Cloth binding. Black lettering with gilt title on front cover.

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Essays on Goethe

Excerpt from Essays on Goethe. In 1822 Carlyle had contributed to a New Edinburgh Review a paper on Goethe’s Goethe thus being his first topic as a reviewer. While at Kirkcaldy he had translated Legendre’s Geometry, and the translation was published in 1824. He was earning then, for a short time, £200 a year at Edinburgh as tutor to young Charles Buller. In 1823 and l824~ – from October, 1823 – his Life of Schiller was appearing in the London Magazine, and in 1824 he published his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, which was praised and abused, and so brought the translator into notice. The Life of Schiller was published as a volume in 1825. When it was afterwards translated into German, Goethe himself wrote a preface to it, and gave some account of the young English author who had done more than any man to make German literature truly understood in England.

Thomas Carlyle (4 December 1795 – 5 February 1881) was a British historian, satirical writer, essayist, translator, philosopher, mathematician, and teacher. In his book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History (1841), he argued that the actions of the “Great Man” play a key role in history, claiming that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men”. Other major works include The French Revolution: A History, 3 vols (1837) and The History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great, 6 vols (1858–65).

His 1837 history of the French Revolution was the inspiration for Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities, and remains popular today. The influence on American literature of his 1836 Sartor Resartus, a novel both satirical and philosophical, has been described as “difficult to overstate”.

A noted polemicist, Carlyle coined the term “the dismal science” for economics, in his essay “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”, which satirically advocated for the reintroduction of slavery to the West Indies to highlight his perceived hypocrisy of British abolitionists’ indifference to domestic child-labour and slave-like working conditions in contemporary factories. John Carey in “The truculent genius of Thomas Carlyle”, a review in Books and Bookmen in 1983, says: “The standard view, which is that Carlyle was so poisonous it’s a wonder his mind didn’t infect his bloodstream.” On Carlyle’s attitude to slavery he adds: “Carlyle was a racist, with a rare talent for misreading historical trends.”

He also wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia.

In mathematics, he is known for the Carlyle circle, a method used in quadratic equations and for developing ruler-and-compass constructions of regular polygons.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature and aesthetic criticism, and treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour. He is considered to be the greatest German literary figure of the modern era.

Goethe took up residence in Weimar in November 1775 following the success of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). He was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August, in 1782. He was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe became a member of the Duke’s privy council, sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau, and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena. He also contributed to the planning of Weimar’s botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace.

Goethe’s first major scientific work, the Metamorphosis of Plants, was published after he returned from a 1788 tour of Italy. In 1791 he was made managing director of the theatre at Weimar, and in 1794 he began a friendship with the dramatist, historian, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whose plays he premiered until Schiller’s death in 1805. During this period Goethe published his second novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship; the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and, in 1808, the first part of his most celebrated drama, Faust. His conversations and various shared undertakings throughout the 1790s with Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and August and Friedrich Schlegel have come to be collectively termed Weimar Classicism.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer named Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship one of the four greatest novels ever written, while the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe as one of six “representative men” in his work of the same name (along with Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Montaigne, Napoleon, and Shakespeare). Goethe’s comments and observations form the basis of several biographical works, notably Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (1836).