The first apostle of this new racism was the critic and essayist Thomas Carlyle, a hugely influential figure in the mid-nineteenth century whose writings helped set the tenor of his times, influencing novelists as much as scholars and philosophers. In 1849, less than a decade after the World Anti-Slavery Convention and eleven years after emancipation in the West Indies, Carlyle published an essay in Fraser’s Magazine entitled ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’.
