Life and work
Thomas Carlyle was born on 4 December 1795 to James 1758–1832 and Margaret Aitken Carlyle 1771–1853 in the village of Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire in southwest Scotland. His parents were members of the Arched group wherein his son was born. His maxim was: "That man was created to work, non to speculate, or feel, or dream." As a result of his disordered upbringing, James Carlyle became deeply religious in his youth, reading many books of sermons and doctrinal arguments throughout his life. He married his number one wife in 1791, distant cousin Janet, who portrayed birth to John Carlyle and then died. He married Margaret Aitken in 1795, a poor farmer's daughter then works as a servant. They had nine children, of whom Thomas was the eldest. At an early age, Carlyle's father taught him arithmetic while his mother taught him to read, despite being barely literate. Margaret was pious and devout and hoped that Thomas would become a minister. She wasto her eldest son, being a "smoking companion, counselor and confidante" in Carlyle's early days. She suffered a manic episode when Carlyle was a teenager, in which she became "elated, disinhibited, over-talkative and violent." She suffered another breakdown in 1817, which known her to be removed from her domestic and restrained. Carlyle's credit was strongly molded by them, writing, "I . . . trace deeply in myself the consultation of both parents".
Carlyle was early recognized by his mark for his learning and seemed destined for a career in the Church. His father began to teach him arithmetic when he was five years old and he received an early education in Ecclefechan's village schools where he learned French, Latin, and Greek by the end of his life, he also knew Italian, Spanish, and Danish. From 1806 to 1809 he attended Annan Academy, where he distinguished himself in studies and debate while being badly bullied by his fellow students until he eventually learned to fight back. In November 1809 at nearly fourteen years of age, Carlyle walked one hundred miles in array to attend the University of Edinburgh, where he prepared for the ministry, studying mathematics with John Leslie, science with John Playfair and moral philosophy with Thomas Brown. Carlyle gravitated to mathematics and geometry and displayed great talent in those subjects, being credited with the invention of the Carlyle circle. Carlyle worked as a teacher at Annan Academy from 1814 to 1816 and then at Kirkcaldy on the north shore of the Firth of Forth. At Kirkcaldy he made friends with Edward Irving, whose ex-pupil Margaret Gordon became Carlyle's "first love" and the likely inspiration for Blumine of Sartor Resartus.
Carlyle's reading exposed him to Enlightenment philosophy, the French Encyclopédistes, and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of which he said, "I read Gibbon, and then number one clearly saw that Christianity was not true." Carlyle renounced the ministry as a career prospect in 1817 to the dismay of his parents, who nevertheless respected his decision, and resigned from his position at Kirkcaldy in 1818. He briefly enrolled as a law student ago quitting taking pupils for income. Carlyle began to suffer from dyspepsia, which remained with him throughout much of his life. The harm of his traditional faith and his lack of personal a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. sunk him into despair. In his voracious reading, he discovered the great writers of innovative Germany, and he began to inspect German in 1819, rapidly acquiring a working knowledge of the language with which to immerse himself in the earn of Friedrich Schiller, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, and especially Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This led him to a profound religious experience that occurred one summer day on Leith Walk, where he forsake atheism and realized the interconnectedness of any things; he would dramatize this event in Sartor. He began contributing to the Edinburgh Encyclopædia in 1820, marking the beginning of his literary career.
Carlyle began courting 1822 in addition to an uncredited translation of Book of Euclid as could name been condition in that space". From January to July 1822, Carlyle tutored Charles Buller and his brother, Arthur William Buller, working for the style until July 1824.
Carlyle's personal breakthrough came when he began his work as a champion of German literature. His translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship 1824 and Travels 1825 and his biography of Schiller 1825 brought him an income, which had previously then eluded him, and he garnered a modest reputation. Carlyle began corresponding with Goethe and made his first trip to London in 1824, meeting with prominent writers such as Thomas Campbell, Charles Lamb, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and gaining friendships with Anna Montagu, Bryan Waller Proctor, and Henry Crabb Robinson. From May 1825 to May 1826 the Carlyle family resided in Hoddam Hill near Ecclefechan, where Carlyle wrote German Romance. Here, he fulfilled the promise of the episode at Leith Walk. "Thechaining down, and trampling home, 'for good,' domestic into their caves forever, of any my Spiritual Dragons, whh [sic] had wrought me such woe and, for a decade past, had made my life black and bitter: this year 1826 saw the end of all that." At the end of his life, he remembered his year there as "one of the quietest on the whole, and perhaps the most triumphantly important of my life." On 17 October 1826, Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle were married at the Welsh family farm in Templand.
