In The Victorian Eighteenth Century Brian Young noted that although Thomas Carlyle was ‘the pre-eminent Victorian sage’, he ‘was not himself a Victorian, but a product of the closing years of the Scottish Enlightenment and of the international atmosphere of late Romanticism’. The eighteenth century, Young insisted, ‘was the age with which [Carlyle] was most determinedly engaged with in his writings’. This balanced appraisal challenges enduring depictions of Carlyle as an anti-Enlightenment figure dismissive of eighteenth-century thought.

One of the first literary portrayals of Carlyle in terms of his estrangement from the Scottish Enlightenment comes from his early biographer James Anthony Froude (1818–94). Lionising Carlyle in imagery drawn from the Gospels and presenting him as a new spiritual leader and reformer, Froude deliberately positioned Carlyle at a remove from what he perceived to be the despiritualised and predominantly secular discourse of the eighteenth-century Scottish intelligentsia. Froude's reading of The French Revolution: A History (1837) depicts Carlyle as a disgruntled auld licht Calvinist preacher, disgusted with wealth, progress and improvement. Froude saw Carlyle, who admonished France for its recalcitrant Catholicism, as a mouthpiece for the millenarian and bitterly sectarian preaching of Edward Irving (1792–1834):

offered light at the Reformation, she would not have it, and it had returned upon her as lightning … She had preferred to live for pleasure and intellectual enlightenment, with a sham for a religion, which she maintained and herself disbelieved. Elsewhere, however, Froude implicitly celebrates some of the main post-Enlightenment ideas in Carlyle's writing. In ‘History: Its Use and Meaning’ (1852), an article which ostensibly responds to Carlyle's Past and Present (1843), Froude catches the gist of Carlyle's meta-historiographical critique of the limits of human understanding and the need for breadth of sympathy in historical interpretation: