'Despising his job in a Birmingham factory, V.W. Garratt surrounded his workbench with a barricade of boxes, set up a small mirror to provide early warning of the foreman's approach and studied the Everyman's Library Sartor Resartus when he was being paid to solder gas-meter fittings.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: V.W. Garratt Print: Book
'As a seaman in the mid-1870s, Ben Tillett had not yet been exposed to revolutionary literature, "But I discovered Thomas Carlyle and was held spellbound by the dark fury of his spirit and the strange contortions of his style".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Ben Tillett Print: Unknown
'As a young South Wales miner, Edmund Stonelake, who had never heard of the French Revolution, asked a bookseller for something on the subject and was sold Carlyle. At first it was hard reading, but eventually he extracted an entire political education from its pages: "I learned...of the great and lasting influence the Revolution had on peoples and countries struggling to establish democratic principles in Government in various parts of the world".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Edmund Stonelake Print: Book, Unknown
'Keir Hardie remembered that a "real turning point" of his life was his discovery of Sartor Resartus at age sixteen or seventeen. He had to read it through three times before he understood it: "I felt I was in the presence of some great power, the meaning of which I could only dimly guess at".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: James Keir Hardie Print: Book
'by age twenty [Mary Smith] had read and understood George Payne's Elements of Mental and Moral Science, Thomas Brown's Moral Philosophy, and Richard Whateley's Logic. But two authors in paticular offered magnificent revelations. First there was Emerson on Nature; and later, as a governess for a Scotby leatherworks owner, she discovered Thomas Carlyle: "Emerson and he henceforth became my two great masters of thought for the rest of my life. Carlyle's gospel of Work and exposure of Shams, and his universal onslaught on the nothings and appearances of society, gave strength and life to my vague but true enthusiasm. They proved a new Bible of blessedness to my eager soul, as they did thousands beside, who had become weary of much of the vapid literature of the time".'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Smith Print: Book
At age fourteen, Elizabeth Bryson read Sartor Resartus, a favorite book of her father, an impoverished Dundee bookkeeper. There she encountered "the exciting experience of being kindled to the point of explosion by the fire of words", words that expressed what she had always been trying to say: "It seems that from our earliest days we are striving to become articulate, stuggling to clothe in words our vague perceptions and questionings. Suddenly, blazing from the printed page, there ARE the words, the true resounding words that we couldn't find. It is an exciting moment... 'Who am I? The thing that can say I. Who am I, what is this ME?'. I had been groping to know that since I was three". She consumed Heroes and Hero-Worship, The French Revolution and Sartor Resartus with the same intoxication'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Bryson Print: Book
At age fourteen, Elizabeth Bryson read Sartor Resartus, a favorite book of her father, an impoverished Dundee bookkeeper. There she encountered "the exciting experience of being kindled to the point of explosion by the fire of words", words that expressed what she had always been trying to say: "It seems that from our earliest days we are striving to become articulate, stuggling to clothe in words our vague perceptions and questionings. Suddenly, blazing from the printed page, there ARE the words, the true resounding words that we couldn't find. It is an exciting moment... 'Who am I? The thing that can say I. Who am I, what is this ME?'. I had been groping to know that since I was three". She consumed Heroes and Hero-Worship, The French Revolution and Sartor Resartus with the same intoxication'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Bryson Print: Book
At age fourteen, Elizabeth Bryson read Sartor Resartus, a favorite book of her father, an impoverished Dundee bookkeeper. There she encountered "the exciting experience of being kindled to the point of explosion by the fire of words", words that expressed what she had always been trying to say: "It seems that from our earliest days we are striving to become articulate, stuggling to clothe in words our vague perceptions and questionings. Suddenly, blazing from the printed page, there ARE the words, the true resounding words that we couldn't find. It is an exciting moment... 'Who am I? The thing that can say I. Who am I, what is this ME?'. I had been groping to know that since I was three". She consumed Heroes and Hero-Worship, The French Revolution and Sartor Resartus with the same intoxication'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Bryson Print: Book
'Labour Party pioneer F.W. Jowett..., reading Heroes and Hero-Worship as a young millworker, was attracted by its vision of a new society but repelled by its authoritarianism: "there must have been something in me that could not respond to his powerful and eloquent glorification of the supermen - including the captains of industry who would organise production not for profit but for use - for in all things else he made a deep impression on my young mind... The more I read of Carlyle's heroes, the less attraction they had. I did not like his Luther, his Frederick the Great, nor his Cromwell... the more Carlyle crowned and canonised the ruling class, the more I felt I was on the side of the common people'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: F.W. Jowett Print: Book
'[Robert Blatchford] found Sartor Resartus intimidating: "after reading the famous meditaton on the sleeping city, I threw the book across the room. I felt I should never be able to write like that".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Blatchford Print: Book
'Philip Inman conveyed a ... specific sense of the uses of literacy for an early Labour MP. The son of a widowed charwoman, he bought up all the cheap reprints he could afford and kept notes on fifty-eight of them... There were Emerson's essays, Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Lamb's Essays of Elia, classic biogaphies (Boswell on Johnson, Lockhart on Scott, Carlyle on Sterling), several Waverley novels, Wuthering Heights, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, The Imitation of Christ, Shakespeare's sonnets, Tennyson, Browning, William Morris and Palgrave's Golden Treasury.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Inman Print: Book
