Thomas Carlyle: A Biography
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: good, worn/faded (refer to image). Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
Few figures in Victorian intellectual life cast as long a shadow as Thomas Carlyle — prophet, polemicist, and one of the nineteenth century's most formidable literary minds. Fred Kaplan's authoritative biography chronicles the full arc of Carlyle's extraordinary life, from his austere Scottish upbringing and grinding years of poverty to his eventual ascent as the era's most provocative moral and social critic. Drawing on an exhaustive range of primary sources, Kaplan presents an intimate portrait of a man perpetually at war with his age, his body, and his own towering ambitions, while also illuminating his turbulent marriage to Jane Welsh Carlyle — itself a subject of enduring fascination for scholars. Kaplan writes with a scholar's precision and a storyteller's instinct, situating Carlyle within the great intellectual currents of his time — Romanticism, industrialisation, and the crisis of religious faith — without ever reducing him to a mere symbol. The result is a biography that restores Carlyle's fierce, contradictory humanity, and forces us to reckon once more with a writer whose warnings about democracy, heroism, and the moral bankruptcy of modern life remain as unsettling today as they were in his own century.
Author: Fred Kaplan
Format: Hardback
Published: 1983, Cambridge University Press
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: good, worn/faded (refer to image). Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
Few figures in Victorian intellectual life cast as long a shadow as Thomas Carlyle — prophet, polemicist, and one of the nineteenth century's most formidable literary minds. Fred Kaplan's authoritative biography chronicles the full arc of Carlyle's extraordinary life, from his austere Scottish upbringing and grinding years of poverty to his eventual ascent as the era's most provocative moral and social critic. Drawing on an exhaustive range of primary sources, Kaplan presents an intimate portrait of a man perpetually at war with his age, his body, and his own towering ambitions, while also illuminating his turbulent marriage to Jane Welsh Carlyle — itself a subject of enduring fascination for scholars. Kaplan writes with a scholar's precision and a storyteller's instinct, situating Carlyle within the great intellectual currents of his time — Romanticism, industrialisation, and the crisis of religious faith — without ever reducing him to a mere symbol. The result is a biography that restores Carlyle's fierce, contradictory humanity, and forces us to reckon once more with a writer whose warnings about democracy, heroism, and the moral bankruptcy of modern life remain as unsettling today as they were in his own century.