Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle

First published: 1843

Type of work: Essays

The Work:

In Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle brings to the task of social commentary the same searching, tenacious, and idiosyncratic analysis that characterized his Sartor Resartus (1835). In the earlier work, Carlyle explores his crisis of faith; in Past and Present, however, he analyzes the problems of newly industrialized England both by invoking historical events and by dissecting contemporary issues. Carlyle offers his assessment in four books: “Proem,” “The Ancient Monk,” “The Modern Worker,” and “Horoscope.” While his method may at first appear haphazard, Carlyle weaves striking examples, blistering caricatures, and shrewd political analyses into a memorable pattern, closing with a stern warning about England’s future.

Born into a family of resolute Scottish Calvinists, Carlyle was never shy about offering opinions, advice, criticism, and even insults in his essays. While he no longer accepted the tenets of the faith, Carlyle never shed its didactic approach. For this reason, some Victorian critics considered his style indecorous, even grotesque. Readers, however, will find his unpredictability and exaggeration surprisingly modern. Carlyle also inherited from his family an abiding respect for and insistence upon work. Throughout Past and Present he demands constructive efforts from all persons “each in their degree” and lambastes the idle gentry, whom he calls “enchanted dilettantes.”

Despite his admiration for the worker and emphasis on solid, practical accomplishment, Carlyle remained scornful of the prevailing Victorian doctrine of utilitarianism. Expounded by Victorian optimists, including Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, utilitarianism sought to achieve “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Its method required assessing every act, belief, or idea for its usefulness or “utility.” Like the utilitarians, Carlyle had little use for existing religious and social institutions; however, he found their emphasis upon happiness infantile and their confidence in utility exaggerated and mechanistic. To Carlyle, the utilitarians wasted energy in endlessly classifying and codifying human efforts. By contrast, he claimed that, given the appropriate conditions, a genuine “Aristocracy of Talent” would arise to lead society. Such “heroes” deserved to be worshiped; they possessed a vital energy capable of reinventing and ordering society. Later generations have deemed such views authoritarian, even fascistic, but Carlyle’s defense of his position in Past and Present defies easy labeling.

In “Proem,” Carlyle introduces most of the major themes of his work as well as his characteristic rhetorical strategies. In Carlyle’s opinion, England in 1843 was burdened by a huge surplus of wealth and activity, improperly managed and frivolously expended. Able workingmen languished “enchanted” in poorhouses or were daily exploited by profiteering and callous employers. Early in the discussion, Carlyle takes a stand on one of the most controversial economic issues of his day: the infamous Corn Laws (repealed in 1846). These tariffs on imported grains were established to eliminate foreign competition and to keep the price of English farm products high; they also effectively robbed working people of their daily bread. Carlyle defends an early popular movement against the Corn Laws, the Manchester Insurrection of 1819, arguing that the agitators “put their huge inarticulate question, ’What do you mean to do with us?’ in a manner audible to every reflective soul in this kingdom.” Those who labor deserve to be responsibly and actively governed, rather than enduring the laissez-faire neglect of the political system. To achieve this organic, vital government, Carlyle urges his readers to “put away all Flunkyism, Baseness, Unveracity from us.” Only a heroic nation of “faithful, discerning souls” will be capable of electing a heroic government, of discerning the Aristocracy of Talent crucial to England’s future.

Also in “Proem,” Carlyle creates the first of his imaginary characters, who appear periodically in the work to serve as “straw men,” ludicrous proponents of the arguments he despises. Bobus Higgins, for example, typifies the fatuous, greedy middle classes, incapable both of self-rule and of choosing worthy leadership. In the following book, “The Ancient Monk,” Carlyle turns to an actual historical figure to dramatize the diminished stature of profit-minded Victorians. The book presents a biography of Samson, abbot of the medieval monastery of St. Edmundsbury, whose deeds are recorded by his faithful biographer Jocelin of Brakelond. Given Carlyle’s distaste for the social machine conceived by utilitarians, it is not surprising that he looked to an age of faith for his heroes. Throughout the essay, however, Carlyle emphasizes that it is Samson’s works, rather than his faith alone, that make him heroic.

Abbot Samson, Jocelin assures the reader, made all “the Earth’s business a kind of worship.” The model for Carlyle’s practical man, Samson “had a talent; he had learned to judge better than Lawyers, to manage better than bred Bailiffs.” Medieval social vitality is expressed not only by Samson’s stature but also by the monks’ capacity to elect him without benefit of ballot box or bribery. Casting a critical eye on Victorian religious fads, Carlyle contrasts Abbot Samson’s quiet efficiency with the “noisy theoretic demonstrations” of Tractarianism, or the Oxford Movement (beginning in 1833), which sought to enhance ceremony and ritual in the Church of England. He entreats his audience to dispose of “blockhead quacks” and acknowledge instead England’s “real conquerors, creators, and eternal proprietors,” “those who ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in England.”

Having offered both a definition and an exemplar of heroism, Carlyle’s analysis continues in “The Modern Worker.” In these chapters, Carlyle’s language becomes the most militant and his arguments the most prescient. Lacking Samson’s insight and distracted by the “Shows and Shams of things,” Victorian society adheres only to the false gospels of “Mammonism” and “Dilettantism.” Carlyle exposes what he terms “Social Gangrene” by citing some unforgettable cases, including the case of a poor Irish widow and mother of three whose appeals to various charitable institutions are repeatedly denied. Eventually, the widow contracts typhus and dies, but not before she spreads the contagion so that seventeen of her fellow laborers die with her. Carlyle asks, “with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have been economy to help this poor Widow?” To Carlyle, society’s studied neglect of the poorer classes is not only inhumane but also foolish. He remarks (with some irony) that, despite being rejected, the dying widow “proved her sisterhood” in the end; disease underscores the biological link between classes, the organic relationship of all humankind.

