Bugs, Mice, Cockroaches
The Carlyles at Home. By Thea Holme. (O.U.P., 35s.) MRS. THEA HoLme, wife of the Curator for the National Trust of 24 Cheyne Row, has written a modest but informative and entertaining account of the domestic life of the Carlyles. The scope of her book is apparent from the fact that, whereas she enumerates all the beds in the house, she differs from other biographers in making no speculations about what went on— or, more likely, did not go on—in them. The
result is that we learn a great deal about 30 like
superficial, everyday routine of the Carlyles, bu tot; hl are little nearer to understanding the springs of ncrete their persistent discontent.
Mrs. Holme is particularly good on the set' vants at No. 24—in thirty-two years, thirty-fo of them came and went. Each relationship be' tween them and their mistress was like short-lived love affair. At first the girl was irr variably a treasure, but within a matter 0t months or even weeks the treasure became $ burden and a nuisance. Some were dishonest, some unclean; one had an illegitimate baby ill the house, without the Carlyles being aware of its Helen Mitchell, to whom both Carlyles were long devoted, lapsed into dipsomania. Although Mrs. Carlyle treated the majority of these Oh with a benevolent, if stern, protectiveness, the conditions in which they worked and lived were by modern standards, disgraceful. Even the mosc sensitive of the Victorians had the ability to close their imaginations to the squalor and overwort, to which they doomed the creatures on whom their domestic ease depended : just as today.evec the most sensitive of us manage not • to thinr about animals—calves, battery-hens, broilers-4' without which our lives would be so much lei convenient.
Apart from maids, the chief domestic troubl of the Carlyles were bugs, mice and cockroache the noise of cocks, pianos and children; and--* most recalcitrant of all—constipation. They dos themselves incessantly, and it is a proof of th, fundamental strength of their constitutions th they did not die young from the ravages of mer,', cury, castor oil, senna and all the other purge; tives which Carlyle had even persuaded himsel were good for his nerves.
Apart from purgatives, Mrs. Carlyle dose', herself, like Mrs. Browning, with morphia a morphine. (Today both these respectable womC would be regarded as drug-addicts.) But it is obvious that the migraines, insomnia, bilioUS attacks, bouts of neuralgia, dizziness and so 0 were almost entirely psychosomatic in orig Mrs. Carlyle was a frustrated woman : frustrat certainly in finding no outlet for her outstandi intellect other than in her letters, her conversa tion and the trivial problems of daily life; fru trated probably in an unconsummated marriage' Mrs. Holme gives some excellent examples of tb transient exasperations and despairs which wera the symptoins of the enduring miseries of marriage in which both partners certainly lov each other, but in which, impelled by so demon of dissatisfaction, they persisted in appil! ing 'each to each the fatal knife.'
FRANCIS KITO
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