Past and Present

Summary

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." Carlyle sets before the reader the able-bodied paupers he saw sitting in silence outside the St. Ives workhouse, the Edinburgh lanes described by the physician W. P. Alison, and a Stockport couple convicted of poisoning their children to collect burial-society money. Like Midas, he says, England has gold it cannot eat. The Sphinx of fact asks every society "What is Justice?" and devours those who answer wrongly, and no "Morrison's Pill," no single act of Parliament, will cure the disease. Book II, "The Ancient Monk," turns abruptly to the twelfth century. Working from the Latin chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, recently edited for the Camden Society, Carlyle retells the decline of the abbey of St. Edmundsbury under the feeble old Abbot Hugo, the election of the sub-sacristan Samson at Waltham in 1182, and Samson's long labour of setting debts, lands, knights and monks in order. He dwells on vivid particulars: Samson's journey to Rome disguised as a Scot, his russet beard turning grey, his quarrels and reconciliations with his own monks, and the night in 1198 when he opens the coffin of St. Edmund and touches the martyr's body. The point is not that England should return to monasteries, but that a believing society could find and obey its ablest man. Book III, "The Modern Worker," returns to the present and names its false gospels. The Gospel of Mammonism holds that cash payment is the only bond between people, so that an Irish widow refused by every charity proves her sisterhood by dying of typhus and infecting seventeen others. The Gospel of Dilettantism lets an idle aristocracy preserve game and talk in Parliament while millions lack bread. Against both Carlyle sets work: "Blessed is he who has found his work," and "all true Work is Religion." Satiric figures such as the mill-owner Plugson of Undershot and the orator Sir Jabesh Windbag show what work and speech become without duty. Book IV, "Horoscope," looks ahead. Carlyle calls for a real aristocracy of talent, for permanent rather than day-to-day contracts, for public education and emigration, and above all for "Captains of Industry" who will rule their workers as soldiers are led, with something like chivalry, because "Love of men cannot be bought by cash-payment." The book is prophecy rather than economics: vehement, ironic and biblical in cadence. Its admirers ranged from Ruskin and Morris to the young Friedrich Engels, and its authoritarian strain troubled readers even in its own decade. The attached Project Gutenberg text (#26159) lets students test each of these claims against Carlyle's own words.

Plot or Argument

• Book I, Proem: Midas, the Sphinx and the Manchester riots

  Carlyle presents England's enchanted wealth through the St. Ives workhouse, Dr. Alison's reports from Scotland and the Stockport poisoning case. He reads the 1842 Manchester disturbances and the memory of Peterloo as inarticulate demands for just government, mocks the hope of a single legislative "Morrison's Pill," and argues for an aristocracy of talent and a renewed capacity for hero-worship.

• Book II, The Ancient Monk: Abbot Samson of St. Edmundsbury

  In seventeen chapters drawn from Jocelin of Brakelond's Chronica, Carlyle describes the abbey under Abbot Hugo, the canvassing and election of Samson before Henry II at Waltham in 1182, and Samson's government: settling the debts, disciplining knights and tenants, appearing in Parliament, resisting a forbidden tournament, and the inspection of St. Edmund's body after the fire of 1198. The case of Henry of Essex, the disgraced earl turned monk, shows the saint's justice in medieval eyes.

• Book III, The Modern Worker: Mammonism and the gospel of labour

  Carlyle diagnoses modern England as a society bound only by cash payment, with an idle landed aristocracy and a working aristocracy of mill-owners who know only profit. The chapters "Labour" and "Reward" proclaim work as a sacred calling and the antidote to despair; "Democracy" argues that the liberty of mere non-interference becomes for the poor a liberty to starve; Plugson of Undershot and Sir Jabesh Windbag are his satirical portraits.

