Carlyle, parliament, and British political debate

Though Thomas Carlyle’s views on historical and ethical issues have been discussed extensively, there has been more reluctance to analyse his relationship with British politics as it developed during his lifetime. If we are to do this, we must look not just at what he said but at what others were saying at the same time. This is hardly ever done, because he presented himself as a lone prophet, and most commentators have taken this claim at face value. His appeal depended on identifying foolish conventions against which he could rail. His implication was that the conventions were common currency and that his own opinions were deeply counter-cultural. Sometimes, as with the “Negro Question”, his desire to shock led him into stormy waters, but it is the contention of this essay that few of his political opinions were as controversial as he implied that they were. This essay examines Carlyle’s views on parliament and the British constitution, which he expressed at length in Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) as well as in other writings. It argues that these views were superficially contentious, because they took aim at some fashionable arguments which venerated parliament’s role in delivering British stability and global power. In reality, however, Carlyle only opposed those who articulated this veneration in its most complacent and unqualified form, which few people did by this point. Carlyle himself expressed an admiration for parliament’s constitutional role which was scarcely different from the general consensus around 1850, though his intemperate language gave a more critical impression. In practice, his proposals for checking its powers in order to improve the efficiency of government were shared with – and in places clearly borrowed from - other people. In other words, the mid-century debate about the strengths and weaknesses of British constitutional arrangements was conducted within very narrow parameters, and though Carlyle was a member of the critical rather than the complacent party, the moderation of the critics’ proposals helps to explain why so little change took place. My object in normalising his opinions is not particularly to show that he influenced others, or that they influenced him, though both these things sometimes occurred. Instead, the aim is to show that his criticisms fell into the mainstream of mid-Victorian politics. The essay goes on to make the same point, more briefly, about his views after 1867: his dislike of some aspects of politics was not discernibly greater than it had always been, while other elements of the new era were quite congenial to a Carlylean. Despite the shrillness of “Shooting Niagara”, the main arguments with which Carlyle was associated remained somewhere on the scale of conventional debate, and arguably had considerable influence