HISTORY AS BIOGRAPHY: Carlyle

Abstract

[Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) ranks among the most popular of nineteenth century literary historians. Learning from Sir Walter Scott to look upon the past as peopled by living men—“not abstractions … not diagrams and theorems; but men in buff coats and breeches, with color in their cheeks, with passions in their stomach and the idioms, features and vitalities of very men”—Carlyle sought to recapture the drama of the past. A stern moralist, his best known works, The French Revolution (1837), Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: With Elucidations (1845) and the History of Frederick II of Prussia (1858–1865) attested his originality of view as well as his political passion. In spite of his dictum that history is biography, Carlyle’s first history, subtitled a “History of Sansculottism,” was in effect an essay in social history, and his abiding concern with universal history transcended the strictly biographical, searching instead for the spiritual unity of an age. A vilifier of specialized “dry-as-dust” historians, he was in turn repudiated by them, and few historians, excepting his avowed disciple and later biographer J. A. Froude, acknowledged Carlyle as a member, much less a master of their craft.