John Adamson at Literary Review:
Ever since Thomas Carlyle first launched his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell on the world in 1845, the Lord Protector’s published words have exercised an almost mesmeric hold on posterity. Overnight, they transformed a figure who had hitherto been a byword for villainy – was he not the killer of King Charles I? – into a hero for the new Victorian age: a God-fearing, class-transcending champion of ‘russet-coated captains’ who became Britain’s first non-royal head of state. His words resonated with a newly politically ascendant and morally earnest middle class. And in Hamo Thornycroft’s vast sculpture installed outside Westminster Hall in 1899, the Carlylean transformation of Oliver begun by the Letters and Speeches found its embodiment in bronze.
Cromwell’s letters and speeches have long beguiled and frustrated the great man’s biographers. Most concur that they hold the key to the inwardness of this most inscrutable and turbulent of souls, even if, so far, that key has never quite turned in the lock. Ever more scholarly editions of his collected writings have followed.
more here.
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