Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire in 1795 and died in London in 1881 — the “sage of Chelsea,” author of Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution and Past and Present. He spent much of his career attacking the political economy of his day, and in 1849 handed it the nickname it has never shaken: the dismal science. Past and Present (1843) reaches for the hyphenated phrase “supply-and-demand” seventeen times — which is exactly why a parrot joke about that phrase drifted onto him half a century after his death, even though he never told it.