Thomas Carlyle

One crisp winter morning, Thomas Carlyle set out on foot for Edinburgh, a hundred miles from home, carrying “fluttering boundless Hopes”—and the fear that they might be disappointed.

Hector Macpherson’s biography begins in early nineteenth-century Dumfriesshire, with the son of a stern stone-mason and a mother who first taught him to read. At school and university, Carlyle finds more solitude than sympathy; though his father hopes he will enter the ministry, the young man follows his own scruples. Teaching, books, and his friendship with Edward Irving open other paths, while Gibbon’s history unsettles the beliefs he inherited. What will Carlyle make of a life that refuses the course laid out for him?

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