Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher. Known as the "sage of Chelsea", his writings strongly influenced the intellectual and artistic culture of the Victorian era.
Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, a village in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. He attended the University of Edinburgh, where he excelled in mathematics and invented the Carlyle circle. After finishing the arts course he prepared to become a minister in the Burgher Church while working as a schoolmaster. He quit these and several other endeavours before settling on literature, writing for the Edinburgh Encyclopædia and working as a translator. He initially gained prominence in English-language literary circles for his extensive writing on German Romantic literature and philosophy. These themes were explored in his first major work, a semi-autobiographical philosophical novel entitled Sartor Resartus.
Carlyle eventually relocated to London, where he published The French Revolution: A History. Its popular success made him a celebrity, prompting the collection and reissue of his earlier essays under the title of Miscellanies. His subsequent works were highly regarded throughout Europe and North America, including On Heroes, Past and Present, Cromwell's Letters, Latter-Day Pamphlets, and Frederick the Great. He founded the London Library, helped to establish the National Portrait Galleries in London and in Edinburgh, became Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh in 1865 and received the Pour le Mérite in 1874, amongst other honours.
Carlyle occupied a central position in Victorian culture, being considered the "undoubted head of English letters" and a "secular prophet". Posthumously, a series of publications by his friend James Anthony Froude damaged Carlyle's reputation, provoking controversy about his personal life and his marriage to Jane Welsh Carlyle in particular. His reputation further declined in the aftermaths of the First World War and the Second World War, when his philosophy was seen as a precursor of both Prussianism and fascism. Growing scholarship in the field of Carlyle studies since the 1950s has improved his standing, and although little-read today, he is yet recognised as "one of the enduring monuments of literature".
Biography
Early life
Thomas Carlyle was born on 4 December 1795 to James and Margaret Aitken Carlyle in the village of Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire in southwest Scotland. His parents were members of the Burgher secession Presbyterian church. James Carlyle was a stonemason, later a farmer, who built the Arched House wherein his son was born. His maxim was that "man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream." Nicholas Carlisle, an English antiquary, traced his ancestry back to Margaret Bruce, sister of Robert the Bruce.As a result of his upbringing, James Carlyle became deeply religious in his youth, reading many books of sermons and doctrinal arguments throughout his life. In 1791 he married his first wife, distant cousin Janet, who gave birth to John Carlyle and then died. He married Margaret Aitken in 1795, a poor farmer's daughter then working as a servant. They had nine children, of whom Thomas was the eldest. Margaret was pious and devout and hoped that Thomas would become a minister. She was close to her eldest son, being a "smoking companion, counsellor 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 required her to be removed from her home and restrained. Carlyle always spoke highly of his parents, and his character was deeply influenced by both of them.
Carlyle's early education came from his mother, who taught him reading, and his father, who taught him arithmetic. He first attended "Tom Donaldson's School" in Ecclefechan followed by Hoddam School, which "then stood at the Kirk", located at the "Cross-roads" midway between Ecclefechan and Hoddam Castle. By age 7 Carlyle showed enough proficiency in English that he was advised to "go into Latin", which he did with enthusiasm; however, the schoolmaster at Hoddam did not know Latin, so he was handed over to a minister who did, with whom he made a "rapid & sure way". He then went to Annan Academy, where he studied rudimentary Greek, read Latin and French fluently, and learned arithmetic "thoroughly well". Carlyle was severely bullied by his fellow students at Annan, until he "revolted against them, and gave stroke for stroke"; he remembered the first two years there as among the most miserable of his life.
Edinburgh, the ministry and teaching (1809–1818)
In November 1809 at nearly fourteen years of age, Carlyle walked one hundred miles from his home in order to attend the University of Edinburgh, where he studied mathematics with John Leslie, science with John Playfair and moral philosophy with Thomas Brown. He gravitated to mathematics and geometry and displayed great talent in those subjects, being credited with the invention of the Carlyle circle. In the University library he read many important works of eighteenth-century and contemporary history, philosophy and belles-lettres. He began expressing religious scepticism around this time, asking his mother to her horror, "Did God Almighty come down and make wheelbarrows in a shop?" In 1813 he completed his arts curriculum and enrolled in a theology course at Divinity Hall, Edinburgh, the following academic year. This was to be the preliminary of a ministerial career.Carlyle began teaching at Annan Academy in June 1814. In December 1814 and December 1815, he gave his first trial sermons, both of which are lost. By the summer of 1815 he had taken an interest in astronomy and would study the astronomical theories of Pierre-Simon Laplace for several years. In November 1816 he began teaching at Kirkcaldy, having left Annan. There, he made friends with Edward Irving, whose ex-pupil Margaret Gordon became Carlyle's "first love". In May 1817, Carlyle abstained from enrolment in the theology course, news which his parents received with "magnanimity". In the autumn of that year, he read De l'Allemagne by Germaine de Staël, which prompted him to seek a German teacher, with whom he learned the pronunciation. In Irving's library he read the works of David Hume and Edward Gibbon's The History of the ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'' ; he would later recall that
I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw that Christianity was not true. Then came the most trying time of my life. I should either have gone mad or made an end of myself had I not fallen in with some very superior minds.
