Thomas Carlyle was born on 4th December 1795 at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, a small village in south-west Scotland on the coach road from England to Glasgow and the North. Both parents were intelligent but poorly educated. His father, aged 37 when Thomas was born, was a stonemason, and later a farmer. His mother Margaret Aitken, then aged 24, could read with difficulty, but could not write until years later. His father had been married before; his first wife, Jannet, died three years earlier after the birth of a son, John. His mother continued to have children at intervals of about two years, and Thomas became the oldest of nine children. He was raised in a strictly religious family, his parents being Burgher Seceders, a small local Calvinist sect. Fiction and poetry were not allowed in the house. He was always his mother's favourite child, but feared his father's easily provoked wrath. Thomas was named after his grandfather, who had been a noted street fighter, like others of his male ancestors. One of his earliest memories was of throwing his stool at his step-brother.
When he was seven, a local minister taught him Latin privately for three years, and thus equipped, he was able to start formal education at Annan Academy, some six miles distant. He spent three unhappy years there as a boarder, with visits home at weekends. His teachers were efficient crammers, given to physical and mental chastisement. He was bullied by his classmates, but, against his mother's wishes, he fought back. Unsurprisingly, he was a fine scholar. He went on to Edinburgh University a month before his fourteenth birthday, not unusual in these days, and walked most of the eighty miles to Edinburgh. His parents hoped that their sacrifices would help their son to become a Presbyterian minister.
He arrived at Edinburgh a talkative and combative personality. As at school, he was not enamoured of his teachers, and derived most of his education from wide reading in the library. He came to university with a good grounding in Latin and French, in geometry and algebra, and with some knowledge of literature.
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Although the family found modest prosperity in later years, they were poor in Carlyle's childhood. He learned arithmetic from his father, and to read and write at village schools.
Schooling
Carlyle, now seventeen, was entering the most difficult phase of his life - a protracted adolescence compounded of poverty, indecision about future goals in life, religious doubts, and concerns about his health.
From 1814 to 1818 he supported himself by full-time teaching, first at Annan Academy, his old school, then at Kirkcaldy. He loathed teaching and lacked the patience for it. He was lonely at Annan, and pleased to obtain the better paid post in Kirkcaldy, nearer to Edinburgh and friends. There he became close friends with a fellow Annandale man, Edward Irving, another outstanding scholar,
later a charismatic preacher in London. He read voraciously, and began to lose his faith after reading Gibbon and Hume. He also formed a romantic attachment to Margaret Gordon, later Lady Bannerman, which she and her family quickly ended. In 1816-17 his mother had a severe mental illness
He studied and translated German works. In June of either 1821 or 1822 he had an important but poorly documented mystical experience in Leith Walk, Edinburgh, which was later to become 'The Everlasting No' of Sartor Resartus. In 1821 he met Jane Welsh, the daughter of a Haddington doctor who had died young, courted her assiduously and stormily, and finally married her in 1826. From 1822 to 1824 he was tutor to the sons of the wealthy Buller family.
Throughout these years he wrestled with the problem of his vocation. He had disappointed his parents by abandoning the church, and for some of these years seems to have lost all religious faith. At the end of them he had rejected Christianity for good, while retaining a belief in God.
In the 1820's he gradually moved towards writing. He had translations of encyclopaedias and a geometry book published. He wrote his earliest papers on German writers, translated Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and wrote a life of Schiller. His financial position was more assured while he tutored the Bullers, and he was able to visit London and Paris for the first time.
He spent 1825 to 1826 helping his parents farm Hoddam Hill, above Ecclefechan, a relatively tranquil end to his youthful turmoil.
He married in October 1826. As the date neared he complained more about his health. Jane confessed that she had been in love with his old friend Edward Irving years earlier, and there were difficulties with his future mother-in-law, who did not approve of her daughter's choice. They were undecided about where to live.
After the wedding they settled for the first year at 21 Comely Bank, Edinburgh. There were serious difficulties, probably sexual, at the very start of the marriage, which made Carlyle unwell, and led him to write to his brother John wishing that he could consult him both as a brother and a doctor. Matters gradually improved and in the course of the next year his complaints about his health diminished. He started but did not finish a novel: Wotton Reinfred.Craigenputtock, 1828-1834
In 1829 his sister Margaret died of cancer of the 'digestive organs'.
He completed Sartor in 1831, travelled to London to find a publisher, but failed to do so. There he met John Stuart Mill and other writers for the first time.
He returned to Craigenputtock in 1832. His father died, and Carlyle wrote the first of his Reminiscences. Goethe died later the same year.
In early 1833 they spent a few months in Edinburgh, and found life there dull after London. Emerson visited him at Craigenputtock. Sartor was serialised in Fraser's magazine. Both grew increasingly despondent about their life and prospects.
Move to London
In June 1834 they moved to 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, where Carlyle was to live for almost fifty years, becoming the 'Sage of Chelsea.'