Selected Writings [antikvár]

IntroductionIn his biography of Carlyle, published only a year after the death of its hero, J. A. Froude reprinted a letter written to Carlyle by an unknown fellow-countryman in 1870. After making the usual apologies for intruding upon greatness, the writer goes on to justify himself:You know that in this country, when people are perplexed or *n doubt, they go to their minister for counsel; you are my minister, my honoured and trusted teacher, and to you I, having for more than a year back ceased to believe as my fathers believed in matters of religion, and being now an enquirer in that field, come for light on the subject of prayer.(Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of His Life,London, 1882, Vol. II, Ch. 1.)The writer was one of the 'millions' of Carlyle's readers who, according to Froude, 'have looked and look to him not for amusement but for moral guidance', and his letter confirms Froude's emphasis on this aspect of Carlyle's reputation when he wrote that- Amidst the controversies, the arguments, the doubts, the crowding uncertainties of forty years ago, Carlyle's voice was to the young generation of Englishmen like the sound of 'ten thousand trumpets' in their ears.(Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, London, 1884, Vol. L Ch. 11.)For his own generation Carlyle was not simply a contributor to the Victorian social and intellectual debate, and not simply a particularly dramatic historian, he was a prophetic voice crying out with clarity and conviction amidst the apparent confusion of an age of change. John Stuart Mill, for example, while he7