'When asked how books had shaped him, Labour M.P. F.W. Jowett ranged widely: Ivanhoe made him want to read, Unto this Last made him a socialist, Past and Present made him think, Vanity Fair and Les Miserables taught him human sympathy, and Wuthering Heights taught him respect for man and nature.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: F.W. Jowett Print: Book
'[Emrys Hughes] read the social history of Macaulay, Froude, and J.R. Green; Thorold Rogers's Six Centuries of Work and Wages particularly appealed to him because it offered "not the history of kings and queens, but of the way ordinary people ha struggled to live throughout the centuries..." Hughes was one of those agitators who found a virtual Marxism in Thomas Carlyle. The French Revolution inspired the hope that a popular revolt somewhere would end the war...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Emrys Daniel Hughes Print: Book
'The historical classics "came as a revelation"- Macaulay, J.R. Green, Gibbon, Motley's Dutch Republic, Prescott on Peru and Mexico and The French Revolution. Academic critics today might discern ideologies in all of the above, but that was not Lawson's reading of them. "Of politics I knew nothing and cared less", he recalled, yet his purely literary readings had helped him form "some very definite opinions on the right and wrong of things social..."'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Jack Lawson Print: Book
Geraldine Hodgson, The Life of James Elroy Flecker (1925), 'Reading aloud in the family circle was an established custom [in 1880s-90s] ... by a very early age, Roy had listened to large parts of Dickens, Longfellow, and Tennyson, and to much of Thackeray, George Eliot, Carlyle, and Browning.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: James Elroy Flecker Print: Book
"Yet I could not but observe the difference with zeal with which I snatched at a volume of Carlyle or Ruskin- since these magicians were now first revealing themselves to me- and the increasing languor with which I took up Alford for my daily 'passage' [i.e.of Bible study]."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Edmund Gosse Print: Book
?I hope that you have read Carlyle in August Macmillan & that you appreciate him. Of course it is damned nonsense but nonsense of a genius & not without a certain point. We have a lot of effete things in this blessed old country & a good rush over Niagara will do us all good in the world? Only it is melancholy to see him begging the aristocracy to come & help poor England out of the slough. If that is it, we shall have to stick there, I fear, till doomsday.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Stephen Print: Serial / periodical
"4/2/1845 - I am also reading Carlyle's History of the French Revolution - full of genius, pathos, and pictures; with all its faults (and it has great ones) still, I can hardly lay it down."
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Amelia Opie Print: Book
'[Helen Crawfurd] derived lessons in socialism and feminism from Carlyle, Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Ibsen's Ghosts and A Doll's House, Dickens, Disraeli's Sybil, Mary Barton, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Under the Greenwood Tree, Tennyson's The Princess, Longfellow, Whitman, Burns, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, George Sand, the Brontes, Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Helen Crawfurd Print: Book
"Emmeline Pankhurst (b. 1858) emphasized the value of her childhood reading in forming her guiding principles. Uncle Tom's Cabin fused with talk of bazaars, relief funds, and subscriptions in her Manchester home to awaken first an admiration for fighting spirit and heroic sacrifice, and then an appreciation of a gentler, restorative spirit ... other favourite childhood books which remained a lifelong source of inspiration ... [were]: Pilgrim's Progress and The Holy War, the Odyssey, and Carlyle's French Revolution. Her interest in politics she traced to reading the paper aloud to her father."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Emmeline Pankhurst Print: Book
'Weaver-novelist William Holt extolled the standard greats ("Noble Carlyle; virtuous Tolstoi; wise Bacon; jolly Rabelais; towering Plato...") and, having taught himself German, memorized Schiller while working at the looms. But he did not limit himself to classics: "I read omnivorously, greedily, promiscuously", from dime novels and G.A. Henty to Hardy and Conrad. Holt disparaged popular authors such as Ethel M. Dell and Elinor Glyn for "peddling vulgar narcotics", yet he was closely attuned to the mass reading public. His own autobiography sold a quarter of a million copes and he once owned a fleet of bookmobiles. He reconciled taste with populism through this logic: though most readers consume a certain amount of junk, it does them no harm because they recognize it as junk'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: William Holt Print: Book
'[Patrick McGill] read virtually nothing, not even the daily papers until, working on the rail line, he happened to pick up some poetry written on a page from an exercise book. somehow it spoke to him and he began to read "ravenously". He brought "Sartor Resartus", "Sesame and Lilies" and Montaigne's essays to work. "Les Miserables" reduced him to tears, though he found "Das Kapital" less affecting. Each payday he set aside a few shillings to buy secondhand books, which after a month's use were almost illegible with rust, grease and dirt....[eventually he] went on to become a popular novelist.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Patrick McGill Print: Book
'Uncle Richard had adored Ruskin, and worshipped Morris, and had slept for years with a copy of "In Memoriam" under his pillow. He told me once how he and his friends used to wait outside the bookshops in the early morning, when they heard that a new volume of Tennyson was to come out. He had read all Browning too, and all Wordsworth, and Carlyle, in fact nearly everything contemporary; and he constantly re-read the Classics in their own classic tongues... a triumph of timing occurred once when he was listening to the Thunderstorm in the Pastoral Symphony, and reading the thunderstorm in "Oedipus at Colonus", and a real thunderstorm took place!'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Richard Litchfield Print: Book