• Book IV, Horoscope: Captains of Industry

  Carlyle asks what kind of leadership can organise labour. He criticises electoral bribery, calls for a "one institution" of organised work, urges industrial leaders to become a new chivalry who bind workers to them by permanent ties rather than weekly wages, and assigns duties to the landed class, to men of talent, and to teachers. He looks for gradual reform from within society more than sweeping legislation.

Characters

• Abbot Samson, abbot of St. Edmundsbury, 1182-1211

  Former sub-sacristan elected abbot in 1182; Carlyle's model of a ruler who governs by work, veracity and practical piety, restoring order to a ruined house.

• Jocelin of Brakelond, monk-chronicler

  Samson's chaplain and the author of the Latin chronicle Carlyle translates and paraphrases; Carlyle calls him a monastic Boswell.

• Abbot Hugo, Samson's predecessor

  An old, inaccessible abbot who lets the abbey sink into debt to moneylenders; Carlyle treats him with pity as an image of well-meaning misrule.

• The Irish Widow, figure from Dr. Alison's reports

  A destitute widow in Edinburgh, refused by every charity, who dies of typhus and infects her lane; for Carlyle, the proof that human beings are bound to one another whether they admit it or not.

• Plugson of Undershot, satirical mill-owner

  Carlyle's invented "Captain of Industry" still in the bucaneering stage, who keeps his accounts by double entry and thinks wages settle every obligation.

• Sir Jabesh Windbag, satirical parliamentarian

  A type of the politician who governs by speeches and expedients rather than by facing the facts of the nation's condition.

• Sauerteig, imaginary German philosopher

  Carlyle's recurring mouthpiece, familiar from his earlier essays, whose sayings, such as that the Hell of the English is the terror of not getting on, voice his sharpest judgments.

Lessons

• Wealth that no one can touch

  Carlyle's opening image is a land full of harvests and workshops whose people sit idle in workhouses or starve in cellars, as if under a curse. He does not deny England's productivity; he denies that productivity alone makes a nation healthy. The Midas fable becomes a judgment on a society that has measured success in gold and forgotten justice.

  • What three scenes does Carlyle use in Book I, Chapter I to show "enchanted" wealth, and why does he choose them?
  • Why does he call the Poor Law "an anodyne, not a remedy"?
  • Does Carlyle blame the poor, the rich, or the whole nation for the Stockport murders? Point to his wording.

• Abbot Samson and the art of governing

  Book II shows a man who did not campaign for power and then spent decades doing the dull, necessary work of ruling: auditing accounts, restraining knights, settling tenants and keeping the liturgy. Carlyle admires that Samson "struggled incessantly to educe organic method out of lazily fermenting wreck." The past serves him as a mirror, not a programme.

  • What qualities did the monks of St. Edmundsbury see in Samson before his election?
  • Which of Samson's acts as abbot does Carlyle most admire, and why?
  • Is Carlyle's twelfth century accurate history, idealised picture, or both? How would you test his account against Jocelin?

• Cash payment is not the sole nexus

  The Irish widow's typhus proves to the city that refused her that she was "bone of your bone" after all. Carlyle's phrase that cash payment is not the sole relation of human beings became one of the most quoted lines of Victorian social criticism. He attacks laissez-faire not with statistics but with a moral claim: people who live together owe one another more than wages.

  • What does Carlyle mean by the "Gospel of Mammonism"?
  • Why is the widow's death by typhus such a powerful argument? Is it fair to the charities of Edinburgh?
  • What obligations beyond wages does Carlyle think employers owe? Which of them does Scripture also teach?

• Work as worship, and its limits

  "Blessed is he who has found his work" is Carlyle's best-known sentence, and he adds that "all true Work is Religion," borrowing the monastic Laborare est Orare. The teaching dignifies ordinary labour and condemns idleness at both ends of society. Yet Carlyle, who had left orthodox Christianity behind, makes work almost the whole of religion; students should ask what worship, rest and grace add to his gospel.

