‘It all stands pretty fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to splash down what I know, in large masses of colours; that it may look like a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance,—which it is.” So wrote Thomas Carlyle to his wife, Jane, before beginning the last volume of his history of the French Revolution. The work took Carlyle three years to write, and its publication in 1837 made the Scotsman one of the foremost writers in Britain. Over the next decade he would achieve fame across Europe and America as a historian, literary critic and political essayist—as, to use an anachronistic term, an intellectual.
Carlyle has been forgotten by the general public, except perhaps as a coiner of terms (“cash nexus,” “the dismal science”), but he has been blessed with a confederation of academics dedicated to publishing his writings in handsome scholarly editions. The collected letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, a collaborative work by scholars at Duke and Edinburgh universities, has reached its 49th volume and, after more than half a century, nears completion. The Carlyles corresponded with a great number of important writers and political figures in Europe and America in the mid-19th century; the letters are an immense resource for historians.
