Thomas Carlyle was a nineteenth-century Scottish essayist, philosopher, and historian. Famous for his distinctively energetic style of prose, he was considered by Ralph Waldo Emerson to be the ‘undoubted head of English letters’. His collected works run to thirty volumes, including the influential history The French Revolution (1837). Following his appropriation by Nazi ideologues, Carlyle’s popularity waned in the early twentieth century, but David Gascoyne’s 1952 text anticipates a revival of Carlyle studies, presenting him as both a prophet and social commentator who cannot be claimed by either the Left or the Right. In this work, Gascoyne aims to position Carlyle alongside the most important writers of the nineteenth century, while simultaneously exploring Carlyle’s ‘message of special value’ to contemporary readers.