Thomas Carlyle | Poetry Foundation

On May 5, 1840, Thomas Carlyle began his famous lecture series "The Hero as Divinity" which later was collected in his book "On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History". A short excerpt from the article:

"Affluence came slowly. To eke out his early royalties, Carlyle had to give annual lectures, a process he detested and feared, yet which he seemed to perform with great public success, his normally impressive conversational and monologuing skills sharpened by nervousness and by the sense of occasion. His lectures on heroes, given in May 1840, were excellent. Published in 1841 as On Heroes, Hero-Worship & the Heroic in History, they pick up some of the main concerns of the volumes on the French Revolution.

The lectures, as Carlyle’s title makes clear, are about heroes. Carlyle considered his own father a hero who had bred in him the view that heroes were necessary for both the individual and society as figures of support and guidance in morally difficult times. In On Heroes, Carlyle goes through history to select different great men in literature and in religion, in war and in peace, in the far past and in the recent past, but not—significantly—in Victorian Britain, which held few heroes for a man like Carlyle. He asks what each hero did for his age, and in every case he gives it shape, form, direction, values, coherence: often destructive, Carlyle’s heroes prevented bloodshed, prevented anarchy, which even in the 1830s was a nightmare to many thinkers. Carlyle himself was becoming a hero to many. The ideas in On Heroes, Hero-Worship & the Heroic in History became some of his most widespread and influential. The lectures were republished many times, excerpted and made available to the new millions of literate poor. Their message was simple, clear, undemanding. Find your hero, give him your loyalty and your obedience. The times are dangerous, but follow your hero and fulfill your obligation to your creator. Christian and skeptic alike found in this clear and simple message a resonant faith, and Carlyle became more and more widely discussed."