“Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches” by Thomas Carlyle: history and biography

The article actualizes the interest in the legacy of T. Carlyle, whose works contain an attempt to present history in the form of a biography, which is a historically conditioned option for solving the modern problem of combining social and individual in the practice of historical research. “Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches” is defined as the only Carlyle’s work containing an identification of history and biography. The analysis of the "Historical Sketches" as a preparatory work for writing the history of the Puritan Rebellion makes it possible to under-stand T. Carlyle's refusal to write history in the form of an epic poem in favor of identifying history and biography. Three volumes of “Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches” are examined to identify specific techniques for identifying history and biography. It is concluded that a holistic description of the history of the Puritan Rebellion through the biography of Oliver Cromwell became possible thanks to the historian's use of his symbolic theory as an explanatory scheme, which took the form of a "heroistic theory" in the late 1830s.