Thomas Carlyle

Mark Engel

Michael Kenneth Goldberg

Joel J. Brattin

In his 1840 lectures on heroes, Thomas Carlyle, Victorian essayist and social critic, championed the importance of the individual in history. Published the following year and eventually translated into fifteen languages, this imaginative work of history, comparative religion, and literature is the most influential statement of a man who came to be thought of as a secular prophet and the "undoubted head of English letters" (Emerson). His vivid portraits of Muhammad, Dante, Luther, Napoleon--just a few of the individuals Carlyle celebrated for changing the course of world history--made On Heroes a challenge to the anonymous social forces threatening to control life during the Industrial Revolution. In eight volumes, The Strouse Edition will provide the texts of Carlyle's major works edited for the first time to contemporary scholarly standards. For the general reader, its detailed introductions and annotations will offer insight into the author's thought and a reconstruction of the diverse and often arcane Carlylean sources.

On Heroes, Hero-worship & the Heroic in History

"Sartor Resartus is the 'sunniest and most philosophical' of Carlyle's works."—Henry David Thoreau "The way to test how much [Carlyle] has left us all were to consider, or try to consider, for the moment the array of British thought, the resultant and ensemble of the last fifty years, as existing today, but with Carlyle left out."—Walt Whitman "How great he was! He made history a song for the first time in our language. He was our English Tacitus."—Oscar Wilde

Mark Engel

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