BOOKS

Marriage and division

Simon Heifer

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF THOMAS AND JANE WELSH CARLYLE: VOLUME 19 (January-December 1845, pp. 263) VOLUME 20 (October 1845-July 1846, pp. 262) VOLUME 21 (August 1846-June 1847, pp. 279) edited by Claude de L. Ryals and Kenneth J. Fielding Duke University Press, £42.75 per volume In January 1845 Thomas Carlyle was a month past his 49th birthday and had lived with his wife, Jane, in Chelsea for just over ten years. His celebrity was becoming immense, though this scarcely contented him — except in terms of the financial ben- efits — and it was a misery to his wife.

When I married Carlyle [Jane wrote to her friend Susan Stirling in October 1846] I was content with feeling perfectly sure myself that he was a man of genius and never trou- bled my head with wishing that the world would recognize it along with me. And now that the world has recognized it, I often think that its recognition has been of small service either to him or me.

The massive project to collect and pub- lish all of the Carlyles' letters now runs to 21 volumes, the first of which were pub- lished in 1970. One has to be young to be confident of living long enough to see the end (Carlyle lived until 1881 but, thankful- ly, wrote very rarely in the last decade of his life because of a disabled hand; Jane died in 1866). As with the previous volumes, the scholarship, research and presentation are faultless. The letters are fully annotated, with short biographies given not just of correspondents, but of people mentioned in the letters. The texts have been accumulated from earlier collec- tions and other books, and from private collections, most particularly that of the National Library of Scotland.

Just under half of the 572 letters present- ed here have never previously been pub- lished, making these volumes indispensable to any student of Carlyle. So powerful were the Carlyles' skills of letter-writing that they still evoke, clearly, a part of everyday life in Victorian England better than any history could; and lace it with gossip and human trivia that give the casual reader or the serious student of Carlyle a truly three- dimensional picture of his and Jane's life. It is not necessary to have read any of the previous 18 volumes to enjoy these; but so involved is the reader of these likely to become with the high-class soap-opera of Tom and Jane's life that consumption of these books will probably necessitate the exploration of earlier volumes.

The two-and-half years covered by these volumes were miserable ones in the Car- lyles' difficult marriage. Jane was eclipsed in what she called 'the valley of the shadow of Oliver' as Carlyle toiled on his edition of Cromwell's letters and speeches. She was 44 in 1845, and enduring an excruciating menopause. Not only did Carlyle have little time for her, but he was also falling under the spell of Lady Harriet Baring, shortly to become Lady Ashburton. Jane may have been certain of her husband's genius but she was less sure of his marital fidelity. This was curious, because there is no evidence that the Carlyles' marriage was ever consummated, and it is thought he was impotent. Frank Harris, the most unreliable of witnesses, alleged that Carlyle (whimpering in the pouring rain in Hyde Park in 1876, on the spot where Jane had dropped dead in her carriage a decade earlier) said he had never had sexual relations with her. Froude, in his tortured apologia, My Relations with Carlyle, observes with all the indelicacy he could muster that Jane's confidante Geraldine Jewsbury told him that Carlyle had not been a proper husband to Jane. But Geral- dine, too, was not the most reliable of witnesses.

After the publication of Oliver in Decem- ber 1845, Carlyle (whose working methods were haphazard, and are brilliantly depict- ed in some of the frantic letters to anti- quarians contained in these volumes) was alarmed to receive floods of correspon- dence from readers drawing his attention

'Old Macdonald had a farm.'

to important primary documents that he had missed. By early 1846 Jane found she was back in the valley of Oliver's shadow, as Carlyle sought desperately to obtain copies of the missing letters so that a supplement to Oliver could be brought out as quickly as possible. The work had had excellent reviews and sold all 1,200 copies of its print run within weeks, so Carlyle was anxious to make it complete as soon as he could. Jane, whose physical health was poor, began to feel psychologically troubled by the contin- ued neglect from her husband. The con- stant pressures on her to socialise with Lady Harriet, so that Lady Harriet could decently meet Carlyle, unhinged her to the point where, to use a non-19th-century phrase, she had a nervous breakdown.

Jane and Carlyle, in the hot summer of 1846, had a ferocious argument as she left to go north to recuperate from her break- down with some friends in Liverpool. Their correspondence in the month they were apart, before Carlyle had finished his revisions of Oliver and could join her, shows the extent of her instability and tantrums, and the extent of his slowly dawning guilt. He wrote to Jane once she had fled north:

Thy great unwearied goodness and true ever- watchful affection, mixed as it is with human infirmity, — 0 my Dearest, woe to me forever, if I could forget it, or be in any way unjust to it.

When she did not write he wrote that he hoped it was

only displeasure or embarrassed estrange- ment from me and not any accident or illness of your own, that robs me of a Note this morning. I will not torment myself with that new uneasiness ...

He confessed that their breach had left him in a humour, 'the saddest I think I have been in for ten years and more'.

Carlyle eventually joined her for ten days, in which they had an uneasy truce, and after which a still wretched Jane went to Manchester to see Geraldine. Geraldine, by long-standing agreement, destroyed almost all of Jane's letters to her at Jane's death. Sadly, the collected surviving letters of the period do not provide any evidence of one supposition for Jane's psychological improvement after her visit to Manchester; that she at last, after 20 years of physically fruitless marriage, found someone Geraldine — in whom she could confide, and that this helped improve her spirits. If Geraldine is to be believed, Jane certainly told her all at some point, and this may well have been it.

We see occasional glimpses, notably in letters to Varnhagen von Ense about Fred- erick the Great, of Carlyle's vigorous anti- democratic beliefs. Future volumes will, no doubt, show this entertaining but not always pleasant side of his character devel- oping. We see him arguing with publishers about copyright, swapping tales with Browning and FitzGerald about Tennyson and Dickens, but above all is catalogued the development of his intimacy with Lady Harriet. By the third of these new volumes he is writing to her as '0 my beneficent' and '0 schOnste, Beste', adddressing her in the language he had encouraged her to learn — as he had encouraged his wife to learn it a quarter-century before. But rarely does he demonstrate such affection for Jane as he shows for Lady Harriet, not only writing to her frequently in a gushing, sim- pering tone, but having friends hunt for books for her that he may give her as pre- sents; there is no evidence in these pages of such solicitousness on behalf of his own wife.

Yet this is the middle-aged man whose mother sends him hams and butter, who makes sure to eat regular quantities of the Annandale porridge sent down to him by his family, and whose letters to his wife seem inevitably to return to the subject of recurring insomnia and missing items of laundry. It is that rather humble, private figure who emerges from these letters, not the demagogue of the Latter Day Pamphlets or the 'moral desperado' that Matthew Arnold, writing in 1849, denounced to Arthur Hugh Clough. Carlyle has become one of the great unread of the 19th century partly because his style is too original, part- ly because the subjects on which he wrote are now unfashionable, but largely because the myth made about him is one of deep personal unpleasantness. It is far from the truth, and one of the prime functions of these letters is to remind us so forcibly of his weaknesses and his humanity.

Simon Heffer's biography of Thomas Carlyle will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1995.