SEEN in some quarters today as something of a proto-fash, or certainly authoritarian and a boilerplate racist typical of the time, Thomas Carlyle was highly influential in the Victorian era and beyond as essayist, historian, and philosopher.

Ralph Waldo Emerson described him as the “undoubted head of English letters”, and he was widely considered a secular prophet, though students should note this is often a soubriquet for “nutter”.

He preached “Natural Supernaturalism”, the idea that all things are “clothes” which both reveal and conceal the divine. Sadly, he eschewed the temptation to conclude his thesis with the words: “I’ll just get my coat.”

Carlyle also postulated the Great Man theory of history, believing that exceptional individuals are the bee’s knees.

All great men are born incontinent bawlers, and wee Tam first saw the gloomy illumination of a Scottish day on December 4, 1795 in the village of Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire.

His father James was a stonemason, later farmer, who believed “man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream”. Righty-oh. Both James and his wife Margaret were pretty pious Presbyterians.

At school, proving he was no Ecclefechan idiot, Thomas showed early ability in English and Latin. But, at Annan Academy, where he boarded during the week, he was bullied badly. However, instead of bricking it – Tom’s brown schooldays – Carlyle fought back “stroke for stroke”.

Aged nearly 14, with no First Bus on the go, the boy walked 80 miles from Ecclefechan to Embra Yoonie, where he studied mathematics (at which he excelled), science and moral philosophy.

His parents intended him for the ministry but he started haein’ his doots, asking his mother: “Did God Almighty come down and make wheelbarrows in a shop?” His mother replied: “Eh?”

Sum of all things

CARLYLE began teaching mathematics at his old school Annan Academy in 1814, moving to the same job in Kirkcaldy two years later. However, pedagogy didn’t suit him, so he returned to Edinburgh and studied German so he could read the mineralogical works of Abraham Gottlob Werner. Well, we’ve all been there.

He also wrote for the Edinburgh Encyclopædia and worked as a translator. In 1821, he met a burd called Jane Baillie Welsh in Haddington. She called him “my German Master”, which is never a good start.

That year, an incident occurred in Leith Walk. In short, Thomas “took the Devil by the nose” and flung him away. Oddly enough, in a few days the present writer is meeting mates in Leith Walk for a wee bevvy. Watch this space.

Thomas put himself aboot, corresponding with Goethe and making trips to London and Paris, meeting swanky scribblers in baith toons. In 1826, Ecclefechan’s Tarzan married his Jane and embarked on a lifetime of bickering. After a spell in Embra, they flitted again to Craigenputtock, Dumfriesshire.

Thomas made dosh by writing various learned articles aboot, ken, this and that, while inexplicably eschewing the opportunity to pen something called From Ecclefechan to Craigenputtock.

He did, however, write something called Sartor Resartus, a philosophical novel featuring a character called Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (“God-born Devil’s-dung”). Published initially as a fascinating magazine serial, naebody read it.

Hot off the press

IN 1834, the Carlyles moved to a swanky gaff in Chelsea, where they at last settled doon. After five months writing about the French Revolution, Thomas lent the manuscript to that John Stuart Mill, whose housemaid, of her own free will, burned it as wastepaper.

In 1836, Sartor Resartus was published in book form and sold out. But it was his completely rewritten French Revolution: A History that really set him up. He was also by now, in the absence of Netflix, a popular lecturer.

He wrote six volumes about Frederick the Great, earning him the sobriquet the “Sage of Chelsea”. Certainly, he had an original writing style, called (ineloquently enough) Carlylese, characterised in his own words not by “balance, gravity, and composure” but “imbalance, excess, and excitement”. Some of it reads like it was written by Captain Beefheart.

Matthew Arnold advised: “Flee Carlylese as you would the Devil.” But he was said to have influenced Arnold, Disraeli, Eliot, Proust, Shaw and a couple of Brownings. Also mentioned are Borges, the Brontës, Conan Doyle, Kipling, and that wee Trollope.

Alexander Jordan called Carlyle “far and away the most prominent figure in a tradition of Scottish philosophy …” However, despite Russian socialist thinker Alexander Herzen dubbing him “a Scotch Proudhon” – bit rude – and William Morris and Keir Hardie acknowledging his importance, his Great Men theory of history, plus his belief in a more “Deutsch” England (as he called Britain), led to his being adopted by dubious political admirers, and considered an intellectual father of Prussianism and fascism.

Indeed, Goebbels is said to have read passages from his History of Fred the Etc to Hitler during his last days in the Nütterbunker. Undoubtedly, he held the mainstream, bigoted view of his day about Jews, while believing they should have their own land in Palestine.

Racy dialogue

FRIENDS said he played up to “a caricature of prejudice”, and that he’d happily deride the French, Irish, Slavs, Turks, Americans, Catholics and black people. I think that’s the lot. He was reported to have spoken of “a natural aristocracy, that of colour”.

On yet another hand, Gandhi quoted him, German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer said the moral underpinning of his thought mitigated against his being a proto-fascist, and his influence is supposedly found in factory laws, child welfare, business ethics and profit-sharing. Boy’s reputation is all over the place.

In March 1869, he met the great white Queen, Victoria of that ilk, who described him in her journal as “a strange-looking eccentric old Scotchman, who holds forth, in a drawling melancholy voice, with a broad Scotch accent, upon Scotland and upon the utter degeneration of everything”. Somebody else said he looked like “the man who has seen Hell”.

On February 2, 1881, Carlyle fell into a coma, only briefly waking to utter the words, “So this is Death – well …”. Unwell, as it turned out. He died three days later and was buried in Hoddom Kirkyard, Ecclefechan.