Past and Present

Contents

1. I.1 Midas 15 min 13

   Carlyle opens with the paradox of 1842. England is full of wealth, yet “dying of inanition”. Some 1.4 million paupers sit idle in workhouses such as the one at St Ives, Glasgow’s lanes hide extreme destitution, and Stockport parents poison their children for burial-club money. The rich are no better off, the manufacturer clamouring for free trade and the landowner for his Corn Law. The nation’s wealth is “enchanted”: it benefits no one. Carlyle closes with the fable of Midas, who got the gold he craved and ass’s ears with it, as an emblem of a society that has mistaken money for wellbeing.

2. I.2 The Sphinx 20 min 1

   Life, like the Sphinx, asks every person and nation a riddle, and destroys those who answer wrongly. England’s riddle is what its new condition demands. Carlyle insists that the universe is just. Acts of Parliament and courts deserve reverence only so far as they match eternal justice, and an unjust law, however enforced, will fall. In the long run might and right coincide, and only what is true survives. He closes by asking how many people in England can still see Heaven’s “invisible Justice”, for they alone stand between the nation and perdition.

3. I.3 Manchester Insurrection 22 min 7

   Continental democrats sneered at the 1842 Manchester strikers for firing so few shots. Carlyle praises their restraint: insurrection only announces the disease, and violence like Peterloo leaves lasting hatred. The strikers’ unspoken question, “What do you mean to do with us?”, is England’s Sphinx-riddle. Their demand for “a fair day’s-wages for a fair day’s-work” is just, but in an age of Dilettantism and Mammonism, with wages left to supply and demand and laissez-faire, it seems almost impossible. Yet every willing horse in England is fed while willing men starve, so the word “impossible” must go.

4. I.4 Morrison’s Pill 11 min 3

   People ask Carlyle for a remedy, as if some Act of Parliament could cure society like Morrison’s famous pill. There is no such pill. What is needed is a radical change of life, a return to Nature’s facts and to sincerity. No Reform Bill, ballot box or Charter can produce honesty from a world of knaves, and a nation of “valets” will always be governed by quacks. Each person’s first task is to stop being a hollow shell of cant and recover a soul. The “things to be done” will then become visible one by one.

5. I.5 Aristocracy of Talent 15 min 1

   A miserable nation, like a miserable man, has departed from the laws of Nature and must confess it. England has been governed by fools; Reform has failed, Benthamite radicalism has dwindled into Chartism, and the cry is now for an “Aristocracy of Talent”. Quoting an imagined journalist, Carlyle doubts that any ballot box can sift it out. Bobus Higgins, the sausage-maker who clamours for it, reveres only talent that has made money. A nation with little wisdom will even trample the little it has, and the Aristocracy of Talent remains far off.

6. I.6 Hero-Worship 14 min 4

   The Editor agrees that government by the wisest is the cure, but finds enlightened egoism, laissez-faire and “Cash-payment for the sole nexus” no law by which society can hold together. True reform means “Hero-worship” done well, and begins at home: each person must stop being a flunky and refuse to countenance quacks. He offers no quick answer to the Sphinx, only a distant guiding star. He announces his method: from old books he will illustrate the Present through the Past, which is bound to it like the roots of the world-tree Igdrasil.

7. II.1 Jocelin of Brakelond 19 min 3

   Book II turns to the twelfth century through the chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, a monk of St Edmundsbury and chaplain to Abbot Samson, recently published by the Camden Society. Carlyle sketches Jocelin as a cheerful, shrewd, childlike “Boswell” whose Latin is easy but whose interests are narrow. Jocelin watches King John at the convent and records only that he left thirteen pence for a mass. Carlyle insists that England in 1200 was a real place of corn, cloth and labour, and that even fitful glimpses of real fact outweigh any fiction.

8. II.2 St. Edmundsbury 10 min 1

   The ruins of St Edmundsbury Abbey now lie in a botanic garden, open for a shilling, admired by Dilettantism and buried under the antiquarian “Dry Rubbish” of Pedantry. Carlyle insists the walls were an earnest fact, built by men who knew they had souls. Modern England, with its hunger-mobs and Corn-law Commons, might profit from looking at them wisely. Jocelin, though garrulous, is human and truthful, and through him the dark centuries become partly transparent.

9. II.3 Landlord Edmund 17 min 5

   Jocelin entered the abbey the year after the Earl of Leicester’s Flemings were cut down at Fornham in 1173. The abbey itself grew from the cult of Edmund, ninth-century king of East Anglia, whom Carlyle presents as an ideal landlord. Edmund was so loved by his people that, after the Danes killed him for refusing their demands, they made him a saint. Gifts accumulated around his shrine until his body had “raised a Monastery round it”, and the whole town is his monument. Arkwright too, Carlyle adds, will have his monument in the mills of Lancashire.

