Biographical Notes: Scottish-born son of a serious and devout Calvinist stonemason, Carlyle was raised and educated for the Presbyterian ministry, but during his college years at the University of Edinburgh he became skeptical of formal religious doctrine.  He taught and tutored for a brief time before deciding to pursue a career in writing.  He started one novel that was never finished, then earned his living first writing reviews and translations from German, later giving lectures and writing influential essays, histories, and biographies.  The 1837 publication of his history of the French Revolution vaulted him to prominence, and Carlyle came to be considered a leading Victorian social prophet and critic.  His outspoken criticism of Victorian society exerted a strong influence throughout the 19th century, and among his more notable admirers were Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels.  Novelist George Eliot said in 1855, "there is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle's writings."

"Carlylese"
The eccentric prose style of Carlyle was distinctive and somewhat difficult even to his contemporaries.  His writing tends to be extravagant and violently exclamatory—some say his work begs to be "shouted aloud."  It is partly the difficulty of his prose that has helped make Carlyle obscure through much of the 20th century.

"Bad Politics"
Perhaps a more important reason for Carlyle's lapse in importance in most of the 20th century is the political allegiance of some of his more famous (or infamous) admirers.  The two fathers of 20th-century communism, Marx and Engels, thought his alone was the voice of English reason in the Victorian Era.  Later in life Carlyle expressed serious mistrust in the abilities of common people to govern themselves in their own best interests.  His anti-democratic ideas made him advocate submission to a sort of enlightened and benevolent feudal authority in government—he thought occasional, gifted geniuses or "heroes" were best qualified to rule nations.  His ideas have often been linked with Fascism, and indeed he was much admired by Hitler's Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.

Transcendental Optimism
After a period of spiritual despair (related in "The Everlasting No" in Sartor Resartus), Carlyle came to believe that one could know God only through transcendental intuition of what he called "the Divine Idea."  Though he does not emphatically relate "the Divine Idea" to nature as the Romantics did, Carlyle shares with them the belief in a sort of visionary Presence that speaks to humankind through "inspiration."  Through all of his "shouting" and radical social criticism, Carlyle believed that "the Divine Idea" would lead to the improvement of humankind.
 
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