  • How does Carlyle's "Know thy work and do it" differ from the old maxim "Know thyself"?
  • Where does Carlyle's doctrine of work agree with the Benedictine rule, and where does it leave out prayer and Sabbath rest?
  • Can a person be faithful in work that is not his chosen "work"? What would Colossians 3:23 say?

• Captains of Industry and the danger of strong rulers

  Book IV asks industrial leaders to become a new chivalry, binding their workers by loyalty and permanent ties. Carlyle insists that "Love of men cannot be bought by cash-payment." His vision is generous toward the poor and hard on selfish masters, but it also prefers command to consent and doubts democracy. A careful reading weighs both the justice he demands and the power he would hand to the strong.

  • What does Carlyle expect a true Captain of Industry to do that Plugson of Undershot does not?
  • Why does Carlyle distrust parliamentary talk and elections? Are his reasons convincing?
  • How do Christian teachings on masters and servants (Ephesians 6:5-9) both support and restrain Carlyle's hierarchy?

Context

Past and Present appeared in the hungry years of the early 1840s, after the Chartist petitions of 1839 and 1842, amid the Plug Plot strikes and riots in the manufacturing districts in August 1842, the debate over the Corn Laws, and resentment of the New Poor Law of 1834 with its union workhouses. Carlyle had already raised the "Condition-of-England question" in Chartism (1839) and had praised heroic leadership in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).

Composition

Carlyle wrote the book rapidly between late 1842 and early 1843, setting aside his long-planned work on Oliver Cromwell. The medieval book rests on the Chronica of Jocelin of Brakelond, published by the Camden Society in 1840 under the editorship of John Gage Rokewode. The St. Ives workhouse scene draws on Carlyle's own journey through Huntingdonshire in 1842, and the Scottish evidence on Dr. W. P. Alison's writings on poor relief. It was published in London in April 1843.

Reception

The book was widely read and much argued over. Emerson arranged its American publication and reviewed it in The Dial in 1843; Friedrich Engels praised its critique of industrial England in an 1844 review while rejecting its remedies, and the phrase "cash payment" reappeared in the Communist Manifesto. John Ruskin and William Morris acknowledged its influence. Its admiration of strong government and its contempt for parliamentary democracy were questioned from the start and have shaped Carlyle's reputation since.

Comparisons

• Chartism

  Carlyle's 1839 pamphlet first posed the Condition-of-England question and the demand that the governing classes govern; Past and Present expands that diagnosis and adds the twelfth-century abbey as a positive example.

• Hard Times

  Dickens dedicated Hard Times (1854) to Carlyle. Coketown and the hollow self-made man Bounderby dramatize the Mammonism and cash-nexus Carlyle condemns, though Dickens trusts private kindness and fancy where Carlyle calls for stronger rulers.

• The Rule of St Benedict

  Carlyle borrows the monastic motto Laborare est Orare and makes a Benedictine abbey his model society. The Rule binds work to the hours of prayer and to obedience under an abbot; Carlyle keeps the work and the obedience but loosens the liturgy.

• Sartor Resartus

  Sartor Resartus gave Carlyle's early spiritual gospel of work and his German mouthpiece Teufelsdröckh; Past and Present carries the same convictions from personal crisis into national politics.

• The Communist Manifesto

  Marx and Engels took up Carlyle's charge that modern society has left no bond between people but "cash payment." Carlyle's answer is a renewed hierarchy of duty under God and heroic leaders; theirs is class struggle and the abolition of property.

• North and South

  Gaskell's mill-owner John Thornton grows, through strike and failure, toward something like Carlyle's Captain of Industry, a master who recognises personal ties with his workers beyond the wage.

