1795–1881 · Scottish essayist, historian & philosopher
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher whose writing shaped Victorian intellectual life — he was known in his later years as the sage of Chelsea. He is remembered for Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution: A History and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, not for astronomy. The stargazing remark that made him an accidental patron saint of SETI is not found among his published writings: it reaches us second-hand, surfacing in print in John Burroughs’s Accepting the Universe in 1920, thirty-nine years after Carlyle died in 1881.