“It is part of my creed that the only Poetry is History could we tell it right.”– Thomas Carlyle

Whether he got the French Revolution “right” is not only up for debate but irrelevant. After all, he wasn’t actually there. But Thomas Carlyle’s great (and difficult) and frenzied <The French Revolution: A History is a highwater-mark in histories, and it took me three years, off and on, to finish the thing – I can take his turgid over-heated prose only in very small doses – but boy, am I glad I read it. Being interested in writers of the late 19th century and early 20th, Thomas Carlyle’s name comes up all the time. In letters, journals, essays – he is referenced casually, with an understanding that the audience will be familiar with him, will have read him. His star has fallen in the last century, and you could no longer make assumptions about your readers’ frames of reference – but it is a giant work, a work that stands alone for many reasons. He wrote it as though he was there. He describes the moles, the blushes, the bad teeth of the people he sees. He paints Robespierre vividly, as though he himself were standing in the crowd watching him go by. Carlyle immersed himself in the first-person documents of the French Revolution, and then, of course, let his imagination run away with him. It is a deeply moral work. A philosophical work. And you need to lie down after reading one or two paragraphs, just to get a BREAK. Dude needs to freakin’ CHILLAX.

Here he is on the storming of the Bastille:

Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible! Guard-rooms are burnt, Invalides mess-rooms. A distracted ‘Peruke-maker with two fiery torches’ is for burning ‘the saltpetres of the Arsenal;’–had not a woman run screaming; had not a Patriot, with some tincture of Natural Philosophy, instantly struck the wind out of him (butt of musket on pit of stomach), overturned barrels, and stayed the devouring element. A young beautiful lady, seized escaping in these Outer Courts, and thought falsely to be de Launay’s daughter, shall be burnt in de Launay’s sight; she lies swooned on a paillasse: but again a Patriot, it is brave Aubin Bonnemere the old soldier, dashes in, and rescues her. Straw is burnt; three cartloads of it, hauled thither, go up in white smoke: almost to the choking of Patriotism itself; so that Elie had, with singed brows, to drag back one cart; and Reole the ‘gigantic haberdasher’ another. Smoke as of Tophet; confusion as of Babel; noise as of the Crack of Doom!

There isn’t one paragraph that doesn’t read like that. It is a massive book.

I was extremely interested to read this generous article about Thomas Carlyle in The Humanities, overflowing with awesome anecdotes – a really good description of the man, his influences, his journey as a writer, and how the book came to be.

There is a famous story that he leant a copy of the manuscript (his only copy) to his good friend John Stuart Mill – and while in Mill’s care, the manuscript was burnt. Accidentally, of course. But my God, can you imagine?

It’s not exactly the same as Mikhail Bulgakov destroying his OWN manuscript of The Master and Margarita (too dangerous to have that crap around in 1930s Russia) and then had to re-write the book from memory (which, frankly, gives me goosebumps to just think about) … because John Stuart Mill (or his married girlfriend, one of the two) accidentally burnt it. Now, these two men were dear friends. Sounds like it wasn’t easy for Carlyle to be friends with anyone. Imagine the agony of John Stuart Mill (I CRINGE thinking about it), and imagine the agony of Carlyle. First of all, your book is lost. Second of all, you don’t want to end the relationship over such a thing – the friendship was precious – but how does one go on? The friendship never really did bounce back, although John Stuart Mill was instrumental in getting the thing published, as well as giving it rave reviews.

Carlyle had to start from scratch and re-write the book. Just looking at the fever-pitched prose of the Bastille excerpt above makes one realize just how difficult it is to re-create something like that. So much of the book reads like that – as though you are in the midst of the mob – it is immediate, emotional … But bless Carlyle, he did what he had to do, and re-wrote the damn thing.

That’s the bare bones of the story that I know – a rather famous “what if” moment in the literary world, especially for Thomas Carlyle who never stopped dreaming about that lost book and how perfect it was – and the article I link to above goes into it in detail.

But there’s much more there. I love to discover that Carlyle loved Washington Irving! Never would have guessed that! How charming! When Irving died, Carlyle mourned him, even though they had never met. He wrote: “It was a dream of mine that we two should be friends!” I find that very touching.

I also very much liked, in the article, the comparison between Carlyle and Gibbon, whose The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and how Gibbon obviously is the monument for most historians, but Carlyle was up to something very different. The article shows the first paragraph of Decline and Fall and then shows the first paragraph of The French Revolution, and it pretty much speaks for itself.

Carlyle wrote in a letter to his brother:

Here, as in so many other respects, I am alone: without models, without limits (this is a great want); and must—just do the best I can.

It is a marvelous article. Highly recommended.

Not to mention Thomas Carlyle’s majestic challenging achievement The French Revolution: A History (Modern Library Classics) – which I definitely consider a must-read. (You know, if you have about three years of your life to spare.)