Calamity!

 This, believe it or not, is Thomas Carlyle, having a bit of a meltdown. As the caption explains, 'A dog knocked over the lamp on the table which held Carlyle's important papers on which he had worked for many years. His manuscript caught fire, turned to ash, and Carlyle became sick from depression. In the end, everything still turned out great.' 
  The picture is one of a series of prints produced by the Japanese Department of Education in the 1870s, when Japan was westernising and introducing its population to those crazy westerners and their wacky ways. Each of the prints shows a western innovator suffering some kind of setback, which would in due course be overcome by persistence and hard work, so that 'in the end, everything still turned out great'.  
 The question is: did a dog-related incident result in any of Carlyle's papers being burnt? The Carlyles certainly had a dog, called Nero, who appears in a famous portrait of the unhappy couple at home – A Chelsea Interior by Robert Scott Tait – but he bears no resemblance to the beast in the Japanese print:

And there is no record of Nero causing any fires. However, Carlyle did suffer a manuscript-burning catastrophe when he gave a first draft of his magnum opus The French Revolution to John Stuart Mill and a housemaid mistook it for waste paper and threw it on the fire. A hysterical Mill rushed to Carlyle's house to tell the terrible tale and witness the great man's reaction, which was volcanic. However, when the volcano had died down, Carlyle got down to work and rewrote the whole thing – and yes, in the end, everything still turned out great. 
  There is more on these remarkable educational prints on the wonderful Public Domain Review website.