Henry James to Charles Eliot Norton, 6 December 1886: "I ought long ago to have thanked you for your very substantial present of Carlyle ... I read the two volumes with exceeding interest ..."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry James Print: Book
'We are reading Carlyle's "Cromwell" and "Aurora Leigh" again in the evenings. I am still in the "Oedipus Tyrannus", with Shelley's Poems and snatches of "Natural History".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot and G.H. Lewes Print: Book
'I have begun Carlyle's "Life of Frederic the Great".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot (pseud) Print: Book
'From Miss [Lucy] Harrison [...] [Charlotte Mew] had heard time and again a reading of Carlyle's "Everlasting No" from "Sartor Resartus".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Harrison Print: Book
'we read one of Carlyle's articles, at the T. Sedgwicks'.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Matineau and Mary Appleton Print: Unknown
'"Chartism" gave me more pleasure and less pain than I expected: but the more I think it over the worse it looks. There is a fine sympathy with the many at the bottom; but it is stuck all thro' with prejudices and bits of injustice, as thick as a tipsy cake with almonds; and the excessive conceit, connected with want of knowledge, will do him harm. I think it will do no other harm, and a great deal of good...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
'"Past and Present", very bad, insolent, bitter, one-sided and full of weary repetitions. I found it weary and irritating reading, except abbot Samson and some few passages.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
'I suppose one ought to read [Carlyle's] "Fred": but the extracts do look such a hash of his old sayings that one has no great appetite'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Serial / periodical
Harriet Martineau, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington Journal, 14 January [?1835]: 'Read Carlyle's article on Burns. Was mightily cheered and lifted up by it.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Unknown
'I wasted a great deal of time in wrong reading from eleven to fourteen, always hoping for the enjoyment which rarely came, but going on with surprising persistence. A sense of overpowering gloom is connected in my mind with Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris", which I read in English, and an impression of a livid brightness with "The Scarlet Letter"; but that is all. Of Carlyle's "French Revolution" all that remains is a sentence like a radiant hillside caught through a rift in a black cloud: the passage where he describes the high-shouldered ladies dancing with the gentlemen of the French Court on a bright summer evening, while outside the yellow cornfields stretched from end to end of France'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir Print: Book
'Tell David Fergusson that I am charmed with his manuscript [a handwritten copy of Carlyle's "Life of Pascal"]; it is the prettiest [that] ever was written for the Encyclopaedia, and perfectly correct.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carlyle Manuscript: Sheet, Handwritten copy of Carlyle's own text
'Later I had determined to spend a Whit-Monday at the Alexandra Palace, and on my way thither bought an eighteen-penny copy of Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus". Arriving at the Palace I sat down in a quiet corner to look through its pages. Fascinated, I read and read; hour succeeded hour; swings and roundabouts passed into oblivion.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Okey Print: Book
'In various letters to Osborne he mentions having received "Tom Jones" which he did not care for; "Jane Eyre" he thought a "wonderful book"; in a volume titled "British Dramatists" he thought Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" "the best by head and shoulders"; Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship" he admired "exceedingly" (he proceeded to write an essay of twenty-six notepaper pages on Carlyle); of Thackeray's "Henry Esmond" he told Osborne that he thought it a "great book", though he disliked its "overelaboration": "perhaps you may say it is merely an additional grace - but I think it stands rather in the way of true eloquence and geninely forceful tragedy, not that I deny there is both eloquence and tragedy in 'Esmond', but I think there might have been more and grander but for that elaborateness".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
Second confinement in the Prison at Hull:
'I remember how when the light began to fail of evenings, I often risked punishment by getting up to my window to finish an essay by Macaulay, whose style charmed me, or one of those vibrant, pulpitating lectures on hero-worship by Carlyle!'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Stuart Wood [pseud?] Print: Book
'I often found peace in the pages of Ecclesiastes or Isaiah, or in the writings of men whom Barry has described as the heralds of revolt - John Inglesant, George Eliot, Carlyle, Heine, Loti, Nietzsche, etc. But in time even literature palls.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Stuart Wood [pseud?] Print: Book
'I have read the Tragedies - I thank you for them - they are Byron's. Need I praise them. I have also read your eloquent history of Faust - For it too I think you. It has fewer faults and greater merits than its Author led me to expect -'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Jane Bailie Welsh Manuscript: Sheet, Draft of essay due to be published in the Review
From Elizabeth Missing Sewell's Journal, 19 February 1856:
'I came here [Bournemouth] for a fortnight and have stayed a month. I have written a little, and read a good deal, -- the second volume of [italics]Sir Charles Metcalfe's Life[end italics], which makes me look upon him as more of a hero than many whom Carlyle would worship; and [italics]Hypatia[end italics] and two sermons of Dr. Pusey's against Germanism, and part of [italics]Hero Worship[end italics], to say nothing of pamphlets and magazines, and a diligent study of [italics]The Times[end italics] every evening.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Missing Sewell Print: Book
