Thomas Carlyle was born in the same year as the famous poet John Keats, in 1795. He was the eighth child of a stonemason and farmer in the town of Ecclefechan, in Scotland. In later years the young man would refer proudly to his background as that of a “peasant.”

Even though his father was a devout Calvinist, Carlyle rejected dogmatic Christianity and had a special loathing of the Roman Catholic Church. The core of his quarrel with the religion was that he believed that Christianity set “too much value on the weak and sinful.”

At first, young Thomas went to the local village school, and then he was moved to Annan academy, where he was bullied by older schoolmates. According to legend, Thomas was so desperate to get a good education, that at the age of fourteen he walked 100 miles to Edinburgh University. Although the boy’s father had hoped his son would enter the ministry, Carlyle instead found that he had a talent with mathematics and thus focused all of his attention to science. But Thomas Carlyle was a strange boy from the very start, so, instead of working hard to earn his degree, he spent all his time combing the library and devouring with passion all the books that he could find. Till the end of his days Carlyle remained an ardent reader.

After working as a teacher, journalist, and contributor to the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, an event changed Carlyle’s life drastically. It is said, that in about the year 1821, he experienced a kind of conversion. No one is really sure how or what happened, but Carlyle himself described it as a conversion to “hatred of the devil, not love of God.” It was then that Carlyle began a serious study of German and took his first steps to becoming one of the most influential social critics in history.

By then Carlyle was a grown man and he needed a family. So, in 1826, he married Jane Welsh, who was the daughter of a well-to-do doctor. Jane has been described as intelligent, attractive, somewhat temperamental, acidly witty, well-informed, generally disagreeable, but ambitious woman who did much to further his career... Whatever she was like, her’s and Carlyle’s marriage wasn’t a very happy one. Their relationship is best seen through a series of almost 9,000 letters that the couple wrote to each other during their lifetime.

The first years of their marriage were difficult even without the fact that they weren’t meant for one another. Money was short, and they had to move to a little farm at Craigenputtock. It was here, in the quiet, lonely cottage that Carlyle began writing his first great masterpiece – Sartor Resartus, which means in Latin the “The Tailor Retailored.” The book achieved great success when it was finally, after long last, published. That was because Carlyle had much difficulty in finding a publisher for it at first.

The book, Sartor Resartus, was written with a sort of mingled bitterness and humor and it is a truly fantastic mixture of both autobiography and German philosophy. Some critics say that this book was actually an early Existentialist work, because Carlyle’s thinking was heavily influenced by German philosophy. Sartor Resartus’ main theme is that, to quote Carlyle himself, “the intellectual forms in which men’s deepest convictions have been cast are dead and that new ones must be found to fit the time, but that the intellectual content of this new religious system is elusive.” In the guise of a so-called “philosophy of clothes,” Carlyle mostly comments on the falseness of material wealth, while in the form of a philosophical romance, he details the crises in his life and affirms his spiritual idealism.

In 1834 Carlyle moved to London with his wife. Here he began writing his second great work, The French Revolution. Hoping for the opinion of his friend, Carlyle lent the partially completed manuscript to J.S. Mill. But the manuscript was accidentally destroyed when the maid mistook it for trash and burned it. Unperturbed by the accident, Carlyle rewrote the whole book, finally finishing it in 1837. Soon the book won acclaim and success, and this brought him many invitations to lecture, thus solving his financial difficulties.

His later works all began to show the savage side of his nature. For example, in an essay on model prisons he tried to persuade the public that the most brutal criminals were actually being well cared for in the new prisons of the 19th century. Or, as another example, even though most Londoners were scandalized by a Jamaican governor who was very cruel to Negroes during an uprising, Carlyle praised him for, in his own words, “saving the West Indies and hanging one incendiary mulatto, well worth gallows”… Soon afterwards he wrote a pamphlet called An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, in which he advocated ruthless measures for the formerly enslaved plantation workers who were demanding higher wages, by saying that slavery should never have been abolished, because it had kept order and forced work from people who would otherwise have been lazy…

Carlyle later wrote more works, such as Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, Elucidations, Latter Day Pamphlets, Past and Present, and another of his more well-known books, Heroes and Hero Worship.

The book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) showed how Carlyle, in an age which put faith in legislation, believed in a leader, a hero, whom people must recognize and worship. Carlyle described a hero as being a divinity (as in pagan myths), as a prophet (for example, Mohammed), as a poet (Dante or Shakespeare), as a priest (for example Martin Luther and John Knox), as a “man of letters” (Ben Johnson and Robert Burns), and as a king (specifically Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon). Carlyle said that world civilization had developed with the help of so-called heroes, because only a heroic leader, in Carlyle’s opinion, can forge a state and help create a new culture for a nation. Carlyle so worshipped heroes that he was always more attracted to the idea of the heroic struggle itself, rather than to any specific goal for which the struggle was being made.

In the year 1865 Thomas Carlyle was offered the rectorship of Edinburgh University, due to his great success as a writer and critic. But, tragically, Jane Carlyle died suddenly and Thomas went into a depression. He lived, sad and alone, for another 15 years. When he died, Westminster Abbey was offered for his burial, but Carlyle was buried instead, according to his wish, beside his parents at Ecclefechan.

Carlyle’s work and his ideas influenced people not only in his own time, but even nowadays. He was the first to see behind the modernization of our world and understand that what was happening was not just progress. He was the first to see that we must look into the past in order to make a better future…