“What sprang forth from Carlyle’s pen was not a dry account of the French Revolution, but a book brimming with passion and philosophy, one that offered a new style of storytelling that influenced a generation of Victorian writers.”
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was born #OTD, 4 Dec. His THE FRENCH REVOLUTION established him as one of the most important social & cultural commentators of his day
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https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2009/marchapril/feature/the-voracious-pen-thomas-carlyle
“Would it not have been economy to help this poor Widow? She took typhus-fever, and killed seventeen of you! […] all government of the Poor by the Rich has long ago been given over to Supply-and-demand, Laissez-faire and such like, and universally declared to be ‘impossible.’”
—Thomas Carlyle, PAST & PRESENT (1843)
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Read free on @gutenberg_org
A Life in Letters
Thomas & Jane Welsh Carlyle were outstanding figures in Scottish literature, above all in their correspondence. Prof Ian Campbell is one of the senior editors of the Duke-Edinburgh edition of the Collected Letters of Thomas & Jane Welsh Carlyle – completed in 2023 in 50 Volumes
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Thomas Carlyle: historian, writer, racist
“His writings show a strong personal conviction and concern for socioeconomic inequalities […] However, Carlyle’s humanitarian concerns only extended to the white working classes and his opinions of people of colour and views on slavery were shockingly expressed…”
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https://glasgowmuseumsslavery.co.uk/2020/11/18/thomas-carlyle-historian-writer-racist/
#Scottish #Victorian #literature #history #19thCentury #slavery #racism
“Carlyle’s endorsement of human sympathy in his description of poor women preparing the family meal in small cottages and his conviction that his work should somehow be for them, demonstrate humility and faith. Yet he would come to approve slavery, militarism and dictatorship.”
—Prof Alan Riach on the Victorian values of Thomas Carlyle & his contemporaries
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#Scottish #Victorian #literature #history #19thCentury #slavery #racism
“Thomas Carlyle was an extremely long-lived Victorian author. He was also highly controversial, variously regarded as sage and impious, a moral leader, a moral desperado, a radical, a conservative, a Christian … an emblem of the complexity, contradiction, and sometimes absurdity of the era.”
—Prof Ian Campbell on Thomas Carlyle
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-carlyle
#Scottish #Victorian #literature #history #19thCentury #poetry #poem