Mineralogy, law and first publications (1818–1821)
In the summer of 1818, following an expedition with Irving through the moors of Peebles and Moffat, Carlyle made his first attempt at publishing, forwarding an article describing what he saw to the editor of an Edinburgh magazine, which was not published and is now lost. In October, Carlyle resigned from his position at Kirkcaldy, and left for Edinburgh in November. Shortly before his departure, he began to suffer from dyspepsia, which remained with him throughout his life. He enrolled in a mineralogy class from November 1818 to April 1819, attending lectures by Robert Jameson, and in January 1819 began to study German, desiring to read the mineralogical works of Abraham Gottlob Werner. In February and March, he translated a piece by Jöns Jacob Berzelius, and by September he was "reading Goethe". In November he enrolled in "the class of Scots law", studying under the advocate David Hume. In December 1819 and January 1820 Carlyle made his second attempt at publishing, writing a review-article on Marc-Auguste Pictet's review of Jean-Alfred Gautier's Essai historique sur le problème des trois corps, which went unpublished and is lost. The law classes ended in March 1820 and he did not pursue the subject any further.In the same month he wrote several articles for David Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopædia, which appeared in October. These were his first published writings. In May and June, Carlyle wrote a review-article on the work of Christopher Hansteen, translated a book by Friedrich Mohs, and read Goethe's Faust. By the autumn Carlyle had also learned Italian and was reading Vittorio Alfieri, Dante Alighieri and Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, although German literature was still his foremost interest, having "revealed" to him a "new Heaven and new Earth". In March 1821 he finished two more articles for Brewster's encyclopaedia, and in April he completed a review of Joanna Baillie's Metrical Legends.
In May Carlyle was introduced to Jane Baillie Welsh by Irving in Haddington. The two began a correspondence, and Carlyle sent books to her, encouraging her intellectual pursuits; she called him "my German Master".
"Conversion": Leith Walk and Hoddam Hill (1821–1826)
During this time, Carlyle struggled with what he described as "the dismallest Lernean Hydra of problems, spiritual, temporal, eternal". Spiritual doubt, lack of success in his endeavours, and dyspepsia were all damaging his physical and mental health, for which he found relief only in "sea-bathing". In early July 1821, "during those 3 weeks of total sleeplessness, in which almost" his "one solace was that of a daily bathe on the sands between and Portobello", an "incident" occurred in Leith Walk as he "went down" into the water. This was the beginning of Carlyle's "Conversion", the process by which he "authentically took the Devil by the nose" and flung "him behind me". It gave him courage in his battle against the "Hydra"; to his brother John, he wrote, "What is there to fear, indeed?"Carlyle wrote several articles in July, August and September, and in November began a translation of Adrien Marie Legendre's Elements of Geometry. In January 1822, Carlyle wrote "Goethe's Faust" for the New Edinburgh Review, and shortly afterwards began a tutorship for the distinguished Buller family, tutoring Charles Buller and his brother Arthur William Buller until July; he would work for the family until July 1824. Carlyle completed the Legendre translation in July 1822, having prefixed his own essay "On Proportion", which Augustus De Morgan later called "as good a substitute for the fifth Book of Euclid as could have been given in that space".
Carlyle's translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels and his biography of Friedrich Schiller brought him a decent income, which had before then eluded him, and he garnered a modest reputation. He 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. He also travelled to Paris in October–November with Edward Strachey and Kitty Kirkpatrick, where he attended Georges Cuvier's introductory lecture on comparative anatomy, gathered information on the study of medicine, introduced himself to Legendre, was introduced by Legendre to Charles Dupin, observed Laplace and several other notables while declining offers of introduction by Dupin, and heard François Magendie read a paper on the "fifth pair of nerves".
In May 1825, Carlyle moved into a cottage farmhouse in Hoddam Hill near Ecclefechan, which his father had leased for him. Carlyle lived with his brother Alexander, who, "with a cheap little man-servant", worked on the farm, his mother with her one maid-servant, and his two youngest sisters, Jean and Jenny. He had constant contact with the rest of his family, most of whom lived close by at Mainhill, a farm owned by his father. Jane made a successful visit in September 1825. Whilst there, Carlyle wrote German Romance, a translation of German novellas by Johann Karl August Musäus, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Ludwig Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jean Paul. In Hoddam Hill Carlyle found respite from the "intolerable fret, noise and confusion" that he had experienced in Edinburgh, and observed what he described as "the finest and vastest prospect all round it I ever saw from any house", with "all Cumberland as in amphitheatre unmatchable". Here, he completed his "Conversion" which began with the Leith Walk incident. He achieved "a grand and ever-joyful victory", in the "final chaining down, and trampling home, 'for good,' home into their caves forever, of all" his "Spiritual Dragons". By May 1826, problems with the landlord and the agreement forced the family's relocation to Scotsbrig, a farm near Ecclefechan. Later in life, he remembered the year at Hoddam Hill as "perhaps the most triumphantly important of my life."