In The French Revolution (1837) Carlyle dubbed Mammon “the basest of known Gods, even of known Devils.” But the most powerful indictment of Mammon came in Past and Present, Carlyle’s angriest polemic on the condition of England. Converted to “the Gospel of Mammonism,” England, Carlyle charged, had exchanged the beneficence of medieval Christianity for a “Mammon-Feudalism,” a “brutish empire of Mammon.” Both downtrodden workers and their heartless masters were “spell-bound” by a “horrid enchantment.”
