Thomas Carlyle (Ecclefechan 1795 – London 1881) was briefly a mathematics teacher (following studies at Edinburgh), but as of 1831 settled in London to pursue a career in letters. He became the dominant public intellectual of his generation. His writings covered the fields of history and biography (History of the French Revolution, 1839; History of Friedrich II of Prussia, 1858-65), fiction (Sartor resartus, 1833) and cultural criticism (On heroes and hero-worship, 1841); he also translated Jean Paul, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and other German Romantics. Indeed, Carlyle is a key figure for the transfer of German Romantic thought into English cultural life (he wrote a Life of Schiller, 1825, corresponded with Goethe, was influenced by Fichte and admired Arndt). Carlyle’s German-derived Romantic idealism was shot through with a very stern moralism, rooted in the Scottish Calvinist belief in which he was raised (and which he abandoned for a more secular moralism in the 1820s). Carlyle’s outlook, which, in the face of a disconcerting modernity with eroding moral certainties, posits a devotion to self-discipline and a reliance on the life-ordering forces of history, became the very blueprint of “Victorian” values; his ideas were disseminated through a generation of intellectuals under his influence, including Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, J.A. Froude and (in America) Ralph Waldo Emerson. Charles Dickens based his historical novel A tale of two cities on the History of the French Revolution. Carlyle saw history as a clash between forces of order and of chaos; a key role in this struggle was played by certain strong, powerful and insightful individuals who had the capacity to shape the course of history. These hero-figures served as an example for society and needed to be revered as such; they included political and religious leaders (Cromwell, Frederick II, Mohammed) and those literary giants who, in Carlyle’s view, articulated the cultural essence of their nation, such as Shakespeare and Dante. With this celebration of great men and the wholesome effect of “hero-worship”, Carlyle stood in the tradition of Hegel’s admiration for Napoleon and anticipated Nietzsche. His celebration of authority-by-willpower inspired many a political leader in the following century. Carlyle himself was also part of, and indeed helped to shape, the intense pro-German sympathies of Victorian England and the Teutonist cultivation of the Anglo-Saxon rootedness of English culture. As an old man, he intervened publicly to support Prussia (and its annexation of Alsace-Lorraine) in 1871; his open letter to The Times was reprinted frequently in Germany and further bolstered his reputation there. This and his life of Frederick of Prussia earned him the Prussian order Pour le Mérite; translated selections from his writings (Arbeiten und nicht verzweifeln, 1902) were highly successful, even in the war years of 1914-18. Later in life, when English Teutonism shifted from pro-German to more Scandinavian sympathies, Carlyle published a series of sketches of The early kings of Norway (1875), drawn from Dahlmann’s Geschichte von Dänemark (1843).
