Thomas Carlyle - 340 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish historian, critic, and sociological writer. He was brought up in a very puritan atmosphere at home. As a result, he was proficient in Mathematics, French and Latin from a young age. Later on he picked up subjects such as theology, philosophy and German and excelled in those too. This exacting and desire for perfection ruled his writings and any work he undertook.


He started writing professionally by submitting articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia.

 

In literature, Carlyle wrote a little differently from democratic ideas. Chartism, On Heroes Past and Present, and Cromwell all developed his thesis that the people need a strong and ruthless ruler and should obey him. Latter-day Pamphlets, which includes "Hudson's Statue," poured out all his contempt on the philanthropic and humanitarian tendencies of the day. His last monumental exaltation of strength was a six-volume history of Friedrich II of Prussia: Called Fredrick the Great. Following his custom, he paid two visits to Germany to survey the scene (in 1852 and 1858), and turned over great masses of material. The first two volumes appeared in the autumn of 1858, were at once translated into German, and were hailed as a masterpiece. The remaining volumes appeared in 1862, 1864, and 1865.


"Carlyle's genius," wrote Hector Macpherson, "was many-sided. He touched and ennobled national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region of the ideal. With the Master of Balliol, we believe that 'no English writer has done more to elevate and purify our ideas of life and to make us conscious that the things of the spirit are real, and that in the last resort there is no other reality.'"


Source - Victorian Web blog


On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History is a book, a collection of six lectures given in May 1840, by Thomas Carlyle. The lectures are respectively about prominent figures. The topics ranged from divine, political and literary. The renowned men were - Odin, the mythological pagan German God, Islamic prophet Muhammed, poet Dante, German priest Martin Luther, Samuel Johnson, the English writer and essayist and English politician Oliver Cromwell.





Image - Publish Date 1840