ABSTRACT
Toward the middle of the century, the historian Thomas Carlyle popularized the highly romanticized portrait of the 'Puritan Revolution' that inspired Masson, Carlyle's great admirer and disciple. This type fell out of fashion after the Second World War, but in the meantime, Gardiner and Firth had imported many of Carlyle's assumptions into their seminal reconstruction of the revolutionary era from primary documents. Unlike Carlyle, most Victorian Nonconformists were social democrats, but this portrait strongly appealed to them because it glorified their ancestors and upheld their own ideal of the self-sacrificing citizen-warrior hero, the type later featured in Kipling's imperial romances. As Achinstein similarly shows, English men and women were spontaneously forced into a newly created public forum simply by exercising their right to petition across lines of religion, rank, or social class. Yet Carlyle's real contribution was to English mythology, not to history.
