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David S. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser, eds. Thomas Carlyle. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. New Haven: Yale UP. 2013. Pp. 348. $20.00.
It is George Orwell's description of Charles Dickens, Carlyle's friend and disciple, that best serves as an epithet for the Carlyle presented by David Sorensen and Brent Kinser in their addition to Yale's Rethinking the Western Tradition Series. Carlyle is portrayed as someone who possesses "the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry - in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls" (16). Presenting Carlyle as a non-partisan polemicist is perhaps not original but surely necessary if Carlyle is to be rescued from his self-inflicted cultural exile and made into a cultural mirror with which to rethink the western tradition. David Sorensen's introduction does an excellent job of reminding the reader of Carlyle's fall both during his lifetime, when Carlyle's authoritarian streak strained many of his friendships, and after, when "Joseph Goebbels cited Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great (1858-65) as Adolf Hitler's chief source of solace during his final months in the Berlin bunker" (2). At the same time, there is an underlying, though complex, sympathy with Carlyle throughout the essays - furthered by the long list of luminaries influenced by Carlyle's writing: "Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Gavan Duffy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Engels, [...] John Ruskin, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde" (159). Sorensen's assurance that, after Goebbels' praise, "the 'Sage of Chelsea' [was never again] readily identified with the cause...