The Pen and the Hammer: Thomas Carlyle, Ebenezer Elliott, and the ‘active poet’

Abstract

A university-educated man of letters, whose social connections in London were decidedly aristocratic, Thomas Carlyle is not generally thought of as a ‘labouring-class’ writer. The reality is that his origins were decidedly humble. Born in a modest ‘arched house’ in the unprepossessing village of Ecclefechan, Carlyle spent his early life in the Calvinistic labouring and farming community of the West of Scotland.¹ He was the son of James Carlyle, a poor man who began his working life as a jobbing stonemason, before becoming a local builder, and then a farmer. Rather than focus on the question of class, critics have tended to concentrate on the religious and aesthetic legacy of this background. Ian Campbell identifies the strict Calvinism of Carlyle’s father as the source of his lifelong doubts about the value of poetic expression, while David DeLaura observes that ‘Poetry is a revealing test-case of Carlyle’s uneasiness with virtually all contemporary creative work’ (Campbell, 1974, p. 7; DeLaura, 2004, p. 32). My contention is that Carlyle’s inherited anxiety about ‘eloquence’ was not simply a product of narrow doctrine. In his youth, he had been a fervent champion of Burns, Goethe and Schiller; and while in the grip of this idealist phase, he applied the term ‘poet’ as a mark of philosophical distinction. The rule-breaking mechanisms of poetry were even considered useful, in peeling back the ‘sham’ of appearances to unveil the ‘real’ (Carlyle, 1898, pp. 176–7).