10. II.4 Abbot Hugo 13 min 3

    Every ideal decays once it takes on bed and board, and monasteries end, bloated, at a Henry VIII’s dissolution. Under the old, half-blind Abbot Hugo, ruled by flatterers, the convent sinks into debt. One loan from Benedict the Jew grows by compound interest from £27 to £1,200. Jocelin’s chronicle speaks of dues and privileges, not personal religion, which Carlyle reads as a sign of unselfconscious faith. When the king’s almoner investigates, no monk dares complain. Hugo dies in 1180 after a fall on pilgrimage, leaving not a penny for the poor.

11. II.5 Twelfth Century 11 min 2

    During the vacancy the king’s custodians take the abbey’s revenues. Carlyle sketches twelfth-century St Edmundsbury: fullers, looms and spinning women, fairs and tolls, dunghills at the doors, thieves hanged after losing trial by battle. Collecting the reaping-penny from the poor provokes old women with distaffs, Carlyle’s “Female Chartists”, and the Lakenheath eel-render dwindles. A feudal aristocracy governs, while the north lies waste and Manchester spins no cotton.

12. II.6 Monk Samson 17 min 7

    The monks testify, however imperfectly, that earthly life is the shadow of eternal realities. Carlyle sets this against a modern world where all dues have become one “cash payment” and man’s Hell is failing to make money. The monks are dull and gossipy, but one stands out: Samson, a taciturn Norfolk man of forty-seven. As a boy he dreamed St Edmund saved him from the Devil, and he once crossed schism-torn Italy disguised as a Scot. Imprisoned by Abbot Hugo, he obeyed in silence and quietly repaired the church.

13. II.7 The Canvassing 7 min 1

    News arrives that an abbot is to be elected. The convent buzzes with electioneering gossip: one brother is too unlettered, another too clever, a third a good manager but unjust. Samson says nothing and remembers everything. Carlyle calls election the one important social act, since the people’s choice reveals its own worth, and its electoral methods mirror its electoral talent.

14. II.8 The Election 19 min 1

    On Samson’s advice, six elders secretly choose three names and seal them, and Samson carries the paper to the king at Waltham. Henry II asks for more names from inside and outside the convent, then has them struck off until only Samson and the Prior remain. Dennis’s speech lets the Bishop see that the monks want Samson. The king accepts him with a warning, and Samson sings the Miserere unmoved. Carlyle contrasts this soulful winnowing with ballot boxes, which a valet-people will use to crown quacks.

15. II.9 Abbot Samson 16 min 2

    Samson enters as Abbot amid bells and feasting, a poor monk suddenly made a mitred lord. Carlyle marvels that a “barbarous” age could recognise the true governor in such a disguise, while enlightened England sets Burns to gauge ale barrels. Samson inherits ruin, debt and Jewish and Christian creditors. He has never governed, but his long apprenticeship in obedience and his inner hatred of chaos make him master of affairs. He soon outdoes the lawyers, and Carlyle reflects on what quack rulers cost the world.

16. II.10 Government 9 min 1

    Abbot Samson sets about reform with cautious energy, governing knights, farmers, monks and prelates alike. His first labour is financial. He gathers the bonds, breaks thirty-three convent seals, and pays debts by raising income and cutting expense. Reap-silver and the eel disputes are settled. Within four years the debts are cleared and the Jews expelled from the town’s liberties. The drunken sacristan William is deposed and his drinking-house razed. Lazy monks murmur that their dream was true: he “rages like a wolf”.

17. II.11 The Abbot’s Ways 13 min 3

    Samson favours only fit men. He rejects rich kin, and he repays old kindnesses at his own cost, never at the public’s. He preaches in Norfolk English, judges without fear or favour as an itinerant justice, and above all holds his tongue and his anger. He dislikes liars, drunkards and windbags, eats whatever is set before him, keeps a generous table for others, and watches the hunt without joining it. Carlyle digresses on the vanished forests and on monasticism “rotted into peat”, after a fifth of England had once been set apart for spiritual uses.

18. II.12 The Abbot’s Troubles 13 min 3

    Governing brings Samson endless toil. The monks cannot keep accounts, resent his control, and once mutiny so loudly that rumours say they will murder him. He excommunicates the ringleaders, then the two sides weep and reconcile. In twelve years his hair turns white. Small triumphs cheer him: a forester grown “reasonable” out of fear of him, and an Earl of Clare outwitted over five shillings. He confides that he would rather have been the abbey’s librarian.

