Past and Present is a book by the Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. It was published in April 1843 in England and the following month in the United States. It combines medieval history with criticism of 19th-century British society. Carlyle wrote it in seven weeks as a respite from the harassing labor of writing Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches. He was inspired by the recently published Chronicles of the Abbey of Saint Edmund's Bury, which had been written by Jocelin of Brakelond at the close of the 12th century. This account of a medieval monastery had taken Carlyle's fancy, and he drew upon it in order to contrast the monks' reverence for work and heroism with the sham leadership of his own day.
Composition
Carlyle wrote on 27 October 1841 that he had thought of editing a journal, asking James Garth Marshall,Is it not now that we are to sing and act the great new Epic, not "Arms and the Man," but "Tools and the Man";—to preach and prophesy in all ways that Labor is honorable, that Labor alone is honorable; that Idleness shall and must move out of its way, or be frightfully thrown into the howling dog-kennel?Having borrowed and read George Calvert Holland's The Millocrat and Marshall's address to the Leeds Parliamentary Reform Association denigrating the "corn-law of aristocracy" while praising industry and industrialists, Carlyle became convinced that "we must have industrial barons, of a quite new suitable sort; workers loyally related to their taskmasters,—related in God (as we may well say); not related in Mammon alone! This will be the real aristocracy, in place of the sham one". The idea of a journal was soon discarded as he turned to writing Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches.
Carlyle grew increasingly concerned with the state of England, as he observed widespread hunger and riots in the spring and summer of 1842. In August he wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson expressing how it distracted him from the writing of Cromwell:One of my grand difficulties I suspect to be that I cannot write two Books at once; cannot be in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth at one and the same moment . . . For my heart is sick and sore in behalf of my own poor generation; nay, I feel withal as if the one hope of help for it consisted in the possibility of new Cromwells, and new Puritans: thus do the two centuries stand related to me, the seventeenth worthless except precisely in so far as it can be made the nineteenth; and yet let anybody try that enterprise! Heaven help me.In the first week of September, Carlyle made a trip to East Anglia for research on Cromwell, in which he observed both the workhouse of St Ives, about which there was "something that reminded me of Dante's Hell", and the ruins of Bury St. Edmunds Abbey, "the Heaven's- Watchtower of our Fathers, the fallen God's-Houses, the Golgotha of true Souls departed". In mid-October 1842 while writing Cromwell, Carlyle read J. G. Rokewood's edition of the Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda de Rebus Gestis Samsonis Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi published by the Camden Society in 1840. Carlyle was much taken with Abbot Samson's strong leadership of the Monastery of Bury St. Edmunds Abbey and he planned to contrast it with modern England. During the final two months of 1842, he wrote quickly, and the first portion of the manuscript was sent to the printers in February 1843, completing the book on 9 March. The first autograph of Past and Present is in the British Library while the printer's copy is in the Yale University Library.
Summary
Book 1: Proem
Carlyle expresses his ideas about the Condition of England question in an elevated rhetorical style invoking classical allusions (such as Midas and the Sphinx) and fictional caricatures (such as Bobus and Sir Jabesh Windbag). Carlyle complains that despite England's abundant resources, the poor are starving and unable to find meaningful work, as evinced by the Manchester Insurrection. Carlyle argues that the ruling class needs to guide the nation, and supports an "Aristocracy of Talent". But in line with his concept of "hero-worship", Carlyle argues that first the English must themselves become heroic in order to esteem true heroes rather than quacks.