OLLI – Carlyle Notes – A. J. Drake's Shakespeare Site

Course title: Victorian Literature and Culture (1837-1901)

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Notes on “Signs of the Times” (1829)

Thomas Carlyle published “Signs of the Times” in 1829, right around the start of the agitation for the First Reform Bill of 1832. This was a difficult time socially and economically for the United Kingdom, and both democracy and material progress are important issues. The Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister from 1828-1830. He was for Catholic emancipation but opposed the Reform Bill. Parliament, however, was already working towards the passage of this bill, which was eventually passed by the Whig leader Earl Grey in 1832.

Carlyle had grown up in the home of a mason by trade, and his father was a Calvinist in religion. It was a large family, and Carlyle was bullied as a boy at Annan Academy. In 1809, he attended Edinburgh University, but did not take a degree because he didn’t have the money to continue his studies. He taught at the Academy where he had gone to school as a youth. His religious doubts led him to study the German Romantic movement, and he married Jane Welsh in 1826. From 1828-1834, Carlyle and his wife lived at Craigenputtock in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. After that period, they moved to Chelsea, England.

In terms of literary fame, Carlyle was rather a late bloomer — Sartor Resartus was too odd a book to make him famous, and such status only came to him upon the publication in 1837 of his masterpiece, the two-volume French Revolution.

The piece we are examining now is an early one. “Signs of the Times” offers the analysis of late 1820s society as what the author calls “mechanical.” Everything, he says, has this quality. But what does the word mean to him? The Greek word μηχανή bears within itself some reference to ability, not to a dead machine but rather to the craftiness of contrivance. Carlyle probably wants us to understand that this connotation is part of what he is getting at. He writes, “We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils” (89).

Carlyle is aware of something about humankind’s relationship with nature that his contemporaries are starting to feel, too: the Industrial Revolution marked the human species’ victory over the natural world, when for centuries they had lived in fear of nature’s great forces and menacing creatures. The ancients could see the beauty of the natural world as well as we can, but at the end of the day, for them it was full of forces and things that could kill a human with terrifying ease.

In socio-economic terms, of course, Carlyle’s word “machinery” refers to the development of early industrial capitalism: the steam engine, the cotton gin, the first railroads, and so forth. He is referring, too, to the concentration of wealth (“capital”) into very few hands that comes with capitalism. It is from his meditations mainly on this phenomenon—early industrial capitalism, that is—that Carlyle derives the great question he means to put to his fellow citizens: since we have a new kind of economy and a society that seems to be shaping itself around that economy’s needs, what is the purpose of such an order of things?

To put this in a way that captures the strong, quasi-religious moralism of Carlyle’s work, we have accomplished a great many admirable, and even wonderful, things, but at what spiritual cost have we accomplished them? It seems as if, Carlyle tells his readers, we have signed off on the idea that everything we engage in—education, religion, whatever—should be done in a “mechanical” way, with an organized, competitive, ruthless manner. As he says, every “little sect” in the U.K. must have its periodical, its magazine, and so forth (90). The Unitarians have one, the Utilitarians, the Phrenologist enthusiasts—everyone’s belief system or quirk will get its share of attention.

What Carlyle is describing is a sort of busybody collectivism that yet turns us all into mere atoms smashing into one another in spite of our physical and mental propinquity. We systematize everything and set it to run on autopilot, so to speak. “Systems” usurp the human province of meaning and purpose, leaving to us nothing but a felt sense of emptiness and lack of social cohesion. There’s a “rage for order,” to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, but it’s all for naught if no livable values provide the ground.

The trouble with systems, Carlyle knows well, is that they really can keep going round and round even if they accommodate very few people, or perhaps none at all. Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, Book 1says that “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Systems can serve themselves, and simply exclude everyone and everything that doesn’t serve them. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what most of us believe a social system should do: it should serve us, not the other way around!

For Carlyle, where there is no genuine “individual endeavor,” there will be no heroism—a major element in his thinking throughout his career. As he writes in “Signs,” “Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand” (91).

What is the answer, then, as far as the Thomas Carlyle of “Signs” believes? He sets forth his hopes for the development of something over against the mechanical in its basest form: that something is dynamism (δύναμις, dunamis power, capability) a transformation of mechanism into a living, spiritual power within human individuals and whole societies. Capitalism and industrial production can’t just be about “Profit and Loss” (91), he insists; it must be about something that stirs the human spirit and gives purpose and a certain intelligibility to life.

Will democracy be able to harness the power of industrial production, which has, after all, begun to crush the ancient problem of inadequate production of life’s necessaries? Well, Carlyle isn’t exactly an “fan” of democracy. As the nineteenth century wears on, he can see which way the wind is blowing, and it’s blowing towards greater participation of the lower classes in English life. In 1829, Carlyle suggests that democracy is not, perhaps, the key to progress—it’s just being pursued, he thinks, like another machine, another system that will most likely serve itself more than the humans who put so much hope and effort into it.

Carlyle doesn’t appear to believe that a government shapes its people. The contrary is true, he supposes, and writes, “it is the noble people that makes the noble Government …” (92). He continues, “On the whole, Institutions are much; but they are not all” (92). So it is not to government, then, that the people should look for the purpose in their lives, or for a way to solve the problem that society is nowadays treated like a big machine, with no room for genius or heroism.