19. II.13 In Parliament 4 min 3

    Samson does his public duty. He leads his knights against Prince John at Windsor during Richard’s captivity and offers in Parliament to seek out the imprisoned king. When the Treasury proposes stripping the gold from St Edmund’s shrine for Richard’s ransom, he dares any man to try, and no one does.

20. II.14 Henry of Essex 10 min 3

    A monk records Henry of Essex’s story, as told to Samson at Reading. The standard-bearer had cheated St Edmund and destroyed an innocent knight. He threw down the royal standard at Coleshill in the Welsh war, and was later accused of treason and fought a judicial duel. Seeing St Edmund and his victim glaring from the horizon, he lost his nerve, fell and became a monk. Carlyle reads the vision as conscience projecting itself, a truth valid in every age.

21. II.15 Practical-Devotional 18 min 4

    Samson is a practical ruler. He excommunicates rowdy tourneying young nobles and brawling townsfolk. He outwits the Bishop of Ely by felling the oaks the bishop wanted, and he has an old dean’s new windmill torn down to protect his own mills. He defies Richard I over a wardship and is forgiven. Behind this worldliness lies an unspoken religion: he mourns the fall of Jerusalem in a hair-shirt. Carlyle contrasts that silent, practical faith with the self-absorption of Methodism and the theorising of Puseyism.

22. II.16 St. Edmund 19 min 4

    Samson builds, tiles and rebuilds, and he restores the fire-damaged altar of St Edmund in marble. At night, with twelve brethren, he opens the coffin and reverently touches the saint’s body, the culmination of his life; a monk watches from the roof. Carlyle sets this against the ghoulish 1828 exhumation of Hampden. Hero-worship decayed into Dilettantism and Mammonism, he warns, breeds Chartism and Sansculottism. Jocelin’s chronicle then breaks off, and the vision of St Edmundsbury vanishes.

23. II.17 The Beginnings 24 min 2

    Samson’s world shows how creeds and customs shape men. Formulas, like skin, are indispensable while alive and deadly once calcified, and habit is the deepest human law. Everything people have, from language, liturgy, law and poetry to St Paul’s, is the forgotten work of nameless heroes, England’s true proprietors. “Fame” is a foolish goose, and Samson accepted oblivion gladly. Only faithful work endures, and Book II closes with Goethe’s “Work, and despair not”.

24. III.1 Phenomena 22 min 3

    Book III, “The Modern Worker”, opens with England’s loss of religion: God’s laws have become profit-and-loss calculations and a “Greatest-Happiness Principle”. The result is a world of “Phantasms”. A Pope blesses Rome from a stuffed kneeling dummy, a “Phantasm-Aristocracy” demands Corn Laws while doing no work, and a London hatter drives a seven-foot plaster hat through the streets in place of making better hats. Carlyle warns that a nation of “Twenty-seven Millions” living by puffery and falsehood is walking towards the land’s end.

25. III.2 Gospel of Mammonism 14 min 6

    The “Hell of the English”, says Carlyle’s German professor Sauerteig, is the terror of not making money. Society has become “mutual hostility” under the name of fair competition, and “Cash-payment” passes for the sole relation between people, so the mill-owner thinks his starving workers have no further claim on him. The emblem is Dr. Alison’s Irish widow in Edinburgh. Refused by every charity, she died of typhus and infected seventeen others, proving by contagion the sisterhood her neighbours denied.

26. III.3 Gospel of Dilettantism 7 min 3

    The “Gospel of Dilettantism” is worse than Mammonism. It produces a governing class that does not govern and goes “gracefully idle in Mayfair” while defending the Corn Laws with arguments it does not believe. Insincere speech breeds insincere action. Carlyle tells the Muslim legend of the dwellers by the Dead Sea, who found the prophet sent to warn them a bore and were turned into chattering apes, and suggests that the tribe is numerous today.

27. III.4 Happy 10 min 2

    “All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble.” Carlyle attacks the modern demand to be “happy” and the utilitarian Greatest-Happiness Principle, which pleads from the stomach, not the soul. Even free traders argue mainly for cheaper bacon. Byron’s complaint and a creaking meat-jack’s song (“Once I was hap-hap-happy”) illustrate the point. The only unhappiness worth naming is being unable to work; happiness is merely the wages, while the work itself is what endures.

