THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881)

Summary

Few men can have rivalled the hold Carlyle exerted upon successive generations of Victorians, and, like other such magnetic forces, he sustained the attention of both those who were attracted to and those who were repelled by his philosophy. Of all the contending voices in this volume only Bray, who may not have enjoyed access to the expensive periodicals in which Carlyle was published, fails to acknowledge him as an influence.

Past and Present was written at speed between the autumn of 1842 and the spring of 1843. The book was sparked off by a visit to East Anglia, undertaken as part of Carlyle's research for his Life of Oliver Cromwell. Whilst there Carlyle saw, in swift succession, the ruins of an abbey at Bury St Edmunds and the workhouse at St Ives. In this chance combination Carlyle recognised the possibility of juxtaposing past and present in such a way as to assuage any personal anxieties about the escapism implicit in his historical studies. Yet the book can also be regarded as a natural development of Carlyle's previous work. A visit to Manchester on 1 May 1842, during a period of factory closure, must have revealed to him how little impact his diagnosis of England's plight, published in Chartism (1839), had made either in improving the lot of the working classes or in diminishing the ruling classes' attachment to the principle of laissez-faire.