Sartor Resartus was one of the works recommended to Wells’s Mr Kipps. But the shelves of any second-hand bookseller now testify to a vanished reputation, for when reaction did set in it was complete and unqualified. An age which had justifiable grounds to be suspicious of the rhetorical expression of inspirational ideas found Carlyle’s work unacceptable on the grounds of both style and content. His prose, which even his admiring contemporaries had sometimes found confusing, came to be regarded as completely unreadable, while the tendency of his political ideas towards an undiscriminating adulation of authority rendered him objectionable to a generation with practical experience of the evils of fascism. In the rehabilitation of the Victorians that has been a major development of recent literary scholarship the case of Carlyle has been left largely in abeyance. Despite the efforts of Professor Basil Willey and Raymond Williams, for example, to draw attention to the positive aspects of Carlyle’s insight into his age, and of American scholars like George Levine and Albert LaValley to redefine the nature of his significance, he remains, if less reviled, to a large extent unread. As a contemporary reviewer remarked, however,

with regard to Mr Carlyle … his influence on his own age, if nothing else, must always make him an object of interest to every other.

(Spectator, 2 October 1858.)

and it is clear that any attempt to understand the nineteenth century which would ignore him altogether is bound to remain incomplete. Moreover if we can no longer accept that valuation of Carlyle which saw him as an inspired prophet, we should not neglect those qualities in his work which have more lasting relevance: we may not care to accept his prescriptions, but his diagnoses were often penetrating and valid.

Thomas Carlyle was born on 4 December 1795 at the village of Ecclefechan, almost one hundred miles from Edinburgh. His parents were poor, industrious, and above all devout, and from them Carlyle imbibed a sense of moral purpose that was never to leave him. Throughout his lifetime he acknowledged the influence over him of parents who believed literally in the prospect of hellfire for the damned: as he wrote in his Reminiscences, ‘An inflexible element of Authority encircled us all.’ In 1809 he was sent to the University of Edinburgh, where he afterwards claimed that he learnt very little. His only pleasure there seems to have been in the study of mathematics and on leaving the university he became a teacher of that subject at Annan Academy. By now his enthusiasm for orthodox Christianity, which had encouraged his parents to hope that he might become a Presbyterian minister, was more tenuous, although through no want of application on the part of his mother, who corresponded with him regularly. ‘Have you got through the Bible yet? If you have, read it again’, she wrote, but by this time Carlyle was exploring wider fields. Writing to his mother he announces his intention ‘to stay a while with you, accompanied with a cargo of books, Italian, German and others’ and in spite of her worried remonstrance – ‘I pray for a blessing on your learning … Do make religion your great study, Tom’ – the books had their effect. Carlyle’s interests at this time included both native and foreign literature in fact, and his desire for a sense of purpose in what he read led to an overwhelming enthusiasm for the German Romantics, and in particular for Goethe.

Carlyle’s earliest published work, which consisted largely of commissioned essays and reviews, reflects these developments in his intellectual interests. In 1822, for example, he published an essay on Goethe’s Faust in the New Edinburgh Review, from 1823 to 1824 a biography of Schiller in instalments in the London Magazine, and again in 1824 a translation of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. To Schiller and Goethe were later added Jean Paul Richter, Heine and Novalis, while essays on Burns and on Boswell’s Life of Johnson, as well as on Diderot and Voltaire, reveal a range of interest perhaps only possible in a reader who through force of circumstance was independent of the literary world of his day. Meanwhile, however, Carlyle had revealed a new kind of interest when in 1829 the Edinburgh Review published his long essay Signs of the Times, a radical attack on prevailing utilitarian social philosophy. The essay was first published anonymously, but its authorship was scarcely a secret and Carlyle’s career as social commentator had begun.

Signs of the Times did not pass unnoticed; Carlyle’s next major work was very nearly never published at all. Still living in Edinburgh, he wrote the involved mystico-philosophical fantasy Sartor Resartus in which, under the pretence of having been asked to review an obscure German publication, he charted the experiences of an imaginary transcendentalist philosopher, lost in a world of materialism and superficiality. The philosopher, of course, thinly disguised, is a projection of Carlyle himself, but the elaboration of the fantasy is such that it is hardly surprising that Carlyle could not find a publisher for it. By now he was married, and indeed approaching middle age: if he was to succeed in a literary career it had to be quickly. Eventually, in 1833, Sartor Resartus was taken by Fraser’s Magazine, to be published in instalments: its author was to be paid at a specially reduced rate. If the editor of Fraser’s was afterwards able to claim that his judgement had been vindicated by the reactions of his readers however, Carlyle, who by now had set up a permanent home in London, was at work on a far more substantial undertaking. The French Revolution: A History was published in three volumes in 1837 and it met with a very different response. Overnight, almost, Carlyle was famous, for the work attracted the attention not only of a wide reading public, but of the leading literary figures of the day. From an unknown author in search of a publisher Carlyle was suddenly transformed into a literary giant.

The French Revolution is as much a work of social prophecy as of history, and the particular appeal of its subject-matter for Carlyle lay in the opportunity that it gave him to describe a society in turmoil. It is hardly surprising therefore that two years later he should turn his attention again to the condition of society at home, and in Chartism (1839) he readily related social unrest in Britain to the conflagration that had been the subject of his history. Carlyle the historian is in fact inseparable from Carlyle the social prophet: the emotional and moral urgency of his utterance in either role is that of the Calvinist who looked for truth amongst the German philosophers and poets. Carlyle was now set upon a literary career in which, whatever he wrote, the prophetic tone would dominate and, like all prophets, he cared little for the susceptibilities of his audience.