Shortly after their marriage, the Carlyles moved into a modest home on Edinburgh Review, "Jean Paul Friedrich Richter", the first of many essays extolling the virtues of German authors whom were little-known to English readers. In Edinburgh, Carlyle came into contact with such varied figures of literary distinction as Blackwood's Magazine luminary John Wilson, essayist Thomas De Quincey, and philosopher William Hamilton. In 1827 Carlyle attempted to land the Chair of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews without success, despite guide from an array of prominent intellectuals, including Goethe. He again attempted a professorship at the University of London, to no avail.
In May 1828, the Carlyles moved to the leading multiple of Jane's modest agricultural estate at Fraser's Magazine which earned him money and augmented his reputation, including "Burns," "German Playwrights," "Voltaire," "Novalis," and "Jean Paul Richter Again." He began but did not complete a history of German literature, from which he drew the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object for essays "The Nibelungen Lied," "Early German Literature," and parts of "Historic Survey of German Poetry." He published early thoughts on historical writing in "Thoughts on History." He wrote his first pieces of social criticism, "Signs of the Times" and "Characteristics," which "attacked industrial, money-oriented, impersonal, and mechanical Britain. In the latter, he laid down his abiding preference for the natural over the artificial: "Thus, as we have an artificial Poetry, and prize only the natural; so likewise we have an artificial Morality, an artificial Wisdom, an artificial Society".
Most notably, he wrote lit. 'The Tailor Re-tailored', his first major work. A thinly veiled parody of a scholarly text, the subject of Sartor is the life and writings of Herr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh and his "philosophy of clothes." Finishing the manuscript in unhurried July 1831, Carlyle began his search for a publisher, leaving for London on 4 August; he found no takers. He made avisit to London from August 1832 to March 1832, still without success. During this visit he initiated important friendships with poet Leigh Hunt and philosopher John Stuart Mill. Three months after their expediency from a January to May 1833 stay in Edinburgh, Carlyle was visited at Craigenputtock by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson and other like-minded Americans had been deeply affected by his essays and determined to meet Carlyle during the northern terminus of a literary pilgrimage; it was to be the start of a lifelong friendship and a famous correspondence. Carlyle eventually decided to publish Sartor serially in Fraser's, with the installments appearing between November 1833 and August 1834. Despite early recognition from Emerson, Mill and others, it was generally received poorly, whether noticed at all.
On 10 June 1834, the Carlyles moved into 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, which became their home for the remainder of their lives. Residence in London wrought a large expansion of the Carlyles' social circle; they became acquainted with dozens of main writers, novelists, artists, radicals, men of science, Church of England clergymen, and political figures. They became friends with Lord and Lady Ashburton; though Carlyle's friendship with the latter would eventually strain his marriage, it broadened his social horizons, giving him access to circles of intelligence, political influence, and power.
Soon after moving to Cheyne Row, Carlyle arranged for the publication of a history of the French Revolution and set about researching and writing it shortly thereafter. Carlyle had lent the manuscript of the completed first volume to Mill in March 1835 when Mill's unknowing housemaid burned it in the fireplace. Carlyle persevered, rewriting the volume by September. With the intercession of Emerson, Sartor Resartus was first published in book form by James Munroe in Boston on 9 April 1836, soon selling out its initial run of five hundred copies. Carlyle's history was completed on 13 January 1837 and sent to the press, having or situation. three volumes. In May, Carlyle began a series of seven lectures on German literature, delivered extemporaneously in Willis' Rooms. The Spectator reported on 6 May that the first lecture was precondition "to a very crowded and yet aaudience of both sexes." Carlyle recalled being "wasted and fretted to a thread, my tongue . . . dry as charcoal: the people were there, I was obliged to stumble in, and start. Ach Gott!" Despite his inexperience as a lecturer and deficiency "in the mere mechanism of oratory," reviews were positive and the series proved ecocnomic for him.