• The Conduct of Life

  Emerson, Carlyle's American friend and publisher, also writes of wealth, work and worship, but with a calmer confidence in individual self-reliance and less hunger for a ruling hero.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The three scenes of Book I, Chapter I: the silent men outside the St. Ives workhouse, Dr. Alison's Scottish lanes, and the Stockport parents. Notice how Carlyle turns each into evidence of a curse on wealth.
• The sudden change of century at the start of Book II. Ask why Carlyle trusts a monk's Latin notebook to judge Victorian England.
• Samson's election in Book II, Chapters VII and VIII, and how differently the monks talk about candidates from how English electors talk in Book IV, Chapter II.
• The Irish widow in Book III, Chapter II. Track how Carlyle uses the language of Genesis ("bone of your bone") to make a public-health story into a theological argument.
• Plugson of Undershot and the chapter "Captains of Industry": compare what Plugson is with what Carlyle wants him to become.

Key terms and names

Condition-of-England question

Carlyle's own phrase, from Chartism (1839), for the problem of mass poverty and unrest in industrial England; Past and Present is his fullest answer to it.

Mammonism

Carlyle's name, from the biblical Mammon, for a society that treats money-getting as the chief end of life and cash payment as the only bond between people.

Dilettantism

The idle, unserious attitude Carlyle charges against the landed aristocracy, who enjoy their rank and game-preserves without governing.

Morrison's Pill

A patent medicine of the day (properly Morison's pills) that claimed to cure everything; Carlyle's image for any single law or scheme promising to cure society's ills.

Jocelin of Brakelond

A monk of St. Edmundsbury and chaplain to Abbot Samson whose Latin chronicle, edited in 1840, supplies Book II.

St. Edmundsbury

Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, a great Benedictine abbey built around the shrine of Edmund, the East Anglian king martyred by the Danes in 869.

Captains of Industry

Carlyle's phrase for the owners and managers of mills and mines, whom he calls to lead their workers as responsible commanders rather than mere employers.

Laborare est Orare

"To work is to pray," the monastic motto Carlyle translates as "Work is Worship."

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What paradox about England's wealth does Carlyle state on the first page, and which examples does he give?
2. Comprehension How was Samson chosen abbot, and what condition did he find the abbey in?
3. Comprehension What happens to the Irish widow, and what question does Dr. Alison ask afterward?
4. Interpretation Why does Carlyle spend a whole book on a twelfth-century abbey in a work about Victorian poverty? What does Samson show that no modern example could?
5. Interpretation Carlyle condemns both the idle aristocracy and the profit-seeking mill-owner. Which does he judge more harshly, and why?
6. Interpretation What does Carlyle mean when he says that the liberty of the working millions has become a liberty to die by want of food?
7. Big Question Is work a blessing in itself, as Carlyle says, or does its worth depend on what it serves and on the rest and worship that surround it?

Faith Connections

• Genesis 2:23 (Scripture)

  Adam calls Eve "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh." Carlyle has the Irish widow plead "I am your sister, bone of your bone," turning the words of Eden into a claim on the charities of Edinburgh.

• 2 Thessalonians 3:10-12 (Scripture)

  Paul commands that those who will not work should not eat and urges quiet labour. Carlyle's condemnation of idle rich and idle poor alike echoes the passage, though he applies it most sharply to landlords.

• Rule of St. Benedict, ch. 48 (Church Fathers)

  Benedict calls idleness the enemy of the soul and orders the monks' day between manual labour and sacred reading. Carlyle's abbey is a Benedictine house, and his "Work is Worship" condenses the Rule while placing less weight on its hours of prayer.

• Luke 16:13 (Scripture)

  "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." Carlyle's "Gospel of Mammonism" takes its name from this saying and accuses England of trying to serve the second master alone.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: England has abundant wealth yet its workers starve or sit idle; this is because the nation recognises no bond but cash payment and no duty in its rulers; a believing medieval community, by contrast, could recognise and obey a capable, conscientious ruler like Abbot Samson; therefore England must recover reverence for work and real leadership, and its landowners and industrialists must govern their dependents as a trust, or the nation will be judged by events.

