[Chapter 5, note 17, of the author's Carlyle and the Search for Authority, which the Ohio State University Press published in 1991. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright. indicates a link to material not in the original print version. GPL]

In referring to the first half of the history, I mean to indicate the structural rather than literal division of the work. Carlyle had planned four volumes, two covering the period up to the death of Friedrich Wilhelm and two on the reign of Frederick the Great, but the second half grew on him as he wrote and became, in the first edition, four volumes in itself. Thus the completed edition totaled six volumes, Carlyle's original intention can still be discerned in the division of the work into books. The first two volumes have ten books and the last four have eleven (originally intended to be ten). To indicate this division of the work into two parts, I will refer to the first two volumes as the first half and the last four volumes as the second half of the history. Note, however, that citations are from the Centenary Edition, which has eight volumes, the "second half" beginning at 3: 278.


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