In his essay on ‘The Negro Question’ (1850), J. S. Mill refers dismissively to Carlyle’s ‘pet theory […] about work’.1 His attack proceeds on a familiar utilitarian basis: if authority is to be invoked in the matter of a social question, we need to know its source, its legitimacy and the limits of its jurisdiction. In colonial contexts, as discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and 6, the Gospel of Work was indeed an instrument of domination, which was all the more pernicious for its vagueness. It is in his overall account of Carlylean thought that Mill misleads, largely because he resorts to caricature. By presenting his antagonist as a practitioner of metaphysical moonshine, he neglects the complex influence of Carlyle’s social placing, and the nuances of his philosophical position. This is most apparent when he lambasts Carlyle for suggesting an equivalence between ‘such work […] as is done by writers’ and ‘real labour’, the latter being ‘the exhausting, stiffening, stupefying toil of many kinds of agricultural and manufacturing labours’.

An important ethical question is at stake: Mill rightly calls out Carlyle’s audacity in preaching to people about their working conditions. And he legitimately questions the implication that authorship is equivalently punishing – not least since Carlyle was addressing harshly indentured plantation workers, including former slaves. What he misses, all the same, is the less hieratic position that motivates Carlyle’s pronouncements: his concern to forge a connection between the transcendental function and the material world, so that ‘ordinances’ can flow in more than one direction. And while the tendency remains to regard Carlyle as a secular prophet, pronouncing from on high, his social background casts that role in a different light. A university-educated man of letters, with decidedly aristocratic social connections, he was nevertheless the son of a poor man, who was first a jobbing stonemason, then a builder and finally a farmer. By implication, Mill’s jibe about ‘stupefying toil’ falls wide of the mark. From his youth, Carlyle had a better acquaintance with such labour than Mill credits. But apart from being a case of social misrecognition, the exchange reveals an enduring blind-spot about the varieties of labour admitted by Carlyle’s Gospel.