Like the story of the South Sea Bubble, Carlyle’s description of economics as ‘the dismal science’ is deployed with obvious relish by journalists and celebrity economists in times of economic turbulence. Carlyle coined that term in his 1849 essay ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’, a near-hysterical denunciation of the humanity of black people which became an influential assault upon British anti-slavery politics. The phrase is often reused without remembering the essay from which it came.
