Thomas Carlyle

What happens when one of the wittiest writers in the English language turns his attention to one of the most thunderous? This 1902 portrait by G.K. Chesterton is less a conventional biography than a meeting of two formidable minds. The first half crackles with Chesterton's signature paradoxes and sly humor as he ruminates on Carlyle's towering works, the scathing attacks on industrial mediocrity, the wild prose of 'Sartor Resartus,' the seismic 'French Revolution.' The second half settles into biography: the Scottish upbringing, the legendary beard, the tempestuous marriage to Jane Welsh, the rise to dominance in Victorian intellectual life. Chesterton understood that Carlyle himself was a performance, a man who looked like a prophecy and wrote like a cyclone. Reading one master anatomize another is a rare pleasure, and Chesterton does not disappoint, he admires Carlyle while never losing the ability to see him clearly. For anyone curious about the men behind the moustaches who shaped how we think about revolution, society, and the self.