Guillotine! Guillotine!! Guillotine!!!
When The French Revolution was published as a three volume set in 1837, it was a revolution (no pun intended) in the way history was written and presented as a discipline. Thomas Carlyle penned history as a story, a novel of the past, which made history enjoyable as well as educational. Days were numbered for the bone dry tomes of days gone by.
Carlyle
began work on the subject when his friend and associate, John Mill, threw the research
and the project into his lap, being unable to complete it himself. Mill provided Carlyle with a wealth of
primary source material on the Revolution.
Once he had immersed himself in all the sources put together by Mill, he
began formulating an outline for the book and soon realized that one volume
would not be enough. One text turned
into three.
Carlyle's writing style was furious. He would read the sources then immediately
sit down and write. After completing the
handwritten manuscript for volume one, Mill looked it over to give his
"two cents" worth of critique.
The single copy had been left in Mill's possession. As fate would have it, one of Mill's servants
mistook the first volume draft as rubbish and threw into the trash pile, where
it was burned. All that work went up in
a plume of smoke.
Mills was devastated.
He took full responsibility and even laid out 200 pounds for Carlyle's
living expenses so he could reconstruct the book. Rewrite he did. Within a short amount of time, Carlyle had
rewritten what was lost, and succeeded in composing two more volumes on top of
that. The set was very popular in its
day. Emerson and Thoreau loved it, as
did Mark Twain, but it was Charles Dickens who thoroughly made use of the
Carlyle's work, as the inspiration for A
Tale of Two Cities. Dickens read and
reread the series whilst writing his French Revolution classic...
...and History would never be the same again.