Thomas Carlyle’s 18th-Century Historians

Literary and intellectual historians of the nineteenth century never tire of pointing out that Thomas Carlyle was born in the same year as John Keats; it is rarely observed that the two men were born only a year after the death of Edward Gibbon. It is as if Carlyle has to be a new born in a new era, either as a late Romantic who lived on to become a Victorian sage or secular prophet, or else as an early enthusiast in importing into Great Britain what Rosemary Ashton has called ‘The German Idea.’For Isaiah Berlin, Carlyle represented a deadly fusion of both these tendencies; he features frequently, if not automatically, in Berlin’s Homeric lists of Counter-Enlightenment rogues and charlatans, a Scottish equivalent of de Maistre. In the estimation of Berlin’s Oxford contemporary Hugh Trevor-Roper, Carlyle signified the historical imagination in a diseased state, closer to pseudo-prophetic myth-making than to properly considered history. Trevor-Roper repudiated Carlyle as unequivocally as had Berlin, but rather more attentively; Gibbon, by contrast, was one of his household gods. Two more local worthies, David Hume and William Robertson, were also of moment to Carlyle. For Carlyle, Hume and Robertson provided a not always attractive intellectual legacy; for Gibbon they had provided, by contrast, a living inspiration as he contemplated the beginning of his own historical labours. This paper will outline some of the ways in which Carlyle interpreted and used eighteenth-century historians to inform his own historical writing.