The parallelism is so obvious and so close as to leave no room for doubt that the story of Teufelsdroeckh is substantially a piece of spiritual autobiography.
This admitted, the question arises whether Carlyle had any purpose, beyond that of self-expression, in thus utilising his own experiences for the human setting of his philosophy.

It seems evident that he had.
As he conceived them, these experiences possessed far more than a merely personal interest and meaning.

He wrote of himself because he saw in himself a type of his restless and much-troubled epoch; because he knew that in a broad sense his history was the history of thousands of other young men in the generation to which he belonged.

The age which followed upon the vast upheaval of the Revolution was one of widespread turmoil and perplexity.

Men felt themselves to be wandering aimlessly "between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." The old order had collapsed in shapeless ruin; but the promised Utopia had not been realised to take its place.