28. III.5 The English 24 min 2

    The English are a “dumb” people, poor at speech but wise in action, and their epic is written on the earth’s surface in canals, cotton-mills and empire. The engineer Brindley, who retired to bed to think, is the type. John Bull is a born Conservative who holds out against logic for years, as over the Corn Laws. But the ledger of fifteen centuries now shows workhouses and hunger, and even this patient people will become reformers. Carlyle urges the Conservatives to drop the Corn Laws before worse questions are asked.

29. III.6 Two Centuries 10 min 2

    The Restoration settlement of 1660 began two centuries of government “without God”, aimed only at keeping order and collecting taxes. Cromwell’s body hung at Tyburn marked the end of earnest Puritanism. The churchmen and their sceptical opponents of the period produced little that lasts. England’s real achievement is its practical work, its cotton, coal, ships and colonies, which is “the one God’s Voice” heard in these atheistic centuries. But Labour remains a blind giant that must gain a soul before it can rule.

30. III.7 Over-Production 9 min 2

    The idle governing class charges the workers with “over-production”: too many shirts, hats and goods, so that a glut leaves the operatives unfed. Carlyle calls the charge absurd. The aristocracy’s own appointed function was to see that the wages of work were justly apportioned, yet it produces nothing but fox-brushes and answers distress with “Raise our rents!” The Corn Laws rest finally on the claim to do what they like with their own land.

31. III.8 Unworking Aristocracy 21 min 5

    Land is the right basis of an aristocracy. But land belongs to God and to all who have worked or will work it, and its owners, who did not make it, are bound to govern. The Corn Laws show a governing class that cannot even refrain from mischief. The idle aristocracy faces the fate of the French nobility of 1789 unless it finds work to do. Nobility means suffering for others. Parchment titles will be pulled out like teeth. The Corn Laws will soon go.

32. III.9 Working Aristocracy 14 min 3

    The working aristocracy of mill-owners must also reform. Foreign competitors are exporting British machinery, and a nation that stakes its existence on selling cotton a farthing cheaper stands on a narrow base. Carlyle asks inventors to work out how to divide cheap cotton justly. Laissez-faire is a “Gospel of Despair” that treats man as a Patent-Digester. Repeal will bring a new period of prosperity, but this will be only a breathing-space in which to reform before the next paroxysm.

33. III.10 Plugson of Undershot 21 min 5

    Relations between people were never long carried on by cash payment alone. Philosophies of supply and demand are a sign that a social system is dying. Fighting became chivalry once a soul entered it, and the same can happen to labour. Plugson of Undershot, a cotton master, is a “Captain of Industry” who acts like a buccaneer: he keeps the hundred thousand pounds and dismisses the spinners with their wages. Carlyle calls for an “Organisation of Labour” in the hands of wise, brave men.

34. III.11 Labour 12 min 2

    There is a perennial nobleness in work. “Know thy work and do it” replaces “Know thyself”. Labour makes order out of chaos, like a potter’s wheel, and stills doubt and despair in the worker. “Labour is Life”, and true knowledge is what holds good in working. Wren building St Paul’s against bishops and officials, and Columbus facing mutinous crews on unknown seas, show how work requires patience, courage and silent strength in the struggle with men and nature.

35. III.12 Reward 23 min 4

    All true work is religion: “Laborare est Orare”, as the old monks said. Carlyle exhorts the worker not to complain and condemns the idle rich man as the one monster in creation. A “fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work” is an unrefusable demand. Yet the real wages of noble work lie in Heaven or nowhere, since no money can buy a life. Industrial work under Mammon is a tragic spectacle, but Labour is an imprisoned god. The epic of the age is “Tools and the Man”.

36. III.13 Democracy 33 min 4

    The question of work and wages can wait no longer. The toiling millions have never been so wretched, isolated by laissez-faire. The thrall Gurth in his brass collar was happier than today’s free labourer, whose liberty is the liberty to starve. True liberty is to be led, or forced, into the right path by wiser men. Conquerors like William the Norman founded aristocracies by divine right. Democracy is inevitable, but it is only the despair of finding heroes, and England must learn to obey its real superiors.

37. III.14 Sir Jabesh Windbag 9 min 2

    Oliver Cromwell, whose body was hanged at Tyburn for trying to govern by the Christian religion, was the most remarkable ruler England has had in five centuries, because he believed in God and answered to an eternal judge. Against him Carlyle sets Sir Jabesh Windbag, the modern parliamentary minister, who governs by newspaper paragraphs and majorities and appeals to posterity. Windbag will founder like a Columbus who hopes to reach America by the friendship of the winds.

