Thomas Carlyle · CatalogThomas CarlyleThomas Carlyle · CatalogThomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian and social critic whose histories, biographies and lectures on heroes shaped Victorian thought in Britain and America.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian and social critic whose histories, biographies and lectures on heroes shaped Victorian thought in Britain and America.
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“Condition-of-England Question. CHARTISM. BY THOMAS CARLYLE. It never”
Chartism, Title page and opening of the 1840 printing · Reader
“Chartism means the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore or the wrong disposition, of the Working Classes of England”
“Surely of all ' rights of man,' this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest”
“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones”
“Turkey derives considerable excuse from the consideration that the Czar, in aiming a fleshly blow at the Sultan, is really aiming a spiritual blow at the Pope”
“John Sterling committed the care of his literary Character and printed Writings to two friends, Archdeacon Hare and myself. His estimate of the bequest was far from overweening”
“Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle”
Thomas Carlyle's Life of Friedrich Schiller first appeared in instalments in the London Magazine in 1823-24 and as a book in 1825, when Carlyle was a young Scottish tutor and translator not yet known as an author. Its full title calls it 'comprehending an examination of his works', and that is an exact description: the book is a biography of the German poet, dramatist and historian Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) interleaved with long critical accounts, plot summaries and translated scenes from his plays.
The Essay on Burns appeared in the Edinburgh Review in December 1828, nominally as a review of John Gibson Lockhart's new Life of Robert Burns, the sixth biography of a poet who had died thirty-two years earlier. Carlyle uses the occasion for an independent portrait of Burns as poet and as man.
Sartor Resartus ("the tailor re-tailored") is Thomas Carlyle's first book and the strangest of the major Victorian prose works. An anonymous English Editor has been sent a German treatise, Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken (Clothes, their Origin and Influence), by Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Professor of Things in General at the University of Weissnichtwo ("Know-not-where").
Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History (1837) follows France from the deathbed of Louis XV in May 1774 to the cannon with which Napoleon Bonaparte cleared the Paris streets on 13 Vendémiaire (5 October 1795). It is arranged in three volumes, The Bastille, The Constitution and The Guillotine, each divided into books of short, titled chapters.
Chartism is Thomas Carlyle's answer to the first great working-class political movement in Britain. Written in the autumn of 1839, after the People's Charter had been rejected by the House of Commons and while riots and arrests filled the newspapers, it was issued by James Fraser as a small book with 1840 on the title page.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History prints six lectures that Thomas Carlyle gave to a fashionable London audience between 5 and 22 May 1840 and published, revised, in 1841. The opening lecture announces the thesis for which the book is still known: that universal history is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked in the world, and that reverence for such men, which Carlyle calls hero-worship, is the root of religion, loyalty and social order.
Past and Present (1843) is Thomas Carlyle's answer to what he called the Condition-of-England question. It opens with a paradox: "England is full of wealth" yet "dying of inanition."
Latter-Day Pamphlets is a series of eight monthly tracts that Thomas Carlyle issued between February and August 1850, of which the attached Project Gutenberg text contains the first five. Written in the aftermath of the European revolutions of 1848, they are his angriest book: a prophetic denunciation of democracy, philanthropy, parliamentary talk and the government offices of Victorian Britain, mixed with practical proposals and with passages of grim comedy.
The Life of John Sterling (1851) is Thomas Carlyle's biography of a friend who died of lung disease at thirty-eight. John Sterling (1806–1844), born on the Isle of Bute and brought up in Wales, Paris and London, was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a writer for the Athenaeum, a young admirer of Coleridge, a sympathizer with Spanish revolutionaries, briefly a curate, and finally a poet and essayist whose books were little regarded.
Shall Turkey Live or Die? is a pamphlet of about thirty pages printed in London by Thomas Bosworth in 1854, when Britain and France were moving toward war with Russia over the Ottoman Empire.
Carlyle's History of Friedrich II of Prussia is the longest work he wrote and the one that cost him most: well over a decade of reading in German archives and memoirs, two journeys to Germany to walk the battlefields, and a long struggle with material he often called dreary. It appeared in six volumes between 1858 and 1865 and is divided into twenty-one Books, which the Project Gutenberg transcription attached here publishes as twenty-one separate volumes plus an appendix.
On the Choice of Books is the title a later London publisher (Chatto & Windus, in the edition transcribed as Project Gutenberg #13435) gave to a small volume built around the address Thomas Carlyle spoke to the students of Edinburgh University on 2 April 1866, after they had elected him Lord Rector. The volume wraps the speech in a long biographical introduction signed by Richard Herne Shepherd (Chelsea, June 1881), a newspaper account of the day, and three short documents: Carlyle's 1868 letter backing James Hutchison Stirling for the Moral Philosophy chair, his December 1868 farewell letter to the students, and the opening of the deed bequeathing his wife's farm of Craigenputtoch to found bursaries.
The Early Kings of Norway is Thomas Carlyle's compressed retelling of roughly four centuries of Norwegian royal history, from Harald Haarfagr's unification of the country around 860 to Hakon the Old's expedition against Scotland in 1263. Carlyle says in a brief preface that the Icelanders, writing through their long winters, preserved almost everything known of the Norse kings in their sagas, and that Snorri Sturluson (whom he calls Snorro) built his History of the Norse Kings, the Heimskringla, out of those sagas.