If published as a new book today, this volume would have to be called On Celebrities, Celebrity-Worship, and the Celebrity Factor in History, which tells us a great deal about the gap between Carlyle’s age and our own. Part of the series “Rethinking the Western Tradition,” this is not a critical edition, since it contains no explanatory notes, which are often sorely needed. It is introduced by the co-editor David R. Sorensen, and followed by seven essays, a glossary of names, and a bibliography. As Sara Atwood observes in her essay, “the popular definition of heroism has been broadened to include just about anything that falls under the heading of humane or ethical behaviour,” actions which “would once have been regarded as simply the right thing to do.” Elsewhere, Brent E. Kinser reminds us (would he hadn’t!) that Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2006 was “You.” In his lecture “The Hero as Priest,” Carlyle indeed welcomes the prospect of “a whole World of Heroes,” but to him this means “A world all sincere, a believing world,” and for that we are still waiting.

On Heroes is a reworking of six lectures Carlyle gave in May 1840—“I vomited it forth,” he wrote to his mother after the second one, “like wild Annandale grapeshot”—whose leading idea had been stated in his previous work, Chartism(1839), a brilliant and biting commentary on agitation for parliamentary reform. Taking it for granted that democracy was not only unattainable