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Thomas Carlyle

Past and Present

Past and Present

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  • Condition: Brand new
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Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (1843) was a prophetic warning of impending disaster for mid-Victorian Britain, shaping debate about the Condition of England and serving as the moral foundation of the welfare state. His writings influenced many writers, including Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Kingsley, and poets such as Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Arthur Hugh Clough.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 512 pages
Publication date: 27 April 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press


Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (1843) was a prophetic warning of impending disaster for mid-Victorian Britain, delivered in a miraculous thunder-voice from out of the center of the world. The impact of Carlyle's social criticism was immediate and profound, shaping debate about the Condition of England question for 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 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 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.

Weight: 350g
Dimension: 129 x 197 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780198841081

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