Thomas Carlyle
Naming his century the Mechanical Age in Signs of the Times in 1829, and for The French Revolution in 1837, the narrative history that made him the most read essayist in Victorian Britain.
Biography
Thomas Carlyle was born on December 4, 1795, at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, the eldest son of James Carlyle, a stonemason and later a farmer. He walked to Edinburgh at thirteen to enter the university in 1809, intending the ministry, and left without a degree to teach mathematics at Annan Academy and then at Kirkcaldy, where he met Edward Irving. In the 1820s he taught himself German, translated Goethe's Wilhelm Meister in 1824, wrote a Life of Schiller, and began a correspondence with Goethe that continued until Goethe's death in 1832.
He married Jane Baillie Welsh in 1826. From 1828 to 1834 the couple lived at Craigenputtock, an isolated farm fifteen miles from Dumfries, where Carlyle wrote the essays that made his name, among them Signs of the Times for the Edinburgh Review in June 1829, and the manuscript of Sartor Resartus. Ralph Waldo Emerson called on him there in August 1833 and afterward arranged the first American edition of Sartor Resartus, printed in Boston in 1836.
The Carlyles moved to 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, in 1834, and he lived there for the rest of his life. The French Revolution appeared in 1837 after he rewrote its first volume from memory, the only manuscript having been burned in John Stuart Mill's household. Chartism followed in 1839, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History in 1841, and Past and Present in 1843. He spent thirteen years on a six-volume History of Friedrich II of Prussia, finished in 1865, and was elected Rector of the University of Edinburgh that same year. Jane died in 1866. Carlyle died in London on February 5, 1881, and was buried beside his parents at Ecclefechan.
