Reflections on Our Current Condition

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881), one of the most influential English authors of the nineteenth century, was born into a large Calvinist family in Ecclefechan, a farming village in southwest Scotland. A gifted student, he was seen as a promising candidate for the ministry, and was enrolled at the Annan Academy in preparation for further studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he presented himself in November 1809 at the age of fourteen. At Annan Academy he distinguished himself in mathematics, but also began reading his way through the works of celebrated British novelists like Defoe, Fielding, and Sterne, as well as The Arabian Nights. These explorations persisted during his years at Edinburgh, where he went on to teach himself languages, too, including Spanish and Italian. Carlyle never completed the arts degree at Edinburgh, but in November 1813 began his studies at Divinity Hall of the Church of Scotland, choosing a largely unsupervised course that would allow him to take his time finding his way. Over the next few years, while he read extensively in many areas, he was employed as a schoolteacher. By 1818 he had determined never to enroll as a full-time student of the ministry. Lacking any clear direction, he became increasingly preoccupied with the state of his health, which would continue to trouble him for the rest of his life. During this early period, he absorbed himself in the study of German, which in time enabled him to read and translate Goethe, to whose work—and to that of other major German authors—he would come to provide access for English readers. He published a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship in 1824, and imagining periods of quiet concentration needed for future projects, proposed to Jane Welsh, the young woman he was courting, the prospect of taking up residence in Craigenputtoch, in a small rural farm left to her by her father. After years in which matters between them remain unresolved, the two were ultimately married in the fall of 1826; they moved to Craigenputtoch not long after, and remained there for six years that would be among the most intensely productive in Carlyle's long career. In addition to writings on Voltaire, Robert Burns, Tasso, and Novalis, he published a highly perceptive and resonant essay called "Signs of the Times" in the Edinburgh Review (June 1829), and began the writing of the extraordinary and uncategorizable book that would come to be called Sartor Resartus. "Characteristics," the comprehensive assessment of the tendencies of the historical moment that Carlyle regarded as "a sort of second Signs of the Times," was first published as a review-essay in the Edinburgh Review in December 1831. These musings drew the attention of a young American who had also abandoned the ministry and now also found himself without a nameable vocation; provided with a letter of introduction by John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson paid a summer visit to Craigenputtoch, and he and Carlyle had a series of conversations there that would help to bring into focus the emerging spiritual and philosophical crises of the modern era and would produce a lifelong correspondence between the two authors.

These pages from "Characteristics" are taken from Vol. III of Carlyle's Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1881).

—SD

If we now, with a practical medical view, examine, by [the] test of Unconsciousness, the Condition of our own Era, and of man's Life therein, the diagnosis we arrive at is nowise of a flattering sort. The state of Society in our days is, of all possible states, the least unconscious one: this is specially the Era when all manner of Inquiries into what was once the unfelt, involuntary sphere of man's existence, find their place, and, as it were, occupy the whole domain of thought. What, for example, is all this that we hear, for the last generation or two, about the Improvement of the Age, the Spirit of the Age, Destruction of Prejudice, Progress of the Species, and the March of Intellect, but an unhealthy state of self-sentience, self...