Old Photograph Thomas Carlyle House Kirk Wynd Kirkcaldy Scotland

Old photograph of the Thomas Carlyle house in Kirk Wynd in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland. The celebrated Scottish essayist and Social historian was born at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire in 1795. He studied divinity at Edinburgh University but abandoned the clergy and left without a degree in 1814. He spent the next four years teaching mathematics. It was during this period that Carlyle was invited to be master of the Burgh school in Hill street, Kirkcaldy. Thomas Carlyle resided in the Kirk Wynd. Of Kirkcaldy Thomas Carlyle wrote: “ The Kirkcaldy population were a pleasant, honest kind of fellow mortals; something of quietly fruitful, of good old Scotch in their works and ways; more vernacular, peaceable, fixed, and almost genial in their mode of life than I had been used to in my Border homeland. I liked; those ancient little burghs and seaside villages, with their poor little havens, saltpans, and weather beaten breakwaters.Dissatisfied with teaching, Thomas Carlyle, returned to Edinburgh and briefly studied Law. He became a tutor and wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia and the Edinburgh Review. He married Jane Baillie Welsh, a writer, in 1826 and they set up a home on a farm in Craigen-puttock. In 1834 they moved to the Chelsea section of London, England, where Carlyle soon became known as the Sage of Chelsea. After the death of his wife in 1866 he edited her letters and prepared his Reminiscences, in which he revealed unfavourable traits in his character and his neglect of his wife, for which he could not forgive himself. He died in London on February the 5th, 1881.



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