On Heroes is Carlyle’s most striking and influential work, the key statement of Great Man history. In some of the most dazzling English prose since Shakespeare, Carlyle shows how the hero appears as god, prophet, poet, priest, writer, and king, with vivid sketches of such great men as Muhammed, Luther, Napoleon, and others. Praised by Thoreau as bettering even Plutarch’s Lives, this book at a single stroke cuts down “trends and forces” histories such as Marx’s dialectical materialism. Carlyle’s hero is “a fiery mass of Life cast up from the great bosom of Nature herself. To kindle the world; the world’s Maker had ordered it so.”

Thomas Carlyle was one of the greatest writers in the English language and a titanic figure of the Victorian age, an arch-reactionary while also a forward thinking trailblazer.

In the Annotated Carlyle Series, the editors of Imperium Press present his major works with extensive commentary. Now, every word of his kaleidoscopic writing, all his obscure allusions and Carlylisms, are accessible even to the lay reader with comprehensive annotations.