'Well Sir - I have to thank you for your last, which certainly is the most tasteful Epistle I ever, in my life, received. I verily believe there is not a word of it, that could offend the nicest tastem or most musical ear - All is harmony, from beginning to end - and the Metaphor and Antithesis in which it abounds render the style surprisingly rich & striking.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Jane Baillie Welsh Manuscript: Letter
Elizabeth Barrett to Richard Hengist Horne, 1 May 1843:
'I have been reading Carlyle .. his "Past & Present" -- There is nothing new in it -- even of
Carlyleism .... but almost everything true -- I am a devotee of Carlyle.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
'I have written a little, and read a good deal, - the second volume of "Sir Charles Metcalfe's Life", which makes me look upon him as more of a hero than many whom Carlyle would worship; and "Hypatia" and two sermons of Dr Pusey's against Germanism, and part of "Hero Worship", to say nothing of pamphlets and magazines, and a diligent study of "The Times" every evening. "Hypatia" is a marvel; very painful because it gives such a miserable view of Christianity in those days. In striving to be true, the description seems as if it must be untrue, even by its own acknowledgment. There must have been self-denial and faith, and charity working beneath those turbulent outward scenes. Yet it gives one no sympathy with philosophy. Mrs Meyrick and I both agree that "Pelagia" wins our affection much more than "Hypatia".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Missing Sewell Print: Book
'You did not mean me to return your story? I hope not - I shall soon be able to say it by heart - how I envy you! I would give Shandy and my pearl necklace to be able to write such an other - but that I shall never be!'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Jane Baillie Welsh Print: BookManuscript: Sheet
'Even as it is, I contrive to in general to get along very reasonably. Jack comes down to me every night: we have a talk and a walk: we correct the Printer's sheets together, and are very happy. He is a kind faithful slut of a fellow.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carlyle Print: ProofsManuscript: Letter
Even as it is, I contrive to in general to get along very reasonably. Jack comes down to me every night: we have a talk and a walk: we correct the Printer's sheets together, and are very happy. He is a kind faithful slut of a fellow.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Jack Carlyle Print: ProofsManuscript: Letter
Virginia Woolf to Margaret Llewelyn Davies, 23 January 1916:
'I've been reading Carlyle's Past and Present [1843], and wondering whether all his rant has
made a scrap of difference practically [...] I become steadily more feminist, owing to the
Times, which I read at breakfast and wonder how this preposterous masculine fiction [the
war] keeps going a day longer -- without some vigorous young woman pulling us together and
marching through it'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Friday 15 April 1921: 'I have been lying recumbent all day reading Carlyle, and now Macaulay, first to see if Carlyle wrote better than Lytton [Strachey], then to see if Macaulay sells better. Carlyle (reminiscences) is more colloquial and scrappy than I remembered, but he has his merits. -- more punch in his phrase than in Lytton's.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Friday 15 August 1924: 'When I was 20 I liked 18th Century prose; I liked Hakluyt, Merimee. I read masses of Carlyle, Scott's life & letters, Gibbon, all sorts of two volume biographies, & Shelley.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
'In looking over the book I see numerous errors regarding the part written in the Lancashire dialect; 'gotten' should always be 'getten'; &c. - In the midst of all my deep & great annoyance, Mr Carlyle's letter has been most valuable; and has given me almost the only unmixed pleasure I have yet received from MB.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Manuscript: Letter
'I had a letter from Carlyle, and when I am over-filled with thoughts arising from this book, I put it all aside, (or [italics] try [end italics] to put it aside,) and think of his last sentence - 'May you live long to write good books, or do silently good actions which in my sight is far more indispensable'.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Manuscript: Letter
'Did you read a little piece of Carlyles on the death of Charles Buller, that appeared about a month ago in the London Examiner? I never heard of Chas Buller before; but was struck with the beautiful testimonial after his death; I think I can remember the exact words of one part -
'And in his patience with the much that he could not do, let us grant there was something very beautiful too'.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Serial / periodical
'I never cd enter into Sartor Resartus, but I brought away one sentence which does capitally for a reference when I get perplexed sometimes. 'Do the duty that lies nearest to thee'.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book
'I mean to read the Atlantic soon; I find 2 numbers, one from you with names of authors, for the which thank you; the second no. has no such names, - & I'll tell you what I've read & liked. Your paper on India, - but then that was not fair, because I knew it was yours, - Floyd Ireson's ride VERY much. Turkey tracts, - yes, I did, & I just defy you, if you said you didn't; and Florentine Mosaics. I cd not read the other story, - and I did not care for Carlyle. I liked yr paper in the first no. on our Exhibition - only there [italics] was [end italics] one Duccio da Siena, & you say there was not.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Serial / periodical
'(Florence MacCunn. [italics] Sir Walter Scott's Friends [end italics] Wm. Blackwood 1909) I have just finished this enchanting book which for a time has entirely seduced me from both Lawrence and Carlyle. I read the whole of D.H.L's letters last week when in bed with a cold; felt completely in sympathy with him and a passionate desire to be on his side, no matter whom I deserted or decried. Began the whole book again, marking passages,meaning to re-read all his works and try and make him out. All this prompted by an article in [italics] L[ife] and L[etters] [end italics] that annoyed me. J. Soames, comparing him with Rousseau. Probably everything she said was true, but the whole tone was patronising and self-righteous. I wanted to explode a squib under her chair.
Now I want to find if there's any likeness or not between Lawrence and Carlyle. But at the moment I am in revolt against L. Why does one veer about so with him?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
'I am reading Carlyle as usual. What a man! ... When I read men like C., I pant along happily at their skirts, thinking myself safe and then, not even knowing I'm there, [they] cuff me with a great fist of a phrase that sends me sprawling ... Reading C. one feels that [italics] nothing [end italics] is worth writing, least of all own tiny things. No one ever had less [italics] message [end italics] than I have and that my duty in times like these is hardly to 'chirrup' on a quiet bough...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
'Well! Dearest you have criticised my letter - it is now my turn to criticise yours. Be patient, then, and good-tempered, I beg; for you shall find me a severer critic than the Opiumeater-'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Jane Baillie Welsh Manuscript: Letter
'My own, best, dearest Love
I do believe I should have gone out of my senses, if your letter had been a day longer of coming. As it was they were obilged to put leeches on my temples to keep me quiet: they thought it was the fatigue of travelling which had made me ill again; and I did not take any pains to undeceive them. My God! what should I suffer, were I indeed to lose your regard, when the apprehension discomposes me thus?'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Jane Baillie Welsh Manuscript: Letter
'My dear Carlyle, I received your letter with the inclosed addressed to Mr Burns, which I had the pleasure of delivering to him about three weeks ago. I reached Edinburgh about mid-day; took the coach at three o'clock, and arrived in Haddington about seven.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: James Johnston Manuscript: Letter
The octogenarian Bewicke Blackburne to Alfred Tennyson, 6 August 1891:
'"Long life to your honour," as Irish peasants used to say, and so say I, the man who was working the State quarry, on the Island of Valencia, when you spent a few days there in 1848, Chartist times in London and Fenian times in Ireland [...] Your sonorous reading to us after dinner sundry truculent passages in Daniel O'Connell's History of Ireland, which happened to be lying on my table, has lingered in my ears ever since. Seeing among my few books all that your friend Carlyle had up to that time published, you told me you thought he had nothing more to say. I was often reminded of this whilst reading his subsequent Cromwell and Frederick and Latter Days, and how near that was to the truth.'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Bewicke Blackburne Print: Book
The octogenarian Bewicke Blackburne to Alfred Tennyson, 6 August 1891:
'"Long life to your honour," as Irish peasants used to say, and so say I, the man who was working the State quarry, on the Island of Valencia, when you spent a few days there in 1848, Chartist times in London and Fenian times in Ireland [...] Your sonorous reading to us after dinner sundry truculent passages in Daniel O'Connell's History of Ireland, which happened to be lying on my table, has lingered in my ears ever since. Seeing among my few books all that your friend Carlyle had up to that time published, you told me you thought he had nothing more to say. I was often reminded of this whilst reading his subsequent Cromwell and Frederick and Latter Days, and how near that was to the truth.'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Bewicke Blackburne Print: Book
The octogenarian Bewicke Blackburne to Alfred Tennyson, 6 August 1891:
'"Long life to your honour," as Irish peasants used to say, and so say I, the man who was working the State quarry, on the Island of Valencia, when you spent a few days there in 1848, Chartist times in London and Fenian times in Ireland [...] Your sonorous reading to us after dinner sundry truculent passages in Daniel O'Connell's History of Ireland, which happened to be lying on my table, has lingered in my ears ever since. Seeing among my few books all that your friend Carlyle had up to that time published, you told me you thought he had nothing more to say. I was often reminded of this whilst reading his subsequent Cromwell and Frederick and Latter Days, and how near that was to the truth.'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Bewicke Blackburne Print: Book
'On his [Tennyson's] return [to Farringford] the evening books were Milton, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Thackeray's Humourists, some of Hallam's History and of Carlyle's Cromwell.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred and Emily Tennyson Print: Book
'The best trumpet that I can suggest is to read Thomas Carlyle’s Essay on Burns. Sick as I am of reading anything in which so much as Burns’s name appears, I was really electrified (beg pardon for such a "Daily Telegraphism") by this. It is full of very fine criticism, expressed here and there in rather an old-fashioned academical style, full of beautiful humanity − see the noble passage about Burns having refused money for his songs − and full of wonderful wisdom. The whole conclusion is indeed admirable; as where he says that all fame, riches, fortune of all sorts is to true peace no more than “mounting to the house top to reach the stars”; and again about Byron: “the fire that was in him, was the mad fire of a volcano; and now we look sadly into the ashes of a crater which erelong[sic] will fill itself with snow.”.
