Friedrich Engels on Thomas Carlyle

“Search as you will, Carlyle's book is the only one which strikes a human chord, presents human relations and shows traces of a human point of view.”

“Thomas Carlyle has become known in Germany through his efforts to make German literature accessible to the English. For several years he has been mainly occupied with the social conditions of England — the only educated man of his country to do so! — and as early as 1838 he wrote a brief work entitled Chartism. At that time the Whigs were in office and proclaimed with much trumpeting that the "spectre" of Chartism, which had arisen round 1835, was now destroyed. Chartism was the natural successor to the old radicalism which had been appeased for a few years by the Reform Bill and reappeared in 1835–36 with new strength and with its ranks more solid than ever before. The Whigs thought they had suppressed this Chartism, and Thomas Carlyle took this as his cue to expound the real causes of Chartism and the impossibility of eradicating it before these causes were eradicated.”

“This is the condition of England, according to Carlyle. An idle landowning aristocracy which "have not yet learned even to sit still and do no mischief", a working aristocracy submerged in Mammonism, who, when they ought to be collectively the leaders of labour, "captains of industry", are just a gang of industrial buccaneers and pirates. A Parliament elected by bribery, a philosophy of simply looking on, of doing nothing, of laissez-faire, a worn-out, crumbling religion, a total disappearance of all general human interests, a universal despair of truth and humanity, and in consequence a universal isolation of men in their own "brute individuality", a chaotic, savage confusion of all aspects of life, a war of all against all, a general death of the spirit, a dearth of "soul", that is, of truly human consciousness: a disproportionately strong working class, in intolerable oppression and wretchedness, in furious discontent and rebellion against the old social order, and hence a threatening, irresistibly advancing democracy — everywhere chaos, disorder, anarchy, dissolution of the old ties of society, everywhere intellectual insipidity, frivolity, and debility. — That is the condition of England. Thus far, if we discount a few expressions that have derived from Carlyle's particular standpoint, we must allow the truth of all he says. He, alone of the "respectable" class, has kept his eyes open at least towards the facts, he has at least correctly apprehended the immediate present, and that is indeed a very great deal for an "educated" Englishman.”