of means for ends. It is an attitude which prepared the way for the ‘world-historical’
man, the Hitlers and Stalins of the religion of humanity.
Carlyle was one of the first to diagnose the ills that industrial capitalism brought
to society. He saw the plight of the factory hand whose labour was the source of
wealth: with no stake or pride in the processes to which he was enslaved; exploited,
underpaid, discarded (unemployment was high in the 1840s) and condemned to the
workhouse. Carlyle’s analysis was admired by Karl Marx when he took refuge in
liberal England. Marx’s solution was political: class war, and the victory of the prole-
tariat. The warning of Carlyle was moral: those to whom evil is done do evil in
return. The remedy, in Past and Present, lies in renewing old arrangements: leaders
who work, a renewed feudalism. Carlyle argues that Gurth, the Saxon swineherd of
Scott’s Ivanhoe, knew his master, his place, and the value of his work. Unlike the
factory hand, the ‘thrall’ Gurth was secure and spiritually free. This idealization of
the mutual respect between the different ranks of pre-industrial society, found in
Burke, Scott, Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) and Pugin’s Contrasts (1836), is found
again in Disraeli, Ruskin and even William Morris. Anti-capitalist, it more often
took a paternalist than a progressive form. Carlyle’s political legacy was mistrust of
revolution and fear of the mob, given unforgettable expression in his French
Revolution, itself a source of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. His Chelsea house, a
centre of London’s intellectual life, is worth a visit.John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill(1806–1873) was the son of James Mill (1773–1836), a Scot
intended for the ministry who, like Carlyle, and like John Ruskin’s father, came to
London.A friend of the economist David Ricardo and the philosopher Jeremy
Bentham, James forced his infant son through a famously stiff educational
programme.
At 16,J. S.Mill founded the Utilitarian Society to study Bentham’s idea that all
policy should be judged by the criterion of what furthered ‘the greatest happiness
of the greatest number’ by the use of a ‘felicific calculus’. As Mill recounts in his
Autobiography (1873), he had as a young adult ‘felt taken up to an eminence from
which I could see an immense mental domain, and see stretching out into the
distance intellectual results beyond all computation.’ This biblical metaphor
recalls both Swift’s Academy of Projectors, and Bentham’s Panopticon, a design
for a workhouse where every inmate could be supervised by a single all-seeing
person. (All inmates could see the supervisor’s elevated observation-room, but
could not tell whether he was there watching them.) British reformers used
Bentham’s planning throughout the 19th century, but his reductive and mecha-
nistic model of society was anathema to Carlyle and Dickens (see the illustration
opposite).
At 20, Mill suffered a depression from which he was rescued by reading
Wordsworth’s poetry – ‘the very culture of the feelings which I was in quest of ’. Mill’s
lucid essays on Bentham and Coleridge balance rational material improvement with
emotional and spiritual growth. They are a good starting-place for an understand-
ing of post-Romantic culture, and an advertisement for the 19th-century liberal
mentality. Intellectual clarity marks the prose ofOn Liber ty (1859),Principles of
Political Economy (1848) and Utilitarianism (1863).266 8 · THE AGE AND ITS SAGES