Thomas Carlyle, 1795 - 1881

The nineteenth century Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle was born in the village of Ecclefechan, Scotland (1795). He studied German literature at school, and after graduating he found work teaching and writing articles for magazines. But he was depressed-he suffered from dyspepsia, and worried about finding a wife and about pleasing his parents. He wanted to write something but abandoned all of his projects almost as soon as he started them. He wrote to a friend, "I must do something-or die, whichever I like better." Finally, he came up with the idea for a book that combined autobiography and philosophy, and he began working on what would become his big breakthrough, Sartor Resartus (1833-1834).

Carlyle started writing a history of the French Revolution at the beginning of the 1830s, and finished it in 1835. He lent the manuscript to his friend, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, but Mill's housekeeper mistook the pile of paper for waste and threw it in the fire. Mill was furious with his housekeeper and offered Carlyle two hundred pounds in compensation. Carlyle said that he felt like a man who "has nearly killed himself accomplishing zero." But he went right back to work and rewrote the entire book in less than two years. The French Revolution was published in 1837, and it was a great success. George Eliot said, "No novelist has made his creations live for us more thoroughly than Carlyle has made Mirabeau and the men of the French Revolution. . . . What depth of appreciation, what reverence for the great and godlike under every sort of earthy mummery!"

Carlyle was interested in the great, towering figures of history, like Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, and Shakespeare. He wrote a book called On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), in which he says, "No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men." Some people in the first half of the twentieth century saw the book as a rejection of democracy, and Carlyle has become less popular than he once was.

Thomas Carlyle said, "He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem."