Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (1843) was a prophetic warning of impending disaster for mid-Victorian Britain that was delivered in what the author described as a 'miraculous thunder-voice, from out of the centre of the world.' The impact of Carlyle's social criticism was immediate and profound, shaping debate about the 'The Condition of England' question well into the twentieth century and beyond, and serving as the moral foundation of the welfare state. His relentlessly abrasive and illuminating critique of industrial civilization generated a vast range of response both in England, Europe, and the United States. The writings of Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, William Morris, John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin, as well as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, were saturated with imagery and ideas directly indebted to the book.
Past and Present also provided novelists and poets with an enduring vision of the ubiquitous rot that lay at the heart of '
laissez-faire' England. The repercussions of Carlyle's unique analysis can be witnessed in the literary form and thematic content of such works as Charles Dickens's
Christmas Carol (1843),
Dombey and Son (1848),
Bleak House (1852-53), and
Hard Times (1854); Benjamin Disraeli's
Sybil (1845); Elizabeth Gaskell's
Mary Barton (1848) and
North and South (1855); and Charles Kingsley's
Alton Locke (1850). Poets such as Alfred Tennyson in
Maud (1855), Elizabeth Barrett Browning in
Aurora Leigh (1856), and Arthur Hugh Clough in
The Latest Decalogue (1862) built a vocabulary that was steeped in the outrage and indignation of Carlyle's polemic. The artist Ford Madox Brown attempted in his painting
Work (1852-65) to give visual testimony to the profound social schisms that Carlyle had exposed in
Past and Present and to pay tribute to the 'Sage' who had 'moulded a nation to his pattern.'
Thomas Carlyle
David R. Sorensen is Professor of English at Saint Joseph's University and Associate Director of its Honors Program. He is a senior editor of the
Duke-Edinburgh Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1970-ongoing), and has edited with K. J. Fielding, Carlyle's
The French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1989) and
Jane Carlyle: New Selected Letters (2004), with Rodger L. Tarr,
The Carlyles at Home and Abroad (2004), and with Brent E. Kinser,
Carlyle's On Heroes and Hero-Worship (2013). He is co-editor of
Carlyle Studies Annual and a founding director of the
Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium (2011- ). He also co-edited the Oxford World's Classics edition of Carlyle's
The French Revolution (2019).
Brent E. Kinser is Professor of English and Department Head at Western Carolina University. He is the author of
The American Civil War and the Shaping of British Democracy (2011), and the coordinating editor of
The Carlyle Letters Online (2007-; ), the electronic edition of
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1970- ), for which he serves as an editor. He is co-editor (with David R. Sorensen) of
Carlyle's On Heroes,
Hero-Worship, and the
Heroic in History (2013) He is co-editor
Carlyle Studies Annual and a founding director of the
Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium (2011- ). He also co-edited the Oxford World's Classics edition of Carlyle's
The French Revolution (2019).
