London's gloomiest couple
Simon Hefter
THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF THOMAS AND JANE CARLYLE, VOLUMES 29 AND 30 edited by Ian Campbell and others Duke University Press, 905 West Main Street, Suite 18B, Durham, NC 27701, Vol 29, $30, pp. 320, ISBN 0822365014; Vol 30, $30, pp. 306, ISBN 15320928 The project of publishing the complete letters of Thomas and Jane Carlyle has been running now for over 40 years, with the first volume published in 1970. These two volumes take the total to 30, and we still have a decade of Jane's life and a quartercentury of the Sage's to cover. In 1854-55 Carlyle was deep in what he called the valley of the shadow of Frederick' as he ploughed through the researching and
writing of his monumental Frederick the Great. His wife was suffering accordingly. Although only a small proportion of each volume contains her letters, Volume 30 is half devoted to her miscellaneous writings. Her journal from 1845 to 1852 is included, as is a journal from the period contemporaneous with these letters. They reveal her loneliness, sense of neglect, reliance on other friends, and above all anger at Carlyle's close friendship with Harriet, Lady Ashburton. We occasionally also see her profound sense of humour, without which she could never have survived, such as when she puts in a formal budget submission to Carlyle to increase her allowance by £29 a year.
All of that would seem to confirm the image of Carlyle as a monster and an appalling husband, selfish, self-obsessed, careless of his poor wife. That would be somewhat unfair. There are hardly any letters in these volumes between the two of them, but when Carlyle goes away to Suffolk in the summer of 1855 to stay with Edward Fitzgerald the correspondence between the spouses is affectionate, loving and reveals real mutual dependence. Similarly, the letters Carlyle writes to his family are inevitably warm and caring, and show him to have been properly beneficient and devoted. He would engage in supporting charitable acts for others on hard times, organising a petition for a state pension for an elderly and impoverished god-daughter of Dr Johnson's. He would write letters importuning friends and acquaintances to help those with even the loosest connection with him if they were in need. Though he would have shuddered at the label, he was a truly Christian soul.
Yet his incipient misanthropy was deepened by the isolation and intensity of the work on Frederick. He tells his brother John that 'a book. I find, is fairly better than most company one gets'. He had famously called the late 1840s a period of 'deep gloom and bottomless dubitation', but nothing has changed five or six years later. He complains to Ralph Waldo Emerson in April 1854 that 'there is no voice in this world which is completely human to me, which fully understands all I say, and with clear sympathy and sense answers to me', other than Emerson's own: a poor tribute to Jane. He is still, admittedly, much affected by the death of his mother the previous Christmas; but time and again one has the impression of Carlyle wallowing in his own misery, and digging himself in ever deeper when the opportunity arises.
The richness of these letters lies, of course, not in their status as a document of self-pity. The cast of characters that walks across the stage is irresistible: Dickens, Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning, William Forster, Monckton Manes, George Eliot and her lover G. H. Lewes (with whom Carlyle had great sympathy), as well as the aforementioned Fitzgerald and Emerson. Scrutinising the family portraits at Windsor for his life of Frederick, Carlyle is buttonholed by Prince Albert, and the two get on well. We have innumerable descriptions of London life at the time. In the winter of 1855 ice floes collide with each other on the Thames. A cholera epidemic terrorises Chelsea. And there is much note of the Crimean war, in which the Carlyles have friends fighting. and Jane worries frequently about the loss of soldiers' lives. In Jane's journal she notes, repeatedly, scenes of death and misfortune around London as she travels on her omnibus: another sign of her depression. 'No visitors today,' she writes at one point, 'no letters, no anything.'
We see, though, a couple being forced apart by obsessions. Carlyle is at the top of the house in Cheyne Row, often not speaking to Jane for hours on end, battling with 'this mother of dead dogs'. Jane is not merely depressed hut frequently ill, in bed for weeks on end with what she thinks is a cold but which modern medicine would doubtless brand as psychosomatic. Carlyle exhibits charm only usually when writing to Lady Ashburton, whom he habitually addresses as though she were Tudor royalty, his own private Gloriana: the sycophancy is quite revolting at times. Even she is not, though, immune to the Sage's self-pity: 'I am in a very low way,' he whines at her in January 1855, 'little but sorrowful humours, outlooks and retrospects present to me; and on the whole no remedy or help possible except sticking to my work.'
Once more, the editorial standards of these volumes are of the highest possible. A footnote putting Harwich in Suffolk in Vol 30 was the only error I spotted. The footnotes themselves are all apposite and highly informative, with cross-references wherever necessary. This project will be, if it is not already, the single most important work of scholarship in 19th-century English literature. As these two volumes demonstrate, the letters are not just important for what they tell us about these two brilliant people. They illuminate the whole of the highest literary circles of midVictorian England. At that time no writer, however much he or she professed to despise the occasional rantings of Carlyle, could deny that he exerted the strongest influence over them. The originality of his mind, and the exactitude and passion of his diction, made him the most compelling and exciting thinker and communicator of his era. Those characteristics are what make these letters so readable. irrespective of what else they tell us about the writer's life and times. As with all previous volumes of this magnificent work in progress, these two leave the reader waiting impatiently for the next instalment.
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