Carlyle's Final Silence

Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Professor of English, University of Notre Dame

[Home —> Authors —> Thomas Carlyle —> Works —> Carlyle and the Search for Authority]

[Chapter 6, note 1, 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]

Even in the early 1870s, Carlyle continued to produce occasional public pronouncements. Nonetheless, for the last five years of his life, he was nearly silent, and from 1879 to his death in early 1881, there is almost no recorded writing. Since Froude is selective in his quotations, it is difficult to tell when the journal ends, but there seem to be no entries after 1878, the year of his last published piece of writing. The last letter of those published is a letter of February 8, 1879, to his brother John, who died in September of that year (NL, 2:341). Letters to most other correspondents stopped earlier, about 1875-76 (see RWE, 587; Cate, 208; Copeland, 248; Marrs, 788; Duffy, 606).

Contents last modified 26 October 2001