Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was born in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, studied at Edinburgh University intending the ministry, and lost his religious faith there before turning to writing and translation instead. The eccentric philosophical satire Sartor Resartus (1833–34) established his singular, densely allusive prose style; The French Revolution: A History (1837) made his reputation and remains his best-known work, written from his own idiosyncratic conviction that history turns on the will of exceptional individuals — a conviction he lost the first volume's only manuscript to before finishing it, after a maid at John Stuart Mill's house mistakenly burned it as waste paper, and rewrote entirely from memory. His London home at Cheyne Row became a gathering place for Victorian intellectual life. He died in London at eighty-five.