Thomas Carlyle

“ We have more riches than any Nation ever had before; we have less good of them than any Nation ever had before. Our successful industry is hitherto unsuccessful; a strange success, if we stop here! In the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish; with gold walls, and full barns, no man feels himself safe or satisfied. Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers, all men, come to a pause; stand fixed, and cannot farther. Fatal paralysis spreading inwards, from the extremities, in St. Ives workhouses, in Stockport cellars, through all limbs, as if towards the heart itself. ”

“ In Poor and Rich, instead of noble thrift and plenty, there is idle luxury alternating with mean scarcity and inability. We have sumptuous garnitures for our Life, but have forgotten to live in the middle of them. ”

“ It is an enchanted wealth; no man of us can yet touch it. The class of men who feel that they are truly better off by means of it, let them give us their name!
Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors,—with what advantage they can report, and their Doctors can: but in the heart of them, if we go out of the dyspeptic stomach, what increase of blessedness is there? Are they better, beautifuller, stronger, braver? Are they even what they call 'happier? Do they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in this God's Earth ”

“ It is with some unwillingness that we pass from this picturesque and romantic episode to the two concluding books, and find ourselves again at hand-grips with professors of the dismal science, commercial capitalists, laissez-faire theorists, Plugson of Undershot, Sir Jabesh Windbag, and the rest of Carlyle's favourite bogies. They are all fallen silent—all gone dead to-day, and to fight the battle with them over again gives one, curiously enough, a far more 'phantasmagoric' feeling than that with which one joined in the struggles of Abbot Samson. ”

“ Human faces gloom discordantly, disloyally on one another. Things, if it be not mere cotton and iron things, are growing disobedient to man. The Master Worker is enchanted, for the present, like his Workhouse Workman ”

“ Yet even now it is impossible not to observe with admiration how, again and again, in isolated passages, in whole chapters, the genius of Carlyle triumphs and preserves the vitality of his perishable materials. The fifth chapter of the Third Book, the chapter on 'The English,' is a case in point: nothing truer, more inspiring, or at the same time more human, more genially humorous, has ever been written on the national character than this study of John Bull, in all his strength and weakness, his confusions of the mind and his heroisms of the will. ”

“ In spite of this formidable preoccupation, he was able to dash off Past and Present literally 'at a heat.' But perhaps I should have written 'because' rather than 'in spite,' for it may well have been to the rebound of the bent bow—to the unspeakable relief of being able to exchange distasteful for congenial work—that the pages which follow are indebted for that varying but unceasing play of eloquence, humour, and passion by which they are irradiated from first to last. ”

“ The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world. ”

“ Descend where you will into the lower class, in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by Mining-Labourer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking, the same sorrowful result discloses itself: you have to admit that the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is fast sinking into a state, to which, all sides of it considered, there was literally never any parallel. ”

“ And we here, in modern England, exuberant with supply of all kinds, besieged by nothing if it be not by invisible Enchantments, are we reaching that?⸻How come these things? Wherefore are they, wherefore should they be?
Nor are they of the St. Ives workhouses, of the Glasgow lanes, and Stockport cellars, the only unblessed among us. This successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth, has as yet made nobody rich; it is an enchanted wealth, and belongs yet to nobody. We might ask, Which of us has it enriched? We can spend thousands where we once spent hundreds ”

“ Of these successful skilful workers some two millions, it is now counted, sit in Workhouses, Poor-law Prisons; or have 'out-door relief' flung over the wall to them,—the workhouse Bastille being filled to bursting, and the strong Poor-law broken asunder by a stronger. [1] They sit there, these many months now; their hope of deliverance as yet small. In workhouses, pleasantly so named, because work cannot be done in them. Twelve hundred thousand workers in England alone ”

“ A human Mother and Father had said to themselves, What shall we do to escape starvation? We are deep sunk here, in our dark cellar; and help is far.—Yes, in the Ugolino Hungertower stern things happen ”

“ In starved sieged cities, in the uttermost doomed ruin of old Jerusalem fallen under the wrath of God, it was prophesied and said, 'The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children.' The stern Hebrew imagination could conceive no blacker gulf of wretchedness ”