The trouble with 'Great Men' : early Victorian conceptions of heroism and Thomas Carlyle's 'On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History'

Thomas Carlyle’s 1840 lecture series, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, is often regarded as the archetypal ‘great man theory’ of history, contributing to his legacy as a protofascist and his rejection from the Victorian historical canon. However, Carlyle was a central figure in the early Victorian intellectual community, and we can better understand both Carlyle and his peers by re-examining On Heroes in the context of existing early Victorian conceptions of heroism. Doing so reveals that Carlyle was far more interested in the ‘heroic’ as an abstract force that all individuals possessed to some degree. He equated heroism with ‘sincerity’ – a belief in and duty to the ‘higher power’ of a divine universal truth of the world. Heroism manifested differently in each society, but typically involved either promoting the spread of the universal truth or protecting it from threats of falsehood. This view was constructed from a hybrid of existing early Victorian thought and German Romantic influences and is consistent across Carlyle’s other works. The early Victorian conception of heroism used a similar foundational structure with the ‘higher power’ of the British nation, whose exemplary heroes included Horatio Nelson and John Franklin. This model was born out of a need for national unity during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and incorporated elements of medieval nostalgia thanks to authors like Walter Scott, resulting in the heroic model of the gallant ‘gentleman’. Given the core structural similarity of devotion to a ‘higher power’, we can understand On Heroes as an attempt at universalising the early Victorian conception of the hero by removing the nationalistic elements in favour of a divine truth. Ultimately, this universalisation retained the exclusionary and hierarchical elements of the national model, allowing fascists to co-opt Carlyle and thereby disrupt his place in the historical canon.