This new selection of the letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle presents a complete view of a remarkable Victorian woman, with a wide circle of friends, who enjoyed the company of distinguished thinkers, writers, politicians, feminists, eccentrics and radicals. This edition draws on many remarkable letters and papers not published before, in which she created a memorable epistolary voice - shrewd, vigorous, ironic, observant, humorous and passionate. Previous selections have often tamely followed the semi-mythical version of her life first given by Carlyle's biographer, James Anthony Froude, showing her as the victimized angel in distress. This new selection gives a rounded picture of her complex character, showing her as a tormented yet forceful woman who was a strong personality in her own right. She now emerges as a self-conscious artist, adept at constructing images of herself that were designed to appeal to her particular correspondents. The account is written with close attention to Jane Carlyle's long-running jealousy of Lady Harriet Ashburton; and fresh letters include many to her mother and her vital response to her passionate lover or admirer Charlotte Cushman. Each letter is a tightly controlled performance, which justifies Thomas Carlyle's belief that her letters equal and surpass whatever of best I know to exist in that kind.

Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (1843) was a prophetic warning of impending disaster for mid-Victorian Britain that was delivered in what the author described as a 'miraculous thunder-voice, from out of the centre of the world.' The impact of Carlyle's social criticism was immediate and profound, shaping debate about the 'The Condition of England' question well into the twentieth century and beyond, and serving as the moral foundation of the welfare state. His relentlessly abrasive and illuminating critique of industrial civilization generated a vast range of response both in England, Europe, and the United States. The writings of Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, William Morris, John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin, as well as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, were saturated with imagery and ideas directly indebted to the book. Past and Present also provided novelists and poets with an enduring vision of the ubiquitous rot that lay at the heart of 'laissez-faire' England. The repercussions of Carlyle's unique analysis can be witnessed in the literary form and thematic content of such works as Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol (1843), Dombey and Son (1848), Bleak House (1852-53), and Hard Times (1854); Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845); Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855); and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850). Poets such as Alfred Tennyson in Maud (1855), Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh (1856), and Arthur Hugh Clough in The Latest Decalogue (1862) built a vocabulary that was steeped in the outrage and indignation of Carlyle's polemic. The artist Ford Madox Brown attempted in his painting Work (1852-65) to give visual testimony to the profound social schisms that Carlyle had exposed in Past and Present and to pay tribute to the 'Sage' who had 'moulded a nation to his pattern.'

This new selection of the letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle presents a complete view of a remarkable Victorian woman, with a wide circle of friends, who enjoyed the company of distinguished thinkers, writers, politicians, feminists, eccentrics and radicals. This edition draws on many remarkable letters and papers not published before, in which she created a memorable epistolary voice - shrewd, vigorous, ironic, observant, humorous and passionate. Previous selections have often tamely followed the semi-mythical version of her life first given by Carlyle's biographer, James Anthony Froude, showing her as the victimized angel in distress. This new selection gives a rounded picture of her complex character, showing her as a tormented yet forceful woman who was a strong personality in her own right. She now emerges as a self-conscious artist, adept at constructing images of herself that were designed to appeal to her particular correspondents. The account is written with close attention to Jane Carlyle's long-running jealousy of Lady Harriet Ashburton; and fresh letters include many to her mother and her vital response to her passionate lover or admirer Charlotte Cushman. Each letter is a tightly controlled performance, which justifies Thomas Carlyle's belief that her letters equal and surpass whatever of best I know to exist in that kind.

'It is I think the most radical Book that has been written in these late centuries . . . and will give pleasure and displeasure, one may expect, to almost all classes of persons.' Carlyle Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution opens with the death of Louis XV in 1774 and ends with Napoleon suppressing the insurrection of the 13th Vendemaire. Both in Its form and content, the work was intended as a revolt against history writing itself, with Carlyle exploding the eighteenth-century conventions of dignified gentlemanly discourse. Immersing himself in his French sources with unprecedented imaginative and intellectual engagement, he recreates the upheaval in a language that evokes the chaotic atmosphere of the events. In the French Revolution Carlyle achieves the most vivid historical reconstruction of the crisis of his, or any other, age. This new edition offers an authoritative text, a comprehensive record of Carlyle's French, English, and German sources, a select bibliography of editions, related writings, and critical studies, chronologies of both Thomas Carlyle and the French Revolution, and a new and full index. In addition, Carlyle's work is placed in the context of both British and European history and writing, and linked to a variety of major figures, including Edward Gibbon, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Hegel, and R. G. Collingwood.

Based on a series of lectures delivered in 1840, Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History considers how heroes are created and conveys his ideas on the importance of heroic leadership. Carlyle explored a wide range of heroes: from the political (Napoleon), to the literary (Shakespeare, Dante, Burns), to the religious (Martin Luther, the prophet Muhammad). While hugely influential in the nineteenth century, Carlyle's ideas were erroneously identified with totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the twentieth. By situating the text in the context of six reevaluative essays, David Sorenson and Brett Kinser argue that Carlyle's concept of heroism actually repudiates its own authoritarian roots and stresses the hero's spiritual dimension. In Carlyle's engagement with various heroic personalities, he dislodges religiosity from religion and looks at how these figures were able to unlock the heroic potential of ordinary human beings.

This is the first time that Thomas Carlyle's remarkable The French Revolution: A History has been published in a comprehensive scholarly form. The edition features an abundance of new critical features, including a critical text that presents the edition much as it appeared in the first edition of 1837, but with a detailed record of the emendations that Carlyle made in subsequent versions during his lifetime. These volumes also contain a variety of scholarly aids-literary, textual, historical, and photographic-to render The French Revolution more approachable and readable to twenty-first century readers. The edition takes seriously Carlyle's claim to have produced a history of the Revolution that is rooted in his primary French sources. The extensive annotations vividly testify to his deep engagement in a wide array of histories, pamphlets, memoirs, and biographies. The notes not only demonstrate his complex method of history, but they also shed fresh light on his artistry and his rich use of language. For the first time, readers will be provided with numerous samples of engravings that Carlyle used from Chamfort's Tableaux historiques and other sources to visualize the 'Flame Drama,' as it was conceived by revolutionary artists and printers. The appendices will also include an annotated version of Carlyle's essay, 'On the Sinking of the Vengeur' (1839), in which he offers a detailed response to controversy surrounding the events that occurred during the naval battle between France and Britain on 'the Glorious First of June,' 1794; an image and transcription of an unpublished MS holograph excerpt from The French Revolution located in the Harry Ransom Center, Texas; and a copy of a corrected proof of 'The Feast of Pikes' held in the Forster Collection of the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world's most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.