Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. I

Thomas Carlyle was born in Dumfriesshire in 1795 and educated at Edinburgh University. He began training for ministry but turned instead to teaching, law study, and increasingly literary work and studying German literature. His first considerable essay was published in 1822. He continued to write on and translate German literature during the following six years, and published a novel, Sartor Resartus, in 1833-4. In 1831 Carlyle met J. S. Mill, who introduced him to Emerson and interested him in the French Revolution, leading to his history of it, completed in 1837. From 1837 to 1840 he undertook several important lecture series, in which he developed his individualist desire to place a satisfactory model of the hero before his contemporaries. His reputation was firmly established by the mid-1840s. He proceeded to spend an immense amount of work on his history of Frederick the Great. In 1865 he was invited to become Rector of the University of Edinburgh, but published little of significance thereafter. Carlyle died in 1881. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, the son of a Unitarian minister. He was himself ordained in 1829 but found he could not accept Unitarianist orthodoxy and in 1832, shortly after the death of his first wife, resigned his ministry and left for Europe, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Carlyle. Returning to Boston, Emerson turned from preaching to lecturing. In 1835 he remarried and settled in Concord, Massachusetts. He published his first book, Nature, in 1836, and was soon recognised as a revolutionary philosopher. In 1838 he became excluded from Harvard for claiming the priority of individual spiritual experience over any church. In 1842 he became editor of the Transcendentalist quarterly The Dial, and volumes of essays in 1841 and 1844 secured him European reputation. He also became known as a poet through two collections. In the 1850s he became an ardent supporter of the abolition of slavery. In 1866 Harvard conferred an honorary Doctorate of Law upon him. Emerson died in 1882.

The decade from 1820 to 1830 was a period of unusual dulness in English thought and imagination. All the great literary reputations belonged to the beginning of the century, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, had said their say.

Both respected as leading thinkers of the day in their respective countries, Carlyle and Emerson enjoyed a lifelong friendship dating from Emerson's first visit to England in 1832. Their voluminous correspondence is substantially preserved on both sides and available, combined, in these volumes.

Both respected as leading thinkers of the day in their respective countries, Carlyle and Emerson enjoyed a lifelong friendship dating from Emerson's first visit to England in 1832. Their voluminous correspondence is substantially preserved on both sides and available, combined, in these volumes.