I subscribe to that essay. My own is quite unnecessary. Do read it; it will do you good; it would do the dead good. It has reminded me once again of the great mistake of my life − and of everybody else’s; that we are all trying to gain the whole world if you will, except what alone is worth keeping; our own soul. God bless T.Carlyle, say I.
[…]
Read that essay, it is in volume two, […]'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
'My first vague realisation that poverty was the result of humanity's incompetence, and not an inviolable law of nature, had come with the sixteen-year-old reading of Carlyle's "Past and Present",'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
'You are right about that adorable book; F. and I are in a world, not ours; but pardon me, as far as sending on goes, we take another view; the first vol. a la bonne heure! but not - never - the second.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
From Hallam Tennyson's account 'Of My Father's Illness':
'During our cruise [on The Sunbeam, Lord Brassey's yacht] my father drew upon his wonderful memory for some of his endless stories: Of [mentions various stories] [...] Of Hallam (the historian) saying to him, "I have tried to read Carlyle's French Revolution, but cannot get on, the style is so abominable."'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Hallam Print: Book
I guessed what was detaining your letter: but I scarcely dared to expect it on Saturday. It came in company with a quarter of a volume of Proofs, or I should have answered it yesterday. But the villainous sheets kept me working till midnight; and now I am to be busy beyond all measure for a week or more.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carlyle Print: Proofs
John Tyndall to Hallam Tennyson (1893):
'You were not born when the influence [of Alfred Tennyson] in my case began. Fifty years ago, in the sixth chapter of Carlyle's Past and Present I found the line:
"There dwells the great Achilles whom we knew";
'to which was attached a footnote referring the line to Tennyson [...] This footnote assured me that Tennyson was a poet whose acquaintance must be made without delay. Not very long afterwards, two young men might have been seen eagerly engaged upon a volume, in the corner of a modest hotel in St Martin's Court, Covent Garden. The one read, the other listened. The one, after a life of usefulness and honour, was snatched from us last year by influenza, and now lies in Highgate Cemetery, the other remains to record the fact. The book in which my friend Hirst and I were then absorbed was entitled "Poems by Alfred Tennyson."'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Tyndall Print: Book
'A pack of sheets came down on Monday morning, with a long letter from the Bibliophile requiring an alteration in the Title-page and Preface; then Jonathan on Wednesday morning; the management of all which things has occiped my whole disposable time till this morning.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carlyle Print: Title page and prefaceManuscript: Letter
'I heard about the great Abbot Sampson, of the twelfth century, whom I was to meet again at the age of fourteen, when I read "Past and Present" while waiting in Westminster Abbey to hear Canon Farrar preach.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Zoe Procter Print: Book
Books read by Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol, July 1896-December 1896, taken from his list of books requested and then sent by his friends. Source text author notes that Wilde read and re-read everything available to him in prison. 'Greek Testament, Milman's History of the Jews; Farrar's St Paul, Tennyson's Poems (complete in one volume), Percy's Reliques (the collection of old ballads), Christopher Marlowe's Works, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Life of Frederick the Great, A prose translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, Keats's Poems, Chaucer's Poems, Spenser's Poems, Renan's Vie de Jesus and The Apostles, Ranke's History of the Popes, Critical and Historical Essays by Cardinal Newman, Emerson's Essays (If possible in one volume), Cheap edition of Dickens's Works.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde Print: Book
Books read by Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol, July 1896-December 1896, taken from his list of books requested and then sent by his friends. Source text author notes that Wilde read and re-read everything available to him in prison. 'Greek Testament, Milman's History of the Jews; Farrar's St Paul, Tennyson's Poems (complete in one volume), Percy's Reliques (the collection of old ballads), Christopher Marlowe's Works, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Life of Frederick the Great, A prose translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, Keats's Poems, Chaucer's Poems, Spenser's Poems, Renan's Vie de Jesus and The Apostles, Ranke's History of the Popes, Critical and Historical Essays by Cardinal Newman, Emerson's Essays (If possible in one volume), Cheap edition of Dickens's Works.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde Print: Book
