How much history from the nineteenth century do we still read as history, rather than as an exercise in understanding historiography? In their way, Motley’s Dutch Republic, Macaulay’s History of England, and Froude’s accounts of the reigns of the Tudors are thorough, artistically written, and informative, but in the century and half since they were published, research has been deeper, understanding more nuanced, and contexts broadened. Nobody would wish to base his or her understanding of these particular subjects on those texts alone.

Yet if the only book you were able to read on the events of the French Revolution was Thomas Carlyle’s breathtaking, expansive, and, in stylistic terms at least, revolutionary 1837 account of them, you would not be too gravely handicapped. Carlyle’s sources were exhaustive. He read every printed work he could find on the subject, every eyewitness account, every contemporary report that could be traced. His level of accuracy was remarkably high. If history is ultimately to be about truth—and it is not a bad aim if it is—then Carlyle hit the target. What his critics, at the time and since, did not like was the way in which he did so.

An extensive description and analysis of the quality of his sources is but one part of the critical apparatus contained in a stunning three-volume edition of Carlyle’s masterpiece, published by Oxford University Press and edited by Mark Cumming and David R. Sorensen; the text has been edited separately by Mark