38. III.15 Morrison again 32 min 3

    There will be no “New Religion”, and religion is not a Morrison’s Pill to be swallowed once. Its essence is the inner light of conscience and practical hero-worship, not rituals or thunder; God’s laws need no Sinai to be binding, and the French Revolution showed their penalties. Work is worship. Sauerteig recommends washing, the Chinese Emperor ploughs a sacred furrow and seeks out the wisest to govern, and Goethe’s poetry is a new scripture. The book closes with Goethe’s “Mason-Lodge”: “Work, and despair not.”

39. IV.1 Aristocracies 34 min 7

    Book IV, “Horoscope”, opens by attacking the sceptical “Philosophical History” that sees only tyranny and fraud in the past. Carlyle argues that every society needs a real Aristocracy and Priesthood, a governing class and a teaching class. He praises the Norman and Plantagenet kings and the feudal land aristocracy, which governed in return for its land, and contrasts them with today’s idle landowners. In the quarrels of Rufus and Becket with the Church he sees modern industry struggling to be born. Brass collars are gone and democracy is inevitable; an Industrial Aristocracy must now be found.

40. IV.2 Bribery Committee 12 min 3

    Carlyle takes up a recent Commons committee that concluded bribery at elections could not be stopped. A Parliament elected by bribery begins its work with a lie in its mouth, he argues; better a Downing Street office selling seats openly. Beneath all the cant, Mammonism is the one sincere belief of the age. The real fault lies with all who honour wealth over worth. The poor freeman sells his vote because neither party cares for him. England must end bribery, and the willingness to be bribed in its own heart.

41. IV.3 The One Institution 32 min 7

    What can Government do for the working millions once the Corn Laws go? Parliament is slow and divided, but the army shows what drilled organisation achieves: why not Services against starvation and ignorance? Carlyle calls for legislation between masters and workers beyond the Factory Inspectors, for sanitary rules, smoke abatement and parks for mill towns, and above all for an Education Bill and a Teaching Service. An Emigration Service would carry surplus workers to colonies that would become England’s markets. Saying how is not the Editor’s job; saying that it must be done is.

42. IV.4 Captains of Industry 18 min 4

    Government cannot do what society will not, so the main work falls on the masters. Carlyle calls the mill-owners Captains of Industry, the potential new aristocracy, and urges them to become a chivalry rather than scalp-counting “Chactaws” or buccaneers. No working world, any more than a fighting world, can be led on cash payment alone. Workers must be bound to their masters by deeper ties than day wages and led as a regimented mass under real captains. The task is hard, but the men who conquered cotton, iron and steam can master it.

43. IV.5 Permanence 14 min 6

    Carlyle’s one general principle for a “Chivalry of Labour” is permanent instead of temporary contract, as in marriage, soldiering and the old bond of Gurth and Cedric. He mocks the anti-slavery campaigners for pitying Black West Indians over starving English workers. A Quaker manufacturer’s testimony, from Chadwick’s inquiries, shows that care for workers pays: he would not swap his men for a rival’s with £7,000 to boot. Carlyle praises staying put over nomadic restlessness and leaves open whether workers should share in profits, concluding that despotism must be made just.

44. IV.6 The Landed 15 min 3

    The idle aristocrat, given thousands a day and asked only to do no harm, should be the strongest of workers. Carlyle pleads for him to take up his real work among his labourers and lands. He holds up the Duke of Weimar, who governed actively and sheltered Goethe and Schiller, and praises Lord Ashley as an exception. No man can live apart from others on a cash account. Hero-worship of true superiors is the godlike thing in human life, and the rebel who sweeps away sham superiors is preparing to obey real ones.

45. IV.7 The Gifted 13 min 1

    A noble principle will turn any anarchy into order, as it turned violence into chivalry. Mammon is a good servant but a terrible master, and the money-counting mill-owner must make himself noble or vanish. Carlyle describes the man of genius whom guineas cannot buy and penalties cannot frighten: the world’s born king. He contrasts him with the hired entertainer who amuses the rich. Men of Letters too may become a chivalry and a real priesthood, once they have nobleness in themselves.

46. IV.8 The Didactic 14 min 2

    Preaching will not end Mammonism, but Destiny will. Strikes and despair will teach the masters, like the rich mill-owner who finds his wealth brings only curses. Carlyle sees the empire of the Dollar cracking even in America, among the Transcendentalists, and religious longing stirring at home. He calls on the reader to act now, without waiting for others, and on working masters to subdue chaos with justice and mercy. The book ends with the vision of all workers, from ploughmen to Goethe, as one noble marching host.