Past and Present (Summarized Edition)

Past and Present (1843) juxtaposes Jocelin of Brakelond's chronicle of Abbot Samson at St Edmundsbury with the factories and poorhouses of industrial Britain. This genre-bending history-sermon indicts laissez-faire 'Cash Nexus' and Benthamite enumeration, railing at idle aristocracy while urging morally answerable 'Captains of Industry.' In Biblical cadences and satiric apostrophes, Carlyle uses m...