Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), essayist, biographer, historian, philosopher, translator, literary and social critic, was one of the great intellectual forces of his period, indispensable to our understanding of Victorian Britain and the 19th century in general. Scholars from Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and the United States assembled at the Scottish Studies Centre of the University of Mainz in Germersheim for the International Thomas Carlyle Centenary Symposium 1981. Their papers, published in this volume, open up a new - European - dimension of Carlyle’s personality, work and thought. They offer evidence that the subject is not exhausted, quite the reverse, and that in many aspects Carlyle is as topical today as in his own time.