Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage
Rosemary Ashton Chatto & Windus, 548pp, £25
ISBN 0701167092
Literary historians have been picking over the Carlyle marriage for upwards of a century. Although bulked out by all manner of new material, notably the forbidding (and continuing) collected edition of Carlyle's letters, Rosemary Ashton's study follows much the same scheme as Osbert Burdett's 70-year-old investigation, The Two Carlyles. Burdett, who diagnosed his male subject's afflictions as "clay in his blood, Calvinism in his head, and dyspepsia in his stomach", observed that the magnitude of the heroes whom Carlyle worshipped increased in direct proportion to his own fortune.
To read this entertaining, if occasionally rather diffuse, chronicle is to be made aware once again of what colossal egotists the Victorians were. And yet the constant self-absorption of those such as Charles Dickens, Walter Pater and Thomas Carlyle is redeemed by its complete naturalness. Carlyle believed that he was a great man. He behaved, consequently, in the way that he imagined a great man ought to behave. The sulks and the monomaniac loftiness were part of the price one paid for having him on the drawing-room carpet. Significantly, these attitudes were taken up by all the little Carlyles who danced around him. The letters of the Scottish literary critic George Gilfillan, a minor figure of the period in whom Carlyle detected a "gloomy grandeur" (in fact, a passable description of himself), have exactly the same rapt interior satisfaction, which at the same time is devoid of the self-consciousness one marks in Gilfillan's 20th-century equivalents.
Every phase of the Carlyles' 40-year union (1826-66) is fascinating: two ill-matched but oddly sympathetic personalities, alternately tearing each other in pieces, trampling on each others' sensitivities in figurative hobnail boots, but simultaneously providing the acutest summaries of each other's psychology and motivation. The five-year stint of their courtship, overshadowed by class (Jane's mother, Mrs Welsh, disdaining to receive Carlyle as a social equal) and jealousy (Jane's other suitors), is more fascinating still. Ashton detects a pattern of "mutual struggle, of progress and reversal, of shifting mastery and submission, of genuine fondness and sharp criticism . . ." With a self-awareness sometimes absent from other areas of his life, Carlyle noted that he tried to compensate for "laxity of feeling" with an intensity of description.
What was in effect a paper relationship - the couple scarcely met during their two-year engagement - finally crawled to the altar. Two years in Edinburgh, with Carlyle trying to establish himself as a German-specialising literary journalist, were followed by an extraordinary sequestration in the Dumfriesshire wilderness of Craigenputtoch. Here Tom rode, worked and felt sorry for himself, while his wife wrote gallantly bogus letters to confidential friends in which a knock at the door becomes the week's event.
Jane's most amusing letters are those about the fatuities of contemporary literary society. At one point, she informed Mrs John Stuart Mill that her husband had spent the morning painting. A portrait, Mrs Mill wondered? No, Jane retorted, a cupboard. In the meantime, Carlyle's attempts to cow an unresponsive public into accepting his genius were taking him into middle age. Sartor Resartus, for which no publisher could at first be found, had to be brought out in Fraser's Magazine, an early-Victorian equivalent of Private Eye.
Bulwer. Thackeray. Dickens. This was the great era of failed literary marriages, whether foundering on desertion or insanity. Somehow, unconsummated or not (Ashton is suitably unsensational on this controversy), the Carlyles' union kept up, despite the sulks, self-pity and passing infatuations. Jane's last letters, written from Sussex shortly before her death ("Oh, my husband! I am suffering torments . . . Oh, I would like you beside me. I am terribly alone"), hint at unimaginable inner horrors.
Diligently researched and scrupulously fair to its chief protagonists, Portrait of a Marriage falters only in the extent of its superfluous detail. To take only one example of Professor Ashton's inability to know where to stop, Carlyle's stomach troubles. They are an interesting subject, but one could have done without the lavish accounts of Coleridge's gastric upsets hauled in for purposes of comparison. Elsewhere, Ashton provides the usual salutary glimpses - so easy to miss at the smart end of biography - of what Victorian life was actually like: the Carlyles' demure maid giving birth to an illegitimate child a few feet from the room in which the author of The French Revolution sat taking tea with his bluestocking friend, Miss Jewsbury.
In another age, Jane might have written a novel, taken a degree, done all kinds of challenging things. You emerge from Ashton's book regretting a powerful natural talent gone to ground in letter-writing. You wonder, too, whether future literary generations will not, in the end, value her more highly than her storm-crossed husband. We shall see.
D J Taylor is writing a centenary biography of George Orwell
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