ABSTRACT
In Reminiscences, Thomas Carlyle recalled his first sight of Edward Irving. It took place in 1808, at Annan Academy, where the older boy, Irving, had come on a visit to his former school. The 'wonderful world up yonder' was a world of teaching and learning. The schoolboy Carlyle heard little of what was said between Irving and his masters, but as an adult looking back he remembered both the excitement in the air and his own yearning after it. The excitements of teaching and learning had been working for Irving and they were failing Carlyle. Moving from teaching to preaching, the charisma so evident in his youth found a ready audience amongst religious enthusiasts and fashionable followers of 'genius'. He had gone from being a celebrity in the 1820s to a wreck in the 1830s, in Carlyle's view a victim of adulation and fanaticism working on culpable levels of self-love.
