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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.