A longtime friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle had a widespread audience, a widespread influence in the Britain of his age.
A personal acquaintance of J. S. Mill - whose maid burned the only manuscript of C's history of the French Revolution - , Dickens read him as research for both his only two historical novels.
For his treatment of the Gordon Riots, D was influenced by C's essay on Chartism.
Chapter I is full of bombastic clichés appealing to smug, middle class moralism and assurance of class superiority.
Class moral superiority.
Class moral superiority.
The perfect tone for a public intellectual.
Wikipedia says C was a Scottish philosopher, but never in my academic career was he even mention by anyone in philosophy.
It is perhaps worth noting that in a quarrel over Negro slavery C and Mill were on opposite sides, and regarding the handling of a rebellion in Jamaica, Mill and some others argued the governor of the colony ought to be hanged for the bloody suppression he ordered, while Carlyle and some others defended the governor.
Dickens, no admirer of the mob or the rabble, was on Carlyle's side in the Jamaica dispute, though the sympathy his novels display for the innocent and best among the lower orders has led some to try to claim him as a socialist, though he never said he was that or wrote in its favor, or against capitalism per se.
Mill was a longtime opponent of slavery, serfdom, and what he called "the subjection of women", and a defender of what we today call democracy, a misnomer for representative government.
Carlyle was on the opposite side of all of that, denigrating the black race, defending slavery and serfdom, and urging some sort of aristocracy in the sense of "the rule of the best".
Wikipedia says C was a Scottish philosopher, but never in my academic career was he even mention by anyone in philosophy.
It is perhaps worth noting that in a quarrel over Negro slavery C and Mill were on opposite sides, and regarding the handling of a rebellion in Jamaica, Mill and some others argued the governor of the colony ought to be hanged for the bloody suppression he ordered, while Carlyle and some others defended the governor.
Dickens, no admirer of the mob or the rabble, was on Carlyle's side in the Jamaica dispute, though the sympathy his novels display for the innocent and best among the lower orders has led some to try to claim him as a socialist, though he never said he was that or wrote in its favor, or against capitalism per se.
Mill was a longtime opponent of slavery, serfdom, and what he called "the subjection of women", and a defender of what we today call democracy, a misnomer for representative government.
Carlyle was on the opposite side of all of that, denigrating the black race, defending slavery and serfdom, and urging some sort of aristocracy in the sense of "the rule of the best".
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