Thomas Carlyle - Early Life and Influences

Early Life and Influences

Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire. His parents determinedly afforded him an education at Annan Academy, Annan, where he was bullied and tormented so much that he left after three years. In early life, his family's (and his nation's) strong Calvinist beliefs powerfully influenced the young man.

After attending the University of Edinburgh, Carlyle became a mathematics teacher, first in Annan and then in Kirkcaldy, where Carlyle became close friends with the mystic Edward Irving. (Confusingly, there is another Scottish Thomas Carlyle, born a few years later and also connected to Irving, through his work with the Catholic Apostolic Church.)

In 1819–1821, Carlyle returned to the University of Edinburgh, where he suffered an intense crisis of faith and conversion that would provide the material for Sartor Resartus ("The Tailor Retailored"), which first brought him to the public's notice.

Carlyle developed a painful stomach ailment, possibly gastric ulcers (which pseudo-medicine of the time attributed to this "crisis of faith"), that remained throughout his life and contributed to his reputation as a crotchety, argumentative, and somewhat disagreeable personality.

His prose style, famously cranky and occasionally savage, helped cement a reputation of irascibility.

He began reading deeply in German literature. Carlyle's thinking was heavily influenced by German Idealism, in particular the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He established himself as an expert on German literature in a series of essays for Fraser's Magazine, and by translating German writers, notably Goethe (the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre). He also wrote Life of Schiller (1825).

In 1826, Thomas Carlyle married Jane Baillie Welsh, herself a writer, whom he had met in 1821, during his period of German studies.

His home in residence for much of his early life, after 1828, was a farm in Craigenputtock, a house in Dumfrieshire, Scotland where he wrote many of his works. He often wrote about his life at Craigenputtock, "It is certain that for living and thinking in I have never since found in the world a place so favourable.... How blessed, might poor mortals be in the straitest circumstances if their wisdom and fidelity to heaven and to one another were adequately great!".

At the Craigenputtock farm, Carlyle also wrote some of his most distinguished essays, and he began a lifelong friendship with the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1834, Carlyle moved to the Chelsea section of London, where he was then known as the "Sage of Chelsea" and became a member of a literary circle which included the essayists Leigh Hunt and John Stuart Mill.

In London, Carlyle wrote The French Revolution: A History (3 volumes, 1837), as a historical study concerning oppression of the poor, which was immediately successful. That was the start of many other writings in London.