Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), born in Edinburgh, was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher. A leading writer of the Victorian era, he exerted a profound influence on 19th-century art, literature, and philosophy. Carlyle's corpus—the best known of which today is his French Revolution (1837)—spans the genres of history, the critical essay, social commentary, biography, fiction, and poetry. He occupied a central position in Victorian culture, being considered not only, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the "undoubted head of English letters," but also a secular prophet of the day.