Thomas Carlyle

My favorite reading selection from this author was The Irish Widow from Gospel of Mammonism. The passage is not only sad but is yet filled with Carlyle’s ridicule. This story depicts a poor Irish woman trying to get help from charitable establishments of the city she lived in. She fell extremely ill with typhus fever and no one reached out to help her. Although she claimed that she was their sister, they still will not help her. As a result, she died and seventeen others are infected with typhus and died as well. With her death came the realization that she was in fact human and just like them, despite her poor status.

I assume that in Carlyle's era, the Irish were treated very poorly and inhuman just like he expressed in this passage. From this work, he displayed how society looked down upon the poor class as unequal. I felt that Carlyle is able to direct this message at all of society then and now. Carlyle experienced leaders in England who abandoned the country to democracy and the laissez-faire coptialism (475). In the passage, he mentions how "all government of the Poor by the Rich has long ago been give over to Supply-and-demand, Laissez-faire.."(481). He chose to mimic this line from his own personal experience. Maybe there is some validity to this story. Maybe he feels that this story touches the society as a whole and that the widow in the story is actually the country of England.

From this passage, hopefully society as a whole will learn that whether their neighbor is rich or poor everyone is merely the same and made by the same flesh by God.