'Began "Friedrich" to purpose and worked well.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'Yesterday hard at "Friedrich", then walk to Tilberthwaite ravine with Joan and Arthur'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'Yesterday Mr Shields came and disturbed me, but I was glad to see him. Did some "Frederick" in spite'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'Yesterday ... Worked at "Frederick".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'Yesterday hard work on "Frederick"'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'"Friedrich".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'Read part of Abbot Samson in evening. The pilgrimage to Rome!'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'Yesterday a very happy Sunday, drawing a snailshell and with sweet evening home service and music, and reading Carlyle's "Teutsch Ritter".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'"Frederick" reading in evening at once encouraging and dismal in the extreme.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'Reading death of Swiss (Carlyle "French Revolution") to girls (Clennie and Diddie).'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'And I have just been reading poor Carlyle on last vol. of "Frederick".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'The programme devoted to Carlyle & his works was then proceeded with but owing to the length of the discussion was not completed. Mr Stansfield read a paper on Carlyle & his philosophy and Mrs Stansfield an extract from Sartor Resartus. Mr Rowntree gave a general resume of Sartor Resartus.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Pattie Stansfield Print: Book
'The programme devoted to Carlyle & his works was then proceeded with but owing to the length of the discussion was not completed. Mr Stansfield read a paper on Carlyle & his philosophy and Mrs Stansfield an extract from Sartor Resartus. Mr Rowntree gave a general resume of Sartor Resartus.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Stansfield Print: Book
'The programme devoted to Carlyle & his works was then proceeded with but owing to the length of the discussion was not completed. Mr Stansfield read a paper on Carlyle & his philosophy and Mrs Stansfield an extract from Sartor Resartus. Mr Rowntree gave a general resume of Sartor Resartus.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Walter Rowntree Print: Book
The whole three are sitting sewing in the most peaceful manner at my hand: our Mother has been reading the Man of Feeling and my last Paper (with great estimation) in the Edinburgh Review.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Carlyle Print: Serial / periodical
'It has most glaring faults as a historical style, but in spite of its obscurity, barbaric whirl of words, & the still graver charge of a certain indifferentism or fatalism in its moral theory, it has brilliant flashes of thought & great occasional loftiness & generosity of sentiment'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: G. W. F. Howard, Lord Morpeth Print: Book
Charlotte Bronte to W. S. Williams, 5 April 1849:
'The Cornhill books are still our welcome and congenial resource while Anne [sister, in terminal decline] is well enough to enjoy reading. Carlyle's "Miscellanies" interest me greatly. We have read "The Emigrant Family." The characters in the work are good, full of quiet truth and nature, and the local colouring is excellent; yet I can hardly call it a good novel. Reflective, truth-loving, and even elevated as is Alexander Harris's mind, I should say he scarcely possesses the creative faculty in sufficient vigour to excel as a writer of fiction. He creates nothing — he only copies. "The Testimony to the Truth [of Christianity]" is a better book than any tale he can write will ever be.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charlotte Brontë Print: Book
Charlotte Bronte to W. S. Williams, 16 April 1849:
'I like Carlyle better and better. His style I do not like, nor do I always concur in his opinions, nor quite fall in with his hero-worship; but there is a manly love of truth, an honest recognition and fearless vindication of intrinsic greatness, of intellectual and moral worth, considered apart from birth, rank, or wealth, which commands my sincere admiration [...] I have not read his "French Revolution."'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charlotte Brontë Print: Book
'Aunt Fanny [Allen] is in a rapture with ''Sartor'' and feels quite convinced that Teufelsdröckh is
meant for Coleridge [...] For my part it is such very hard reading that I think I must give it up.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Emma Wedgwood Print: Book
'I have been reading Carlyle, like all the rest of the world. He has been writing a sort of pamphlet on the state of England called ''Chartism.'' It is full of compassion and good feeling but utterly unreasonable.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Emma Darwin
'Meeting held at 68 Northcourt Avenue
20th III 1935
Howard R. Smith in the chair
1. Minutes of last Meeting were read & approved
[...]
