The Major Works of Thomas Carlyle

The Victorian Age which extended from 1837 to 1901 was an era of great social change and intellectual advancement. "The steady advance of democratic ideals" and "the progress of scientific thought" (Compton-Rickett, page 405) were the chief factors influencing the life of the times. The age was marked by "conflicting explanations and theories, of scientific and economic confidence and of social and spiritual pessimism, of a sharpened awareness of the inevitability of progress and of deep disquiet as to the nature of the present" (Sanders, page 399). The literature of Victorian England is infused with the scientific as well as the humanitarian spirit, the romantic as well as the didactic note. It was essentially an Age of Prose- the direct influence of the growth in science and the questioning spirit -with great progress in critical prose writing. The inconsistent features of the early Victorian Britain were clearly reflected in the pamphlets, essays, lectures, and books of Carlyle, the greatest figure in the general prose literature of his age and one of the greatest moral forces of the nineteenth century.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1886), Scottish historian, critic, and sociological writer was born in the village of Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire as the eldest child of James Carlyle, stonemason, and Margaret Carlyle. The two great influences on his thought and work were the Bible and the modern German philosophy. He was in spirit a revolutionary of the Romantic Period utterly dissatisfied with modern commercialism and a champion of the simplicities of life. He openly admired the qualities of courage and endurance as can be seen from his treatment of the heroes of history. The striking feature of his work was "the burning enthusiasm t...

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...easure in looking back to the past and recreation of its great events. But the principal aim of Carlyle as a Victorian writer was to be didactic in tone -to give an answer to the perplexing questions of the age and to uplift the common man- which led to the intense moral fervour in his writings. Thus his literature is didactic and his history the worship of the strong.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Compton-Rickett, A. A History of English Literature. London: Thomas Nelson

and Sons Ltd, 1947.

Hudson, William H. An Outline History of English Literature. Bombay: B. I.

Publications, 1964.

Moody, William Vaughn.,and Robert Morss Lovett. A History of English Literature.8th ed. NewYork: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964.

Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. London:

Oxford, 2000.