thomas and jane: those absorbing tragicomedies

Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle….

It was a disastrous marriage- that is, at least, the conclusion we draw from the Carlyle’s letters. James Anthony Froude, a close friend and the authorof a four volume biography that appeared between 1882 and 1884, asserts that it was never consummated; and certainly Jane exhibited many of the traits of a disappointed and embittered woman whose emotional grievances found vent in a long succession of psychosomatic maladies. Yet was she quite so miserable as she often liked to pretend? Though she would speak of “the Valley of the Shadow of Marriage” and expiate at length upon her daily woes, both the Carlyles, we must remember, possessed a keen dramatic sense.

For them their checkered married life was an absorbing tragicomedy. Carlyle needed something to grumble about, apart from the current evils of society and the general turpitude of modern mankind; while Jane required a constant supply of subjects on which she could exercise her sharp edged wit. As a born novelist who had failed to write a book, she may have half enjoyed their misadventures. Her references to her remarkable husband are sometimes tartly disparaging, even downright acrimonious. Yet it is clear not only that she admired him, but that he had aroused in her a deep devotion, a feeling that soon transcended any youthful dreams of ordinary human happiness.

Both were proud, and both were lonely. During what Carlyle afterward called their “sore-life pilgrimage,” they becme inseparable fellow travelers. Jane, however, did not cease to fret against his atrabilious egotism- when she was angry, observed a critical acquaintance, she had ” a tongue like a cat’s, which would take the skin off at a touch”- and her husband was generally far too busy to give her the attention she demanded. Not until he had finally lost her, and had opened her private papers, did he bein to understand her secret sufferings.

Thus the long marriage of Jane and Thomas Carlyle was neither happy nor unhappy. Although its moments of desperate wretchedness probably outnumbered its occasional hours of sunshine, Jane’s earliest letters, in which she addresses Carlyle as her “Goody, Goody, dear Goody” and promises him- she is stayingat her mother’s house- “to make it all up to you in kisses” when she returns to Craigenputtock, are scarcely more affectionate in tone than the last she ever wrote. Written and posted on April 21, 1866, this letter is simply headed, “Dearest.”

It was that afternoon that she died in her coach, killed by a heart seizure….

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)… No one would have found it easy being married to Thomas Carlyle. Utterly absorbed in producing his wordy histories (Frederick the Great ran to six volumes), possibly impotent, and certainly obsessed with shit, he was as far from a loving Victorian paterfamilias as it was possible to be. But for Jane Welsh, the fellow Scot whom he married in 1821, it was doubly hard. Sharp as a tack, witty if not exactly merry, and with the natural sense of self-importance of a beloved only child, Jane found life with the gloomy, gusty Sage of Chelsea well-nigh impossible. She toyed with leaving and, during Carlyle’s infatuation with the really rather ordinary Lady Ashburton, even considered suicide. In a period that specialised in spectacularly unhappy celebrity marriages – the Ruskins, Dickenses and Thackerays – the Carlyles still managed to take the prize as the couple least likely to endure. That their union, unlike these others, ended in neither divorce nor madness says a lot for their need to stick together, hurting and being hurt, until the end came in 1866, with Jane’s death at 64.

Jane Carlyle has always come off better in the public-relations war that ensued from the moment that J A Froude started to publish his four-volume biography of Carlyle in 1882 and revealed that the marriage had been difficult. With her sense of fun, love of benign gossip and (one assumes) involuntary childlessness, she makes a sympathetic figure. Carlyle, with his windy rants against the modern world, his lack of interest in finding practical solutions to social problems, and his unfortunate record as one of the authors to whom Hitler turned at tricky moments, seems old-fashioned, and unpleasant with it. Then there

he beard, shaggy even by mid-Victorian standards, which only adds to the sense of a doomy Old Testament prophet determined that, if he wasn’t having fun, then no one else was going to either. Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/feb/09/biography.highereducation