Latter-Day Pamphlets

Latter-Day Pamphlets is a collection of eight polemical pamphlets by the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), published successively by Chapman and Hall in London in 1850. The European revolutions of 1848 and his experiences during the Irish Famine years (1846, 1849) prompted Carlyle to write these texts. The title is taken from the Book of Job—'I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth'—where 'latter day' means 'the end times, the latter times,' alluding to the era of collapsing old order and looming crisis that he saw around him. The eight pamphlets were issued month by month, in order: 'The Present Time,' 'Model Prisons,' 'Downing Street,' 'The New Downing Street,' 'Stump-Orator,' 'Parliaments,' 'Hudson's Statue,' and 'Jesuitism.' Each has its own title and pagination; bound together they run to about 430 pages. The core of the book is a fierce assault on the political, social, and religious condition of Britain at the time: he questions how democracy operates, mocks parliamentary empty talk and electoral demagoguery, criticizes the prison system as too lenient, and uses the affair of 'Hudson's Statue'—a proposal to erect a monument to the bankrupt 'Railway King' George Hudson—to satirize the decay of public morality under the commercial pursuit of profit. The recurring figure of 'Bobus' is the personification of commercial culture eroding social morality. The book caused great controversy in Britain upon publication; Engels wrote a review of the first two pamphlets, Marx rebutted its doctrine of an 'aristocracy of talent' in the New-York Daily Tribune, and Emerson, Dickens, and Ruskin each responded in their own way. As an important text for studying Carlyle's social thought and the spiritual condition of the Victorian era, it is still regarded today as one of the classics of nineteenth-century British social criticism.