Thomas Carlyle’s House
THOMAS CARLYLE BECAME one of Britain’s most noted essayists and historians. His parents belonged to a small sect of strict Calvinists who disapproved of poetry and fiction, so Thomas, the oldest of nine brothers and sisters, had the direction of his literary path predetermined. The road to literary accomplishment, though, was a winding one. As a young man, he shared his parents’ strong religious convictions and voiced no objections to his father’s desire that Thomas enter the ministry. The young man struggled through school, though, the victim of typical schoolyard bullying. His parents thought his reaction to this somewhat unseemly for an aspiring cleric, because he defended himself with his fists instead of turning the other cheek. Thomas held his teachers in low esteem, and during his studies at Edinburgh University he did much of his learning alone in the library.
He completed his four-year course of study at the university, but his family could not afford the expense of the further three years of full-time schooling necessary to earn a degree in divinity, so Thomas enrolled in a program that allowed him to study full-time for just one more year, followed by six years of part-time study while working to earn an income. But as time dragged on, he grew ever less enthusiastic about a future in the ministry. Even as his divinity studies lost their appeal, so too did his work as a teacher. Possibly as a means of escape, he immersed himself in books.
