WorkThomas Carlyle

Past and Present

Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843)

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) · London: Chapman and Hall, 1843

AnalyzedReadMentioned

Documented 1843–1845

Additional passages preserved in the Memoirs (1852)

Letters • Books • Essays

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

AttestedConfirmed reading1843Evidence ↓

Confirmed reading

Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had this work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.

Dated
1843Past and PresentAttested
“Carlyle's book I have, in some sense, read. It is witty, full of pictures, as usual... except the Goethean, Do to-day the nearest duty.”
Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · 1 June 1843, Niagara
MERGED 2026-10-11: absorbed duplicate witness(es) re663 (Mem-2 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (sections), Mem-2-05, line 11253; tier A; same passage) — counted once here. Explicit 'Carlyle's book I have, in some sense, read'.

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood

II. Adolescence

III. Self-Directed

IV. Transcendentalist2records

V. New York2records

VI. Europe

✦. Memoirs (1852)

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1843—

Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson

p261

analyzed · read

“His book, as it happened, you gave me as a birthday gift... Carlyle's book I have, in some sense, read. It is witty, full of pictures, as usual.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. III. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

She offers extensive analysis: praising the wit and the "sketch of Samson" (the monk who becomes abbot of St. Edmundsbury), acknowledging its potential to rouse readers, yet criticizing Carlyle for being "open to his own assault." She identifies only one "valuable doctrine"—the Goethean maxim—as worth preserving from the work.

1845—

New-York Daily Tribune

“Oliver Cromwell” · December 19, 1845 · p. 1

analyzed · read

“Sometimes a great success has followed the portraits painted by him in the light of such faith, as with regard to Mahomet, for instance.”

The same sentence also names On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Counted as one engagement.

Fuller, Margaret. Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems. Edited by Arthur B. Fuller. Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860.

1845—

Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches . . .

“Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches . . .”

mentioned

“in such pictures as that of the Monk in “Past and Present,” where the genius of artist and subject coincide, the result is no less delightful for us.”

Fuller, Margaret. "Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches . . ." New-York Daily Tribune, 19 December 1845. · 19 December 1845

Preserved in the Memoirs (1852)

1843—

Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli

p40

analyzed · read

“Carlyle's book I have, in some sense, read. It is witty, full of pictures, as usual... No doubt it may be of use to rouse the unthinking to a sense of those great dangers and sorrows.”

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.