Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) is now recognised as one of the most important writers of the nineteenth century in Scotland, in the United Kingdom, in the English-speaking world. As critic of an increasingly machine-oriented and profit-driven society, he argued for moral values, respect for the individual,and a good ethical basis to society. As historian and critic he achieved enormous success as "Sage of Chelsea" despite his humble beginnings as the son of an Ecclefechan stonemason. It was the death of his father in 1832 which triggered the beginning of his "Reminiscences", biographical essays of wonderful detail clearing out his memories under the stress of sudden bereavement. The process took much bigger form when his talented wife Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-66) suddenly died, leaving him lonely and shattered in the realisation how much their married life had meant to him -- and filling the loneliness with this passionate, regretful and often brilliantly detailed picture of their life together over several decades. The "Reminiscences" show Carlyle, often a difficult author, at his most human and most approachable. As a picture of Scottish working-class life they are as illuminating as their insight into the literary and aristocratic circles in London both Carlyles occupied in the 1840s and 1850s. Their unique correspondence, now being edited in the Duke-Edinburgh edition (37 volumes to date) reveals them as the most talented letter writers of their century. Ian Campbell joined the English department of Edinburgh University in 1964, and in 2009 retired as Emeritus Professor of Scottish and Victorian Literature. He is one of the senior editors of the Duke-Edinburgh edition of the Carlyles' complete correspondence.

Reminiscences

Biographies & Memoirs

CARLYLE., THOMAS

Arts & Literature

Kennedy & Boyd

This volume includes a selection of Scottish writing from one of its most innovative periods, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It ranges across literary genres from the controversial 'translations' of James Macpherson's Ossian poems to the prose polemic of Thomas Carlyle. It includes a wide selection from the poetry of Robert Burns and the short fiction of James Hogg, and the complete texts of Joanna Baillie's play De Monfort, Walter Scott's narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and John Galt's novel Annals of the Parish. Footnotes elucidate historical and other references, and Scots words are fully glossed. The introduction places these texts in the dynamic historical context in which this extraordinary literary flourishing occurred. Robert Irvine is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of books on Tobias Smollett, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen.

The Edinburgh Anthology of Scottish Literature Volume 1

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

This volume includes a selection of Scottish writing from one of its most innovative periods, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It ranges across literary genres from the controversial 'translations' of James Macpherson's Ossian poems to the prose polemic of Thomas Carlyle. It includes a wide selection from the poetry of Robert Burns, and the complete text of Joanna Baillie's play De Monfort. Footnotes elucidate historical and other references, and Scots words are fully glossed. The introduction places these texts in the dynamic historical context in which this extraordinary literary flourishing occurred. Robert Irvine is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of books on Tobias Smollett, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen.

The Edinburgh Anthology of Scottish Literature Concise Edition

The writing career of Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) stretched over some seventy years, encompassing at least seventy works of fiction as well as non-fiction, poetry and plays. Almost unknown, however, is the mass of shorter prose pieces - journalism, essays, polemics, reminiscences - which Mitchison produced during her long career. There are many hundreds of these pieces, covering a tremendously wide range of topics, an untapped resource both in Mitchison biography and in the wider field of social history.  Volume 2 in the seven-volume edition of Naomi Mitchison's Essays and Journalism is devoted to her writing about the West Highland village of Carradale, to which she moved in the late 1930s and where she lived for over sixty years. She writes about many aspects of Carradale: her farm, the local fishing industry, the big garden which was particularly dear to her heart, and 'the village and the Big House'. A long essay, 'Rural Reconstruction', never reprinted before, is a snapshot of Carradale in the 1940s and a spirited presentation of Mitchison's dreams for its future. These digressive, charming, combative pieces show both the practical and the thoughtful sides of her writing, often to touching effect: she cared deeply for Carradale and its people, and the book is a wonderful introduction to a beautiful part of Scotland and a major writer.