Towards the end of “Signs of the Times,” Carlyle turns to the field of literature, saying that the periodical journalism of the U.K. is probably, in 1892, the closest thing there still is to a Church that can instruct all of the people as needed. Ultimately, though, while Carlyle will continue to believe in the power of literature (in the broadest sense of that word) to effect some healing and inculcate purpose in life, more and more as his career goes onward, he will look to a kind of idealized neo-feudalism or paternal socialism to heal the rifts and the alienation in his society. In the 1840s text Past and Present, Carlyle will look to men he calls “Captains of Industry” to take hold of society and give it meaning and direction. But these solutions are not on tap in this early essay, “Signs of the Times.” Carlyle will never be a great admirer of raw capitalism or total democracy. In the latter case, he would surely insist, there is a lack of regard for excellence, and that principle is replaced by smug, self-satisfied ignorance pretending that by itself, unaided by anyone who stands “on the higher eminences of thought” (Mill’s phrase in On Liberty) it is adequate to determine the “good life,” which is what Aristotle said politics should help us achieve.

Notes on Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843)

In the selection from the chapter Democracy, Carlyle opposes the doctrine of laissez-faire. He says that the times are unprecedented, “that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us.” The Phalaris Bull anecdote is a metaphor of enchantment, externalizing the injustice of the times and reifying it into solid Law. But this kind of thing is bad if done unconsciously.

The Irish widow who dies of typhoid fever shows that we are all linked together, all potential hosts for disease. This is a grotesque way of making a point that people will not accept in the ordinary way. The page offers grotesque contrasts between the savage and the civil, especially with the mention of Black Dahomey. Carlyle prefers feudal relationships over contemporary ones: Gurth the Swineherd “is not what I call an exemplar of human felicity….”

Nonetheless, this bondsman’s master at least acknowledged a reciprocal human tie, and the relationship cannot be reduced to the cash nexus. What is liberty? “The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right path….” True liberty, therefore, is the compulsion to work at what you do best. If you don’t like Carlyle, you might say this passage compares uncomfortably with George Orwell’s 1984—slavery is freedom.

Who are the genuine aristocrats? Carlyle speaks for the wage-slaves: “if thou art in very deed my Wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to ‘conquer’ me, to command me!” Carlyle aims to preserve the principle of aristocracy rather than the specific class that now claims English titles; he asserts that there is an unconscious link in people’s minds to divine justice. “A conscious abhorrence and intolerance of Folly…dwells deep in some men….”

William of Normandy contains both fire and light, but mostly light; “the essential element of him… is not scorching fire, but shining illuminative light.” Carlyle calls for a radical recycling of the aristocratic principle. His task is to perceive and make known the need and means for bringing order from chaos, productivity from idleness and anarchy. Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand cannot do the kind of work William the Conqueror could. As for revolutions, “Nature’s poor world will very soon rush down again to Baseness…” Revolutions are a sign of progress, but only an initial stage on the way to finding our true superiors.

Finding those true superiors “is a work for centuries; to be taught us by tribulations, confusions, insurrections, obstructions….” In the section titled Captains of Industry, Carlyle addresses the significance of government: “Government, as the most conspicuous object in Society, is called upon to give signal of what shall be done; and, in many ways, to preside over further, and command the doing of it. But the Government cannot do, by all its signaling and commanding, what the Society is radically indisposed to do. In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom….”

So the government gives signs and commands, but it is ultimately the symbol of the people. It is not the primary agent. Carlyle interprets raw capitalism as chaos, and says that “To be a noble Master, among noble Workers, will again be the first ambition with some few….”

On this page, Carlyle addresses the ancient problem of distribution. Capitalism solves the problem of production, but not just distribution. There can be a noble industrialism and “Government by the Wisest.” These are the captains of industry who will fight chaos and necessity, making progress possible. The task of Carlyle’s prose is to align us with divine forces such as Justice. He means to spiritualize the debased, ordinary concept of work and return it to a place of honor. In this, he apparently looks back to German idealists such as Hegel and forwards to Marx.

The Captains of Industry are as yet the unconscious masters, and the aim is to make them believe in themselves and to make us believe in them and align our wills with theirs. Carlyle attacks capitalist accumulation by comparing thoughtless capitalists to pirates and Choctaw Indians. Capitalists clothe their lust for money in ideological garments, but it is nothing more than aggression masked by false value systems. Carlyle makes a contrast between the real and the apparent, and he wants to reconstruct audibly (in part visibly, to but primarily Carlyle builds a sense of voice) the reality to which his readers must adhere in future.

This final page ends on a note of energy and vitalism. “It is to you I call; for ye are not dead, ye are already half-alive: there is in you a sleepless dauntless energy, the prime-matter of all nobleness in man.” Carlyle has been trying all along to show how order can be brought from apparent chaos—chaos is in the last instance intolerable, and he trusts that there is order underlying it, if only we could perceive it. The call to order involves an assertion of neo-feudalism.

Carlyle’s wild and apocalyptic language is designed to allow us to encompass chaos, to surround it with a principle of divine order and tame it thereby. The very wildness of his prose seems meant to show that he is not afraid of anarchy—”be not afraid,” as the Gospels say. Reducing social chaos to order, and re-spiritualizing the productive process will solve the problem of distribution—an ancient dream come true.

Edition: Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 11^th edition. Volume E, The Victorian Age. New York: 2024. ISBN-13: 978-0393543322.

Document Timestamp: 3/12/2026