Though he defends honest labor, Carlyle repudiates profit as a motive for human endeavor. He foresees the rise and impact of advertising, impatiently dismissing the “Puffery” of an English hatter who “has not attempted to make better hats . . . but his whole industry is turned to persuade us that he has made such!” Things made only for profit are, to Carlyle, “no-things.” Recalling his Calvinist roots, he insists that work must not be profaned by notions of economic gain; nor should it be trivialized by fantasies of happiness. Utilitarians such as Bentham and Mill degrade the dignity of labor, just as surely as do profiteers, by making happiness its goal. Both happiness and profit are ephemeral, irrelevant. Only work provides an index of human worth to Carlyle, a means of recognizing an Aristocracy of Talent. Society is not held together by cash payments or by supply and demand. In demanding “let us see thy work,” Carlyle seeks a more organic social structure than economic class and a less arbitrary measure of success than a full purse.

In “The Modern Worker,” Carlyle also makes it clear that democracy (at least as he defines it) does not represent the climax of political evolution. Liberty, he claims, “requires new definitions.” He has little faith in the capacity of representative government to secure genuine liberty, nor can he tolerate that liberty which measures human relationships only in terms of cash flow. At its worst, democracy becomes the pursuit of economic liberty by hypocrites eager to enslave themselves anew by gratifying their most “brutal appetites.” Carlyle expresses his belief that democracy is merely a transitional phase when he states,

The Toiling Millions of Mankind, in most vital need and passionate instinctive desire of Guidance, shall cast away False Guidance; and hope, for an hour, that no-Guidance will suffice them: but it can be for an hour only.

Espousing his own brand of radicalism, Carlyle supports the people’s right to topple inept or self-interested governments, but he does not extend to them the right to govern themselves. He sees genuine liberty only in an integrated society, one in which individuals perform appropriate work and coexist with inferiors, equals, and superiors. In closing, Carlyle returns to history for an example of such right governance, contrasting the talent of Oliver Cromwell with the empty platitudes of Sir Jabesh Windbag (another of Carlyle’s symbolic characters).

In book 4, “Horoscope,” Carlyle returns to the subject of true aristocracy, reiterating that it is “at once indispensable and not easily attained.” He implores his readers to use the continuity between past and present to instruct the future. The nineteenth century has a new epic to write, “Tools and the Man” (in contrast to Vergil’s “Arms and the Man”), which must address unprecedented social forces such as industry and democracy. Carlyle warns that the present parliamentary system, rife with corruption and ineptitude, is incapable of organizing labor and managing the working classes. Characteristically, he asserts that these problems can only be solved “by those who themselves work and preside over work,” in other words, a “Chivalry of Labor.” Carlyle’s manifesto replaces a feudal aristocracy with an industrial aristocracy. He exhorts them to abandon an economics of supply and demand and to offer in its place “noble guidance” in return for “noble loyalty.” He stresses that this must be a permanent bond. The freedom afforded by monthlong (versus lifelong) contracts is comparable to the liberty guaranteed by democracy; for Carlyle, it is a worthless commodity. While the bond between laborer and master is sacred to Carlyle, the worker is no mere serf. Carlyle raises the possibility of jointly owned ventures in which the worker’s interests, as well as his efforts, are permanently represented.

The landed gentry remain relevant in Carlyle’s scheme only to the extent that they exert themselves and use their accumulated resources on behalf of their fellow beings. Otherwise, they are scarcely human; they are “living statues” who are pampered, isolated, and absurd. Similarly, the “gifted”—writers, artists, and thinkers—cannot be segregated from those who haul timber or dig ditches; their position in a “Chivalry of Labor” depends upon active contribution and is no more or less honorable than any other.

For Carlyle, these are the prerequisites for an epic future. Though he has been accused of fascism, Carlyle seeks, ultimately, to reawaken and to recover the connections between persons. (In this respect, his ideas heavily influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson and American Transcendentalism.) Past and Present closes with a memorable avowal of this human interdependence: “Men cannot live isolated: we are all bound together, for mutual good or else for mutual misery, as living nerves in the same body.”

Bibliography

Calder, Grace J. The Writing of “Past and Present”: A Study of Carlyle’s Manuscripts. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949. Contains valuable information on Carlyle’s writing process and stylistic eccentricities.

Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. Introduction and notes by Chris R. Vanden Bossche. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. In addition to the text, this volume contains an introduction that places the work in its historical context, as well as extensive textual annotations.

Fielding, K. J., and Roger L. Tarr, eds. Carlyle Past and Present: A Collection of New Essays. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976. Presents a variety of approaches to the work and its author.

Holloway, John. The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument. London: Macmillan, 1953. A landmark study of Carlyle’s rhetorical strategies and persuasive tactics.

Levine, George. The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macauley, Newman. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968. A learned discussion of Carlyle’s style in the larger context of Victorian prose.

Morrow, John. Thomas Carlyle. New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2006. Chronicles Carlyle’s personal life and intellectual career and discusses his works.

Trela, D. J., and Rodger L. Tarr, eds. The Critical Response to Thomas Carlyle’s Major Works. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Collection of reviews and essays about Past and Present and Carlyle’s other major works that date from the initial publication of his works until the end of the twentieth century. The introduction discusses how Carlyle responded to his critics.

Ulrich, John McAllister. Signs of Their Times: History, Labor, and the Body in Cobbett, Carlyle, and Disraeli. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002. Discusses how Past and Present and works by William Cobbett and Benjamin Disraeli were a response to the economic and cultural crises in England during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Waring, Walter. Thomas Carlyle. Boston: Twayne, 1978. An excellent introduction to Carlyle’s ideas. Helps explain the philosophical tensions and social conditions of the early Victorian period.