Rhetorical device: prophetic irony. In Book III, ch. II Carlyle writes that the refused Irish widow "proves her sisterhood" by dying of typhus, then states the conclusion in mock-economic terms: "She took typhus-fever, and killed seventeen of you!" The bitter understatement makes the reader supply the moral outrage.

Debate: Resolved: that Carlyle's Captains of Industry would protect English workers better than parliamentary reform.

Memory Work

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness

Captains of Industry

Writing Prompts

Essay: Carlyle claims that the past can measure the present. Using Abbot Samson's election and government in Book II and the chapters "Gospel of Mammonism" and "Democracy" in Book III, argue whether his contrast between the twelfth century and the 1840s is fair, and what it reveals about his idea of good government.

Comparison with Hard Times: Dickens dedicated Hard Times to Carlyle. Compare Bounderby of Coketown with Plugson of Undershot, and argue whether Dickens's remedy for industrial hardness agrees with Carlyle's call for Captains of Industry.

Medical Lens

Past and Present is social prophecy, not a medical book, but it rests on medical evidence and medical metaphors. Carlyle relies on the Edinburgh physician W. P. Alison, whose reports on destitution and fever in Scotland were part of the early public-health movement, and his story of the Irish widow whose typhus kills seventeen neighbours is an argument for the economic and moral folly of refusing relief. He describes chronic poverty as "gangrene" rather than fever, mocks the patent-medicine culture of Morison's pills as an image for legislative quick fixes, and cites a criminal case of child poisoning for burial money. Book II's account of St. Edmund's exhumation, attended by "Walter the Medicus," gives a glimpse of a medieval monastic physician. Medical relevance is limited to these passages.

• Book I, ch. I (Midas)

  Carlyle cites Dr. Alison's testimony on the lanes of Glasgow and Edinburgh, calling it a healing art made sacred again, and describes Scotland's poverty as chronic gangrene rather than fever-fits.

  Physicians Doctors Public Health Sanitation
• Book I, ch. I (Midas)

  The Stockport Assizes case of 1841, in which parents were convicted of poisoning three children to claim burial-society payments, presented as a symptom of starvation and despair.

  Pharmacology Poisons Starvation Nutrition Death Dying
• Book I, ch. I (Midas)

  The able-bodied paupers seen in silent torpor outside the St. Ives union workhouse, described as enchanted men forbidden to work.

  Starvation Nutrition
• Book I, ch. IV; Book III, ch. XV

  Morrison's Pill, Carlyle's spelling of the widely advertised Morison's vegetable pills, becomes his image for every single remedy that promises to cure society at a swallow.

  Quackery Charlatans
• Book II, ch. XVI (St. Edmund)

  Jocelin's account of Abbot Samson opening the saint's coffin by night with the sacristan and Walter the Medicus, and touching the incorrupt body.

  Physicians Doctors Death Dying
• Book III, ch. II (Gospel of Mammonism)

  From Dr. Alison: an Irish widow refused relief by every Edinburgh charity dies of typhus, and seventeen others in her lane die of the fever; Carlyle asks whether helping her would not have been economy.

  Fever Infection Public Health Sanitation Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Tell the Irish widow's last week in Edinburgh from the point of view of a clerk at one of the charities that turned her away.

• Essay

  Carlyle says the past can judge the present. Choose one practice of Abbot Samson and one institution of your own town, and argue what each could learn from the other.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between Plugson of Undershot and Abbot Samson about what a master owes the people who work for him.

Further Reading

• Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, Jocelin of Brakelond

  The twelfth-century chronicle behind Book II; available in modern English translation.

• Chartism, Thomas Carlyle

  The 1839 pamphlet in which Carlyle first framed the Condition-of-England question.

• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Thomas Carlyle

  The 1840 lectures behind Book I's chapters on hero-worship and an aristocracy of talent.

• Unto This Last, John Ruskin

  Ruskin's 1860 essays on political economy, which carry forward Carlyle's attack on the cash nexus.

• The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels

  Engels's 1845 study of Manchester, written soon after he reviewed Past and Present.