The British essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was the leading social critic of early Victorian England. Disseminating German idealist thought in his country, with Calvinist zeal he preached against materialism and mechanism during the industrial revolution.

Thomas Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, on Dec. 4, 1795. His father, a stonemason, was an intelligent man and a pious Calvinist. Carlyle was educated at Annan Grammar School and Edinburgh University, where he read voraciously and distinguished himself in mathematics. He abandoned his original intention to enter the ministry and turned instead first to schoolteaching and then to literary hackwork, dreaming all the while of greatness as a writer. A reading of Madame de Staël's Germany introduced him to German thought and literature, and in 1823-1824 he published a Life of Schiller in the London Magazine and in 1824 a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship .

Meanwhile Carlyle...