Where the Past Meets the Present and Where it does Not: Carlyle, Racism and Virtue Signalling

Was he really using his fictionalized narrator to mask (thinly) his pro-slavery, ‘racist’ sentiments or was it a device to expose what, in his opinion, were hollow public displays of outrage at social injustice and misplaced philanthropy – what nowadays we might call ‘virtue signalling’ or gesture politics?

Quinlan Mann