Kingsley, attempted with varying effect, to persuade the reading public to look for ways of reducing the gap between the "two nations". Carlyle contributed to the awakening of social conscience among the reading public and understood the social and political importance of literature. He attacked the growing materialism of Victorian society and its laissez-faire doctrine. In his attacks on the wealthy, Carlyle anticipated some of the ideas of the condition-of England novels. He also inspired social reformers, such as John Ruskin and William Morris. "Signs of the Times" and the Condition-of-England question In June 1829, the Edinburgh Review published Carlyle's "Signs of the Times", in which he anticipates the Condition-of-England Question he raised a decade later in Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843). G. B. Tennyson notes: "Carlyle more than any man before him perceived the changes being wrought by the Industrial Revolution." He criticised the ethos of the Industrial Revolution, which, he believed, was destroying human individuality. He expressed his distrust of the spirit of the "mechanical age", which was manifested not only in the technical progress of English society but also in an overwhelming feeling of lack of mental or spiritual vigour and enthusiasm: "The King has virtually abdicated; the Church is a widow, without jointure; public principle is gone; private honesty is going; society, in short, is in fact falling to pieces; and a time of unmixed evil is come on us." The essay was aimed to draw the attention of the reading public to the spiritual price of social change, caused particularly by the frenetic industrialisation. In "Signs of the Times", Carlyle warned that the Industrial Revolution was turning people into mechanical automatons devoid of individuality and spirituality. For Carlyle, machine and mechanisation had double meaning: they meant literally new technical devices, but also metaphorically mechanistic thought that suppresses human freedom. Carlyle strongly criticised the mechanisation of the human spirit and indicated the high moral costs of industrial change. In this sermon-like essay, Carlyle led a crusade against scientific materialism, Utilitarianism and the laissez-faire system. He believed that the freedom of the emerging mechanical society in England was a delusion because it made workers into greater slaves than their ancient counterparts had been and because mechanization of society threatened the human ability to think and act creatively. In "Signs of the Times", Carlyle tried to reshape public opinion about the present Condition of England, which