Biography Essay

Thomas Carlyle was an extremely long-lived Victorian author. He was also highly controversial, variously regarded as sagacious ana impious, a moral leader and a moral desperado, a radical and a conservative. Contradictions were rampant in the works of early biographers, and in the later twentieth century he is still far from being understood by a generation of critics awakening to his pivotal place in nineteenth-century Britain. The staggering correspondence he and his wife conducted with each other and with their formidable circle of friends and acquaintances (a circle that touched Victorian Britain at every point) will further enhance his reputation when the long process of editing and publishing it reaches an end. By 1991 twenty-one volumes of the Duke- Edinburgh edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (Duke University Press), edited by Charles Richard Sanders and others, had appeared. A total of forty...