4. The Program of anonymous readings was then proceeded with[;] members reading in the
order in which they sat round the room. An interval of about 2 minutes at the end of each
piece was allowed for cogitation at the end of which the reader anounced the authors name &
the work from which he had read. Identification proved unexpectedly dificult[.] No one reading
was identified by everyone & the highest scorer only guessed eight authors & 4 & ½ works
Reader Author Work
E. B. Castle Plato Phaedo
M. S. W. Pollard R. Browning Pictures in Florence
E. Goadby Saml. Butler Notes
M. E. Robson Flecker Hassan
R. H. Robson Belloc Eyewitness
E. C. Stevens M. Arnold Self dependance
E. D. Brain B. Shaw Pre. to Back to Methuselah
M. Castle T. Carlyle Sartor Resartus
A. Rawlings R. Browning Pheidippides
J. Rawlings G. Eliot Middlemarch
E. B. Smith Lewis Carroll Phantasmagoria
F. E. Reynolds Tennyson Locksley Hall
S. A. Reynolds E. B. Browning Lady Geraldine’s Courtship
H. R. Smith Chas. Kingsley Westward Ho
F. E. Pollard Shelley Prometheus Unbound'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mignon Castle Print: Book
'This last week many little amenities have softened our lot; after a fornight's detention we had the good fortune to have our grand-motherly sergeant as chief of the guard. In our recent tour of the home counties under his superintendence we had established a certain authority over him by reason of his dependence upon us for remembering his documents, catching trains, and most principally, not losing ourselves! Thanks to this moral ascendancy, we were able to raid our kits and get almost anything we wanted — toilet things and books were the greatest desiderata — and since then I have been enjoying Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher. I hope to finish this and then do Sartor again, so as to take Browning's and Carlyle's philosophies of life with me to think over during the Scrubs [detention] months.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Corder Pettifor Catchpool Print: Book
'I am driven by stress of bad novels to Carlyle again.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Emma Darwin Print: Book
'By the time I was seventeen, my passion for reading had become so intense that a few hours [study in the public library] in the evenings seemed totally insufficient ... I started to spend odd shillings in second-hand bookshops and to keep my pockets stuffed with a volume or two for the purpose of reading when I should have been working. Chief among these first purchases were the volumes of the Everyman's Library ... A handy size for the pocket, they introduced me to Emerson's essays, Marcus Aurelius, Coleridge's Biographica Literaria, Carlyle, and to other writers.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vero Walter Garratt Print: Book
'At one end of the shop stood the foreman's little glass office, from which he could observe all that was going on through the windows in front of him. To obstruct his view was my only chance of reading, so I formed a screen by putting boxes of [gas] fittings ... on the vital part of the bench, fixed a small mirror in line with the door of his office, and then stealthily drew from my pocket Everyman's Sartor Resartus, which I stood against the barricade and alternated spasms of sumptuous reading with arid efforts at soldering or riveting, which I accomplished with about half the attention I gave to the print.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vero Walter Garratt Print: Book
'Our drive with Carlyle was interesting ... he talked about a number of things, especially about his 'French Revolution', which I happened to be reading.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: William Darwin
‘Here I am, sitting on my bed, half-reading Carlyle, little soaking through to
my dull mind, when I become aware that a boxing match is being arranged
… I am not altogether in agreement with the Russian attitude to suffering.
It is too passive. In a review of Rupert Brooke’s "Letters from America", I
found that Henry James had written to this effect, in the preface. “I admire
the British soldier. His mind seems to contain a moral hospitality to all the
vagaries of fortune” … So it does. He grins nearly all the time that one
might expect him to have little reason for doing so … We are 14 miles away
from Salisbury, near Tidworth. If we stay for any time I mean to visit
Stonehenge.’
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ivor Bertie Gurney Print: Book
'At the time I received thy letter, I was reading Carlyle's 'Life of Cromwell'. I was unable to procure
the second volume immediately, and while waiting for it, I have been reading attentively his 'Past
and Present'. I have been extremely pleased with it, and deeply interested in his views of the
present state of society, or rather of the corruption of its state.. [extensive commentary follows]
Often while I have been reading it I have thought of thee, and wished I could read it with thee.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Eliza Ellis Print: Book
'I would not, I could not, give up the rides and
rambles that took up so much of my time, but I
would try to overcome my disinclination to serious
reading. There were plenty of books in the house —
it was always a puzzle to me how we came to have
so many. I was familiar with their appearance on
the shelves — they had been before me since I
first opened my eyes — their shape, size, colours,
even their titles, and that was all I knew about
them. A general Natural History and two little
works by James Rennie on the habits and faculties
of birds was all the literature suited to my wants
in the entire collection of three or four hundred
volumes. For the rest I had read a few story-books
and novels: but we had no novels; when one came
into the house it would be read and lent to our
next neighbour five or six miles away, and he in
turn would lend to another twenty miles further
on, until it disappeared into space'. I made a
beginning with Rollin's "Ancient History" in two
huge quarto volumes; I fancy it was the large
clear type and numerous plates [...] that
determined my choice. Rollin the good old
priest, opened a new, wonderful world to me, and
instead of the tedious task I feared the reading
would prove,it was as delightful as it had
formerly been to listen to my brother's endless
histories of imaginary heroes and their wars and
adventures. Still athirst for history, after
finishing Rollin I began fingering other works of
that kind: there was Whiston's "Josephus", too
ponderous a book to be held in the hands when read
out of doors; and there was Gibbon in six stately
volumes. I was not yet able to appreciate the lofty
artificial style, and soon fell upon something
better suited to my boyish taste in letters - a
"History of Christianity" in, I think, sixteen or
eighteen volumes of a convenient size. [...] These
biographies sent me to another old book, "Leland
on Revelation", which told me much I was curious
to know about the mythologies and systems of
philosophy of the ancients [...]. Next came
Carlyle's "French Revolution", and at last Gibbon,
and I was still deep in the "Decline and Fall"
when disaster came to us, my father was
practically ruined.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: William Henry Hudson Print: Book
