Deism and scepticism had in the 18th century reduced both what educated
Christians believed, and the strength with which they believed it. By the time of the
French Revolution, some intellectuals (not all of them radicals) were not Christians.
Public meetings gave new chances to speakers, and Dissent became political rather
than religious. In the liberal reforms of 1828–33, the Church of England lost its legal
monopoly. Most Victorians went to church or chapel, although the factory towns of
the Midlands and North had fewer churches, which did not always provide convinc-
ing leadership. In an age of rapid change and disappearing landmarks, guides to the
past, present and future were needed, and lay preachers appeared. Some were
Dissenters, others sceptics, others penny-a-liners.
Carlyle and Ruskin came from Scots Calvinist backgrounds to set up pulpits in
the English press. Unchurched intellectuals like George Eliot looked for and
provided guidance. The Oxford Movement renewed the Catholic elements in the
tradition of the Church of England. Most preachers preached, of course, from
Anglican pulpits, like the Broad Church Charles Kingsley, who also preached from
university lecterns, as did his Christian Socialist friend the Revd F. D. Maurice.
These thinkers were the first to see and to seek to understand the effects of indus-
trial capitalism on social and personal life, effects which continue. Their often valid
analyses are rarely read today, for the moral tones in which Carlyle and Ruskin
address their audiences sound odd today. Yet they had a deep influence, so long
assimilated as to be forgotten, on many significant currents of national culture,
among them the Gothic Revival, Anglo-Catholicism, Christian Socialism, British
Marxism, ‘Young England’ Toryism, the Trade Union movement, the Arts and
Crafts movement, the National Trust, the Society for the Preservation of Ancient
Monuments, and the cults of the environment, of the arts, and of literature. The
society and conditions shaped by the Industrial Revolution met their first response
in these thinker s.
Thomas Carlyle
The voice ofThomas Carlyle(1795–1881) was heard soon after the Romantic poets
fell silent. Edinburgh University enlightened this stonemason’s son out of the
Pr esbyterian ministry for which he was intended, but left him dissatisfied with scep-
ticism. Religion was created by humanity to meet human needs: its old clothes
should be discarded, updated, replaced by new man-made beliefs. This is the theme
ofSartor Resartus (‘The Tailor Re-clothed’), which purports to be the autobiography
ofa mad German philosopher edited by an equally fictitious editor. A Romantic
heart is similarly ‘edited’ by an Enlightened head in Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent
(1800) and Hogg’s Justified Sinner (1832), but Carlyle’s work is far more extraordi-
nary in form and style. Once devoured for its message, the book’s chaotic style
makes it hard reading.
After arduous years studying German thought and translating Goethe, Carlyle
moved from Craigenputtock, Dumfries, to Chelsea, where his History of the French
Revolution made him famous. Scornful of metaphysical and materialist thinkers, he
forged a faith in Life, in intuition and action, and in historical heroes who tran-
scended human limitation. His great man – statesman, priest, man of action, captain
ofindustry, man of letters – achieves his vision with energy. Earnest action is itself
good; the vision itself is secondary. Carlyle’s shrewdness, trenchancy and conviction
go along with a wild reliance on intuitive thinking, and an unreflective substitution
THE VICTORIAN AGE 265Thomas Carlyle
(1795–1881) Signs of the
Times(1829), Characteristics
(1831), Sartor Resartus
(1833–4), History of the
French Revolution(1837),
Heroes and Hero-Worship
(1841), Chartism(1839),
Past and Present(1843),
Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and
Speeches(1845), Occasional
discourse on the nigger
question(1849), Latter-day
Pamphlets(1850), Life of
John Sterling(1851), Life of
Frederick the Great of Prussia
(1858–65).