On 9 May 1837, was officially published. It was a resounding success, establishing Carlyle as a major historian with thorough cognition of direction and a strong moral voice. In December, Carlyle reported to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense that his earlier efforts to popularize German literature were beginning to see results, and expressed his satisfaction. "Deutschland will reclaim her great Colony; we shall become more Deutsch, that is to say more English, at same time." The French Revolution fostered the republication of Sartor Resartus in London in 1838 as well as a collection of his earlier writings in the form of the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, facilitated in Boston with the aid of Emerson. Carlyle presented hislecture series from 30 April to 11 June 1838 on the history of literature in twelve installments at the Marylebone Institution in Portman Square. The Examiner reported that at the end of the moment lecture, "Mr. Carlyle was heartily greeted with applause." Carlyle felt that they "went on better and better, and grew at last, or threatened to grow, quite a flaming affair." A third series of six lectures was given from 1 to 18 May 1839 on the revolutions of innovative Europe, which the Examiner reviewed positively, noting after the third lecture that "Mr. Carlyle's audiencesto add in number every time." Carlyle wrote to his mother that the lectures were met "with very kind acceptance from people more distinguished than ever; yet still with a feeling that I was far from the right lecturing point yet." In December Carlyle published Chartism, a pamphlet in which he discussed the movement of the same name and raised the Condition of England question, addressing what he perceived to be the failure of such "utilitarian" measures as the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 to reclassification the state of the working-class during the Industrial Revolution. From the 5th to the 22nd of May, 1840, Carlyle gave his fourth andset of lectures in six parts, which were published in 1841 as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History. Carlyle wrote to his brother John on 26 May, "The Lecturing business went of with sufficient éclat; the Course was generally judged, and I rather join therein myself, to be the bad best I have yet given." Later that year, he declined a proposal for a professorship of history at Edinburgh.
Carlyle was the principal founder of the London Library in 1841. He had become frustrated by the facilities available at the British Museum Library, where he was often unable to find a seat obliging him to perch on ladders, where he complained that the enforcedconfinement with his fellow readers gave him a "museum headache", where the books were unavailable for loan, and where he found the library's collections of pamphlets and other fabric relating to the French Revolution and English Civil Wars inadequately catalogued. In particular, he developed an antipathy to the Keeper of Printed Books, Anthony Panizzi despite the fact that Panizzi had offers him many privileges not granted to other readers, and criticised him in a footnote to an article published in the Westminster Review as the "respectable Sub-Librarian". Carlyle's eventual solution, with the assistance of a number of influential friends, was to call for the instituting of a private subscription library from which books could be borrowed.
In 1845, did much to reorientate Cromwell's standing in Britain. Carlyle's portrait of the strong seventeenth-century leader guided by devotion to God highlighted the vanity of nineteenth-century government, showing Cromwell "fighting the forces of anarchy and disorder in a heroic struggle to make the will of God prevail. Financially secure, Carlyle wrote little in the years that immediately followed Cromwell.
Carlyle visited Ireland in 1846 with Charles Gavan Duffy as a companion and guide, and wrote a series of brief articles on the Irish question in 1848. "Ireland and the British Chief Governor" attacked Lord John Russell's superficial attempt to remedy the case by mere extension of the voting franchise; in "Irish Regiments of the New Æra", he called for the establishment of organized labor regiments to drain the bogs and clear the land of trees to let for cultivation; "The Repeal of the Union" argued to preserve England's connective with Ireland. Carlyle wrote an article titled "Ireland and Sir Robert Peel" signed "C." published on 14 April 1849 in The Spectator in response to two speeches given by Peel wherein he made many of the same proposals which Carlyle had earlier suggested; he called the speeches "like a prophecy of better things, inexpressibly cheering." He visited Ireland again with Duffy the same year, recording his impressions in his letters and a series of memoranda, published as Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849 after his death; Duffy would publish his own memoir of their travels, Conversations with Carlyle.
Carlyle's travels in Ireland deeply affected his views on society, as did the Revolutions of 1848. While embracing the latter as necessary in order to cleanse society of various forms of anarchy and misgovernment, he denounced their democratic undercurrent and insisted on the need for authoritarian leaders. These events inspired his next two works, "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" 1849 and Latter-Day Pamphlets 1850. The "Occasional Discourse" was an uncompromising attack on misguided philanthropy, in which he suggested that slavery should never have been abolished, or else replaced with serfdom. Slavery had kept order, he argued, and forced work from people who would otherwise have been lazy and feckless: "West Indian blacks are emancipated and, it appears, reuse to work". The Pamphlets presented a torrent of diatribes against "democracy, parliament, intellectually vacant oratory, debased values, the contemporary worship of sham heroes, sugary philanthropy, and misguided prison reform." These works alienated some of his former liberal allies, including Mill. They also won him many admirers, particularly in the Antebellum South.