Without exactly coining the phrase, Carlyle’s Past and Present stands as an irregular summation of the Gospel of Work. To ‘[k]now thy work and do it’, he avers, is ‘The latest Gospel in this world’ (10:196). Work operates here as an absolute good – indeed, as ‘Religion’ (10:200) – and the dividing lines are correspondingly stark: on the one hand he invokes the ‘unworking Dilettantism’ of a partridge-trapping aristocracy (10:182); and, on the other, regiments of diligent but unemployed workers (10:197). Only, Carlyle begins at the edges to nibble away at this definitional absolutism. And it is here that he addresses the more specific concerns of this book. As Chapter 1 demonstrates, the implication of his conviction that ‘a man perfects himself by working’ (10:196) is that authors too must consider their status as workers. By 1843, Carlyle was still quoting Goethe, notably his injunction to ‘Work, and despair not’ (10:135). But the distinction advanced ‘between work and sham-work, between speech and jargon’ (25:196), imperils the place of poetry and fiction in his economy of values. Though admitting that ‘The spoken Word, the written Poem, is said to be an epitome of the man’, he is still drawn to ask, ‘how much more the done Work’ (10:158). Equally, his wry allusion to the pitiful ‘day’s-wages of John Milton’s day’s-work, named Paradise Lost’ (10:19) betrays an anxiety not only about literary rewards, but about the equivalence of different ‘day’s work’. The aim here is not to repeat the well-known story of Carlyle’s increasing and oddly self-defeating Philistinism, but to probe the uncertainties that shadow his categorical rhetoric, and the ways these condition his vocational placing.

Once Carlyle’s difficulties in satisfying himself are understood, it is easier to appreciate the ironies of his legacy, and the forms of projection it invites. At the level of direct influence, several Carlylean preoccupations recur across the cases surveyed in later chapters.