[Chapter 6, note 10, of the author's Carlyle and the Search for Authority, which the Ohio State University Press published in 1991. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright. indicates a link to material not in the original print version. GPL]

Mill had sent a copy [of On Liberty] to Carlyle when the book was published (Wilson, 5:340). At the time, Carlyle found the reasoning powerful and praised it as serious, ingenious, clear," but he could not accept its fundamental argument and went on to register his "perfect and profound dissent for the basis it rests upon" (NL, 2: 196; see Larkin, 74). The manuscript of the response Carlyle wrote in 1865 is transcribed in Trela, "A New (Old) Review." Carlyle worked only two days, October 18-19, 1865, before abandoning the critique. Trela, who remarks that it is "surprising" Carlyle would return to On Liberty six years after reading it, seems not to have noticed that Mill had recently been elected to Parliament or that Carlyle began writing on the day of Palmerston's death.


Victorian
Web

Authors

Thomas
Carlyle
John Ruskiin Contents

Contents last modified 26 October 2001