. Early in the spring of 1879 he suddenly 'broke down altogether' into lassitude and loss of interest. Surprisingly, he had so improved by May that he was out of imminent danger. His brother Jack died on 15 September 1879, but through the autumn Carlyle was in calm spirits and, on his eighty-fourth birthday, Browning and Ruskin visited him. Though he made efforts to walk, his mobility suddenly decreased, as if his legs were retiring after a lifetime of service. Each afternoon a carriage ride provided gentle exercise and some relief from the desultory reading which was his main amusement. By March 1880 he had almost lost interest even in looking out of the carriage window. At the beginning of the next year he was too weak to dress himself, even to move. He soon sank into 'a deep heavy sleep', from which the constant ringing of the doorbell by newspaper reporters, eager to be timely with the news that the nation expected at any moment, could not disturb him. On Friday 4 February 1881 Mary Aitken thought she heard him saying to himself, 'So this is Death: well ...' (W. Allingham, A Diary, 1907, 308-9). At about half past eight the next morning, at 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, he quietly, almost imperceptibly, drifted off into the complete silence that he had for so long thought of as the highest blessing. On 9 February the body was conveyed on the overnight train to Scotland and brought to Ecclefechan the next day. The funeral was at noon: on the hour 'the Presbyterian kirk bells tolled mournfully' and the hearse arrived, followed by five funeral coaches and about a hundred villagers. No one spoke. As was the custom, the coffin was lowered into the earth without a eulogy or a prayer.

FRED KAPLAN

Sources  
The collected letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. C. R. Sanders and K. J. Fielding, 1-2 (1970)
J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 4 vols. (1882-4)
F. Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: a biography (1983)
L. Hanson and E. Hanson, Necessary evil: the life of Jane Welsh Carlyle [1952]
Letters and memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. T. Carlyle and J. A. Froude, 3 vols. (1883)
T. Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. C. E. Norton, 2 vols. (1887)
R. L. Tarr, Thomas Carlyle: a descriptive bibliography (1989)
Thomas Carlyle: the critical heritage, ed. J. P. Seigel (1971)
W. H. Dunn, Froude and Carlyle (1930)
C. F. Harrold, Carlyle and German thought, 1819-1834 (1934)
C. R. Sanders, Carlyle's friendships and other studies (1977)
Carlyle and his contemporaries, ed. J. Clubbe (1976)
R. W. Dillon, A centenary bibliography of Carlylean studies (1981-5)
Kirkcaldy town minutes, 1816

Archives  
BL, corresp., RP 392, 402 [copies]
Bodl. Oxf., pocket books
Duke U., Perkins L., letters and papers
Edinburgh Central Reference Library, letters
Harvard U., letters and literary MSS
Hornel Library, Broughton House, Kirkcudbright, family letters and letters
Hunt. L., corresp., literary MSS, and papers
JRL, letters
London Library, letters
Morgan L., corresp. and papers
NL Scot., corresp.; corresp. and papers; family corresp. and papers
NL Scot., MSS
U. Edin., letters
University of Toronto, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, family corresp.
V&A, letters, manuscripts, and proofs
Yale U., Beinecke L., letters, papers |  BL, letters to James Marshall, Egerton MS 3032
BL, letters to Macvey Napier, Add. MSS 34614-34615, 34621, 34622, passim
BL, letters as sponsor to Royal Literary Fund, loan no. 96
BL, letters to Mr and Mrs R. Smith, Add. MS 44885 A
CUL, corresp. with Edward Fitzgerald
Harvard U., Houghton L., corresp. with Ralph Waldo Emerson
JRL, letters to John Ruskin and John James Ruskin
Kircaldy Art Gallery and Museum, papers relating to Kirkcaldy
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, corresp. with Alexander Carlyle and others
Mitchell L., Glas., Glasgow City Archives, letters to William Stirling-Maxwell
NA Scot., corresp. with Robert Mitchell and family
NL Aus., letters to Alfred Deakin
NL Ire., letters to Charles Gavin Duffy
NL NZ, Turnbull L., corresp. with Geraldine Jewsbury
NL Scot., letters to William Allingham
NL Scot., letters to Baring family
NL Scot., letters to Arthur Helps
NL Scot., letters to Robert Horn
NL Scot., letters to David Hyde
NL Scot., letters to Thomas Murray
NL Scot., letters to Lady Sandwich
NRA Scotland, priv. coll., letters to John Swinton
priv. coll., Mirchouse, Keswick, corresp. with Thomas Spedding
Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, corresp. with John Tyndall
Ruskin Library, Lancaster, corresp. with John Ruskin
Som. ARS, letters to Sir Edward Strachey
Trinity Cam., letters to Lord Houghton
U. Edin. L., letters to Charles Butler
U. Edin. L., letters to J. Johnstone
U. Edin. L., letters to David Laing
V&A NAL, letters to John Forster

Likenesses  
D. Maclise, pencil drawing, 1832, V&A; repro. in Fraser's Magazine, 7 (1833)
D. Maclise, lithograph, pubd 1833, BM, NPG
S. Laurence, drawing, 1838, Carlyle's House, Kensington and Chelsea, London
R. J. Lane, lithograph, pubd 1839 (after Count D'Orsay), NPG
J. Linnell, oils, 1844, Scot. NPG
R. S. Tait, two salt prints, 1851, NPG
R. S. Tait, oils, 1855, Carlyle's House, Kensington and Chelsea, London
T. Woolner, plaster medallion, 1855, NPG; version, Scot. NPG
R. S. Tait, double portrait, oils, 1857-8 (with his wife), Carlyle's House, Kensington and Chelsea, London
F. M. Brown, group portrait, oils, c.1860 (Work), Man. City Gall.
T. Woolner, marble bust, 1866, U. Edin. L.
G. F. Watts, oils, c.1868, V&A
G. F. Watts, oils, 1868, NPG [see illus.]
W. Greaves, pencil and wash drawing, 1870, Scot. NPG
J. M. Whistler, oils, 1873, Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum
J. E. Boehm, terracotta bust, 1875, NPG
R. Herdman, oils, 1875, Scot. NPG
aquatint, 1875, NPG
A. Legros, oils, 1877, Scot. NPG
J. E. Millais, oils, 1877, NPG
H. Allingham, watercolour, 1879, Scot. NPG
W. Brodie, bronzed plaster bust, 1879, Scot. NPG
W. Greaves, oils, c.1879, Scot. NPG
H. Allingham, two drawings, 1881 (posthumous), Carlyle's House, Kensington and Chelsea, London
J. E. Boehm, marble statue, 1881, Scot. NPG; related bronze statue, Chelsea Embankment, London
A. Gilbert, plaster death mask, 1881, NPG
photographs, Carlyle's House, Kensington and Chelsea, London
photographs, Carlyle's birthplace, Ecclefechan, Dumfries and Galloway
photographs, NPG
woodcut (after watercolour by H. Allingham), BM, NPG

Wealth at death  
under £40,000: resworn probate, April 1882, CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1881)

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