How Thomas Carlyle's masterpiece literally rose from the ashes

The pair were political opposites, Mill a liberal, Carlyle a conservative (or rather a reactionary). The difference was good-natured and only gave them all the more to enjoy in their non-stop arguments.

But that evening Mill, said his closest friend, was “the very picture of desperation”. Mill had recently taken away the manuscript of the huge book just completed by Carlyle on the French Revolution (which in modern editions runs to more than 1000 pages). He was to give the author his valued critical comments.

After he had finished reading it, Mill handed it on to a pioneer of feminism, also his sexual soulmate, Harriet Taylor. And her servant, who was illiterate, used the paper to kindle a fire. All that was left of Carlyle’s passion and fury were a few charred leaves. Mill brought the ashes to Cheyne Walk as confirmation. It was a bigger literary event than could be expected today, and not just because of our digital technology.

Only 20 years before, the conservative English had been locked in a mortal struggle with the revolutionary French, and one way they now had of registering their triumph by land and sea was in taking no trouble to learn about the France of the past or the present.

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For example, they would not buy books about these European neighbours, which meant none were written for a commercial nation such as England.

Scots formed an exception to the rule. Famous as fighting men, this did not mean they scorned the life of the mind. What was more, they had been the best of friends with the French before 1707 and the Union did not in itself kill off that Auld Alliance.

In the 18th century, David Hume and Adam Smith were just as happy in Paris as in London, probably more so. Now in the 19th century, Mill and Carlyle in their turn kept up with the literary developments on the other side of the Channel, and constantly discussed them. Only one other person in Britain had since 1815 ventured a fresh history of France and he was also a Scot, Archibald Alison, a sheriff in Glasgow.

Carlyle’s book was therefore filling a void in the market, and its destruction surely would have justified a furious reaction on his part. Yet when he encountered his friend, he became the soul of polite concern. Mill, beside himself with grief and self-recrimination, got from Carlyle a cup of tea. Mill offered to pay money by way of recompense, but Carlyle insisted he would simply start his book again.

Mill's nocturnal visit was a long one, which meant Carlyle and his wife Jane had to stay up late to comfort him. When at last he left, Carlyle’s first words to Jane were: “Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up. We must endeavour to hide from him how very serious this business is for us.”

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And so it was. They had no money. Carlyle doubted he could ever write that book a second time. He had destroyed his notes and, he believed, his memory with them: “I remember and can still remember less of it than of anything I ever wrote with such toil. It is gone.”

That night, however, he had a dream. His father and brother had been rough, tough men, bruisers from the Borders, yet now they rose from the grave and begged him not to abandon the work. The next morning, Carlyle told Mill he would take the money after all. He used it to buy paper, and at once started rewriting.

First, he did volumes two and three, then volume one. He wrote the entire manuscript from memory, in words that came “direct and flamingly from the heart”. The three volumes were completed and published in 1837. In nearly two centuries since, they have never been out of print. Carlyle kept the charred leaves in his study for the rest of his life.

We do not often think of the Scottish Enlightenment as a heroic enterprise, and most men featuring in these columns would probably have found that an alarming concept.

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But it looks as if it would have come easily to Carlyle and Mill. For them, intellectual activity had turned into a struggle. Its heights and depths struck them to the quick. But then, outside their own minds the cool classicism of earlier times had given way to a hectic era of progress that threatened at any moment to break down in chaos.

And the best place to think or write about this was the capital of the country where most of all it was happening: not Edinburgh, but London. To play their part in it, the Carlyles had had to move from Comely Bank to Chelsea – not without regret, but definitively, in 1834. Mill belonged to a second generation of exiled Scots intellectuals and became the pioneer of classical liberal economics.

Scotland grew too small for them – a defect they acknowledged but never tried to reverse. To these potential leaders of the nation, its importance had dwindled. That affected the whole of their old homeland as well.