Thomas Carlyle: A Biography

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a man always in revolution. He revolted against the religion of the day, against the industrialist and capitalist social structure, and against the idea that a lifelong marriage should be intensely and continuously happy. He was an ardent Calvinist, but struggled with many accepted religious truths. He championed the introduction of German Romantic literature to the British and penned a masterful history of the French Revolution. He was irascible and crotchety, but many flocked to his ideas. Fred Kaplan’s Thomas Carlyle is a unique and thorough biography of this ideological pioneer.

Fred Kaplan’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography of Carlyle is as researched as it is long. At 600 pages, it covers the show more entirety of the life of the noted Scottish essayist and philosopher. While it incorporates a great deal of his correspondence and others’ notes on Carlyle, Kaplan tends to stay away from literary analyses of Carlyle’s writings. Very few other details are spared, however, as Kaplan does a very good job of fleshing out this long-dead thinker. This is a 30th anniversary re-issue of the work, but I think it would hold up against modern biographies. A splendid and absorbing book. show less

As a writer and historian, Thomas Carlyle stands as one of the dominant figures of Victorian literature. Growing up in Scotland, he was a shy boy who studied for the ministry and the law before deciding to embark on a career as a writer. After starting out as a literary critic he moved on to become a historian, outlining a vision of history as a chronicle of heroes who shaped events - a view that alienated him from the growing liberal and democratic trends of his time.

Drawing upon Carlyle's enormous correspondence and personal writings, Fred Kaplan provides a detailed study of the man. Much of Carlyle's life is uninteresting, coming across as constant intellectual anxiety and a never-ending concern about illness, frequently punctuated show more in his early years by moves in search of a more congenial locale. Yet Kaplan describes it in a surprisingly readable manner, one that moves the reader smoothly through what might otherwise be turgid stretches. His examination of Carlyle's tense marriage is especially strong; a woman of considerable gifts in her own right, she proved as popular in London's literary circles as Carlyle himself, though the pleasure she drew from this was often offset by her own frequent illnesses and fights with her husband. Punctuating all of this is Kaplan's analysis of Carlyle's ideas, which he often develops within the context of the historian's many contacts with the leading literary figures of his day - a perspective that adds further to his insights into his personality.

Yet while Kaplan's biography provides an excellent portrait of Carlyle's personal life, it lacks an examination of the very thing that makes him worthy of study: his writings. Kaplan does recount Carlyle's efforts to write his many books and essays, but the finished products themselves are never analyzed for what they said or how they were received by the reading public. This is a glaring omission in what is otherwise a fine study of an important Victorian historian, one whose work had a significant impact on the thought of his era. show less