“Carlyle was not a conservative,” wrote Simon Heffer in his excellent biography of Thomas Carlyle, Moral Desperado (1995). “What he saw of the socio-political system in the mid-nineteenth century he despised, and saw no point in conserving.” That is true, but the fact that Heffer had to say it suggests the existence of other reasonable interpretations: one wouldn’t say, for example, that Nietzsche wasn’t a conservative. Richard Reeves, by contrast, in his recent and highly competent biography of John Stuart Mill, repeatedly and without explanation calls Carlyle a “conservative,” presumably for no other reason than that Carlyle’s views diverged sharply from those of the “liberal” Mill. Indeed, the question of whether Carlyle was a conservative, a liberal, a proto-socialist, a nationalist reactionary, or something else again—that is, the question of how to define Carlyle’s political disposition in some relevant way—has troubled his interpreters for many years.

Carlyle (1795–1881) was one of the two or three most influential writers of the nineteenth century. Writers as varied and philosophically irreconcilable as Ruskin, Mill, Dickens, Arnold, and Emerson all attested to the power Carlyle had, in one way or another, exercised over their thinking. Yet now he’s hardly read at all. A few dedicated souls at Edinburgh University continue to produce the Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, an invaluable work of scholarship, and Carlyle’s first book, the strange and convoluted satire Sartor Resartus(1834), is still taught in postgraduate English courses. But his best works are