The Manuscript That Burned

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

By early 1835 Carlyle had a complete first volume of his history of the French Revolution, and lent the only copy to John Stuart Mill for comment. What happened next has become one of the standard cautionary stories of literary history. A maid in Mill's own household, finding loose pages of a manuscript with no obvious purpose, used them to light a fire, apparently mistaking the sheets for waste paper. Mill came to Carlyle's house in person to confess what had happened. Carlyle later described sitting up with his wife Jane past midnight after hearing the news, and being struck less by anger than by a strange, exhausted calm, comparing the loss to a servant told his master's house has burned down, resolving simply that the thing had to be endured. He had almost no notes to fall back on and rewrote the entire volume from memory over the following months, a fact his own later editors and biographers have treated as proof of the almost total command he had over his own material even before it reached the page. The finished three volume French Revolution appeared in 1837 to real acclaim, including praise from Mill himself, who never fully forgave himself for the loss and is said to have offered to cover Carlyle's living expenses while he rewrote it, an offer Carlyle accepted only in part. The rewritten volume, not the lost original, is the version every reader has known since.