For Carlyle the contrary of history is not fiction but oblivion, the unraveling of the collective human memory that holds civilization together. History is not a record of civilization; it is civilization itself, the past speaking to the present and to the future through the voice of the historian. Without that animating voice, we would have neither history nor elegy – only gibberish and unmarked graves.

History and the human voice, life and speech, are virtually one in Carlyle's mind. His moving reminiscence of his stonemason father, begun while the body still lay above ground and finished just after it was laid in the grave – an elegy so spontaneous as to be the diary of the mourner as well as a portrait of the dead – is above all a tribute to James Carlyle's powers of speech. ‘Never shall we again hear such speech as that was,’ Carlyle writes, the purest ‘of all the dialects I have ever listened to,’ a ‘full white sunlight.’

James Carlyle died in 1832; three years later, on the occasion of another loss that Carlyle took at least as hard, his father returned to him in a dream. Carlyle had gone to sleep late on the night of 6 March, 1835, after John Stuart Mill, pale and shaken, had told him that the entire first volume of The French Revolution, which Mill had been reading in manuscript, had been inadvertently burnt.