What personal struggles did Thomas Carlyle experience in his early twenties?

In his early twenties, Thomas Carlyle faced significant personal and professional instability. After abandoning a teaching career that did not suit him, he returned to the University of Edinburgh in 1819 to study law, a period he described as three miserable years marked by loneliness and isolation.1

During this time, Carlyle grappled with profound spiritual struggles, ultimately abandoning his father’s original plan for him to enter the ministry. He lived a nomadic life, struggling with poverty while working in various brief tutoring positions and journalism. These years were defined by a lack of certainty regarding the meaning of life and a "tortured and defiant spirit," which he later explored in a fictionalized account of a spiritual conversion in his work Sartor Resartus. This period of intense internal conflict and professional uncertainty was a formative, albeit difficult, chapter in his early life.1