Essays and Journalism, Volume 2: Carradale (Naomi Mitchison Library)

History

MITCHISON, NAOMI

Europe

Essays and Journalism, Volume 4: Botswana (Naomi Mitchison Library)

Africa

Essays and Journalism, Volume 7: Education, Literature and Philosophy (Naomi Mitchison Library)

History & Criticism

On February 24th, 1934  - shortly after the civil war in Austria and the defeat of the Socialists - Naomi Mitchison left Eng­land on a visit to Vienna in order to do what she could to relieve the terrible distress of the defeated.  In this day-by-day diary she tells us what she saw, did and felt: and the whole forms at once what is called a "human document" of rare poignancy and dramatic interest, and a book of some historical import­ance. "Very few people have both money and leisure- and the will-to do this. I've got this because of my profession. I rang up V[ictor] G[ollancz] on Monday evening, and asked if he'd give me an advance on a-very hypothetical-book about it. He said he would, and I'm going on that. I couldn't have otherwise. Simply as an observer I shall be some use; it's the one thing I'm sure I can do well, though I don't think I'm a good analyser. What I should like to do is to write a full diary every day, as truthful as it can possibly be. I shall type it on both sides of the sheet, so that it will fold small, and shall try and leave a duplicate with somebody-if I get my copy through, they can destroy theirs. But perhaps the whole thing is moonshine; perhaps there won't be anything to write down! If so, looking back on this afternoon from whenever it is in the future, I shall see myself looking a perfect fool. However, that won't be the first time ! Anyway, for what it's worth. I feel all thrilled now, screwed up like a child going to play Indians. Perhaps I shall be more grown-up by the end of it."

Vienna Diary 1934 (Naomi Mitchison Library)

Community & Culture

'We story-tellers have a delightful time playing with history, perhaps finding something fascinating, perhaps making dreadful mistakes.' 
Here, in The Oath-Takers, the 'central maypole round which the people ... must swing and fall' is Charlemagne, and one of 'the people' a young man who makes his journey to manhood in a world of feudalism and a powerful Church. 
In the second short novel, Sea-Green Ribbons, the reader enters the political, religious and social tumult of the English Civil War through the story and choices of a young woman, Sarah, from a radical Leveller family in London.

The Oath-Takers and Sea-Green Ribbons (Naomi Mitchison Library)

Genre Fiction

This is Naomi Mitchison's least successful novel, and new readers should not start here! It is shaped by her own life and fears in her own experience in 1931, and is the first of her novels and stories not to have a historical setting. Mitchison was appalled by the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, and wanted to warn the world. She was rather dismayed by the results of the Russian Revolution, of which she had once had great hopes. She also poured all her most personal feelings into the novel, and covered a plethora of subjects - not only free love, abortion and rape, but the unmentionable discussion of marital infidelity, trouser buttons and rubber goods. Her own love life was so complex that she divided it between two sisters in the novel! It spent two years being censored by the publisher while she championed it, but it was crowded, over-written, hectic and unbalanced. It is poor, but Mitchison-lovers will find it impossible to put down. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen

We Have Been Warned (Naomi Mitchison Library)

Literary

Naomi Mitchison published The Blood of the Martyrs in October 1939, just a month after the outbreak of the Second World War. The novel marks a return to the historical subject matter for which she had made her name in widely acclaimed books such as The Conquered (1923) and The Corn God and the Spring Queen (1931). It is set in the Rome of Emperor Nero around the time of the Great Fire and follows the interconnected lives of two distinct social circles. The first is the household of the Senator Flavius Crispus who is nostalgic for the more tolerant and rational Rome of a previous age. The second is a small community of Christians made up of slaves and freedmen and women who meet in secret to share the 'love feast'. Moving between the two circles is the son of a defeated British king, Beric, who, deprived of legal and political status, has no secure place in either world. Beric's dilemma, and eventual fate, provides a focal point to a novel made up of multiple individual stories that converge in the same tragic end. The late 1930s also saw the publication of Mitchison's political polemic, The Moral Basis of Politics. The Blood of the Martyrs is in many ways a fictional exploration of the same themes. Where, Mitchison asks, might we find a 'moral' answer to the threat posed by fascism and the increasing power of the Nation State over the rights of the individual? She finds hope, if not quite the solution, in the resistance offered by the early Christians to Nero's persecution. Dedicating her novel to political dissidents and minorities of her own time, she calls for a moral idea around which they too might unite to challenge the tyranny of State power in its characteristic twentieth-century forms.

The Blood of the Martyrs (Naomi Mitchison Library)

Naomi Mitchison

Ancient Civilizations

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