Thomas Carlyle

Scottish essayist, historian and social critic known as the Sage of Chelsea, a founding figure of Victorian prose whose Sartor Resartus (1836) reworks German transcendental philosophy into a satirical fictional biography, and whose narrative history The French Revolution (1837) rebuilt an entire lost first volume from memory after the only manuscript was accidentally burned as kindling in John Stuart Mill's house. In On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), delivered first as public lectures, he argued that history turns on the acts of great individuals, a claim that shaped Victorian debate on leadership and biography for decades. He corresponded with Ralph Waldo Emerson for close to forty years, and Emerson arranged the first American book edition of Sartor Resartus in Boston in 1836, two years before its first British edition.