I Too Am Here

I have a valued friend who lives a long way away and doesn’t do email or social media. We phone, occasionally, but once or twice a year I’ll sit down, choose a pen, assemble paper, pour a glass of wine, and spend the evening writing her a letter. It feels at once deeply self-indulgent and extravagantly generous. I write about myself but I’m thinking of her, knowing she will be pleased at being chosen. Jane Welsh Carlyle, a woman Sir Leslie Stephen described as ‘the most wonderful letter-writer in the English language’, put it simply: she liked ‘writing to people who like to hear from me’.

Why they liked to hear from Mrs Carlyle is obvious the moment you open one of the many volumes of her correspondence – Collected Letters, Selected Letters, Early Letters, Love Letters, Letters to Her Family, Letters and Memorials – and become, in ghostly fashion, the person addressed. Being in her company is a treat. She’s witty and observant, and she tells great stories. She can make a joke out of anything, the more wretched the situation the better. Her marriage to Thomas Carlyle offered many opportunities to wring humour out of misery, and it was he who first edited her correspondence, assuaging his grief (and guilt) after she died in 1866 by sorting and annotating as many letters as he could collect. Thomas Carlyle handed his wife’s correspondence to his biography J. A. Froude, who edited Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, published in three volumes in 1883. They were a sensation. Admittedly some people were uncomfortable with the vigorous plain-speaking they found in the letters, though Froude had made many alterations to spare the tender susceptibilities of Victorian readers – where Jane wrote ‘bowels’ (which she did many times: bowels were a household preoccupation), Froude substituted ‘interior’. For all that, readers recognized that Froude, following Carlyle, had made available an invaluable record of literary life in London, with walk-on parts for other famous writers: Dickens, Thackeray, John Forster, Harriet Martineau, the Brownings, Tennyson, Geraldine Jewsbury. But mostly what readers enjoyed was the intimate portrait of a marriage. Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle were an unlikely couple. She, a doctor’s daughter, the local ‘belle’ in Haddington and an heiress after her father died, had many admirers. Her vivacious early letters are wildly satirical at their expense. Thomas Carlyle, a stonemason’s son from Ecclefechan, ‘a man of genius’ as yet unproved, had little beside his genius to recommend him. In person he was awkward, clumsy and, as Jane was to discover over a long marriage, atrabilious, dyspeptic and emotionally obtuse. But in his seriousness he reminded her of her father. She loved his conversation and his brilliant letters. They both dreamed of fame. At first they settled in a lonely farmhouse, Craigenputtock, where Thomas worked hard to build a career as a literary man and Jane kept house. Looking back years later she recalled the difficulties of living so far from ‘the conveniences of life’, where no capable servant would choose to be, and where she, ‘a capital Latin scholar and a very fair mathematician’ but ‘sublimely ignorant of every branch of useful knowledge’, had to learn to sew and cook. Husbands, it transpired, wore their stockings into holes, were forever losing buttons and needed bread. She knew nothing about fermentation and the heat of ovens when she set about bread-making. She found herself waiting hour upon hour for her dough to rise, ‘the only person not asleep, in a house in the middle of a desert’. It was the thought of Benvenuto Cellini, sitting up all night watching his cast of Perseus in the oven, that saved her. Cellini was an artist, and his energy and will, his patience and his talent were key, not the fact that he was making a statue and she a loaf. ‘If he had been a woman living at Craigen-puttock, with a dyspeptic husband, sixteen miles from a baker, and he a bad one, all these same qualities would have come out most fitting in a good loaf of bread!’ Similarly, all Jane’s qualities as an artist came out most fittingly in her letters. People, their oddities and foibles, were her study, and the letters are alive with pen portraits. She had a keen sense of the ridiculous, instinctively exploding nonsense and ‘can’t’ with laughter. Importantly, she is always in the picture. Her letters say: this hap­pened to me. I saw, heard, thought this. Imagine! And the brilliant mockery is often self-mockery, as when she reported her husband’s comment just as she was about to go to a Christmas party: ‘“My dear,” says Carlyle, “I think I never saw you look more bilious; your face is green and your eyes all blood-shot!” – fine comfort when one was about to make a public appearance!’ Her main subject, from first to last, though, was her husband. He was the main thing that had happened to her; it was through him that her life was determined. His career took them to London. She loved what she saw of the ‘omnibuses, carriages, glass coaches, waggons, carts, dogcarts, steeple bells, doorbells, gentlemen raps, twopenny post-raps, footmen- showers-of-raps, of the whole devil to pay, as if plague, pestilence, famine, battle, murder, sudden death . . . were broken loose,’ and looked back with some horror at the stillness and ‘sameness’ she had left behind. London even had ‘a beneficial effect’ on her bowels: ‘I am more and more persuaded that there is no complete misery in the world that does not emanate from the bowels.’ They became a celebrity couple and, though she might write ‘let no woman who values peace of soul ever dream of marrying an author!’ she relished the opportunities and was quickly acknowledged as a fascinating woman in her own right, ‘bewitching’ in her affections and vivacity and touching in her vulnerabilities. She had married a man whose words were worshipped, a colossus of Victorian culture who was lionized and encouraged to feel his own supreme impor­tance. (Or, as his wife put it: ‘in sober earnest, is it not curious that my husband’s writings should be only completely understood and adequately appreciated by women and mad people?’) Preaching that to be a writer was to have a calling, Carlyle worked with priestly intensity. Nothing was allowed to interfere with his mission. His demands, however changeable, were absolute. For her, it was ‘living the life of a weathercock in a high wind, blowing from all points at once’, making it hard to maintain her sense of self, what she called her ‘I-ety’: ‘I should like to see the individual vanity that could hold its own in the position of worser half to a “celebrated author”!’ But in fact she did hold her own. Others thought she secretly published novels. Reading Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley in 1849 she explained to her niece Jeannie: ‘You see, I get the credit with certain Critics in Style of writing these Jane Eyre books myself – and I was curious to know whether the new one was up to my reputation!’ She held her own by dramatizing her life in the character of Lion’s wife. Rosemary Ashton, in her fine double biography Thomas & Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage (2002), says Thomas took pride in Jane’s ‘witty way of avenging herself on his temper’. He would listen while she caricatured him, joining in the fun at his expense. She had licence to criticize, channelling her frustrations into biting humour, amusing friends and bewildering disciples. It was a double act, and, in Ashton’s view, Carlyle’s way of atoning. Ashton also makes it clear that the marriage became profoundly unhappy, especially after Thomas Carlyle developed an infatuation with Lady Harriet Ashburton. It is a little dispiriting to read about them as the years grind on and happiness recedes. (Samuel Butler quipped that it was good of God to let the Carlyles marry each other, because that way only two people were made miserable.) But that isn’t the effect of reading the letters. When she was writing to friends and family Jane took command of her world and her experience. Fired by the sense of personal connection, she created a habitable shared space on the page that is full of life. ‘I too am here,’ she wrote. Her significance was recognized by the editors of the Duke–Edinburgh Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, a project that was launched in the 1950s and was com­pleted with the publication of the fiftieth volume in 2022. It is fully digitized and freely available online. In the introduction to the open­ing volume, Charles Sanders pays homage to Froude for his editorial work (while rapping him over the knuckles for inaccuracies) and points out that the success of the original Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle did more than bring a ‘non-writing’ wife out of the shadows. Froude’s volumes elevated the genre and aided its critical acceptance: the letter as a literary form became established. Jane Welsh Carlyle’s sophisticated and dramatic artistry inspired others. There is an immediacy in a letter that can seem uncontrived or ‘artless’. In many ways that is its ambition. Female poets, novelists and progressive thinkers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot were part of the Carlyles’ social circle and Carlyle him­self implied that Jane was their equal and might do as they did. Thus he wrote to her in 1842:

My prayer is and has always been that you would rouse up the fine faculties that are yours into some course of real true work, which you felt to be worthy of them and you! . . . I will never give up the hope to see you adequately busy with your whole mind.

Nobody considered household management – the ‘earthquakes’ she would set in motion at Cheyne Row the moment Carlyle went off on a trip, painters, carpenters, paper-hangers and ‘two non-descript apprentice-lads’ rushing in at six in the morning, spreading themselves over the house, and commencing an ‘infernal noise of pumice-stone’ like ‘a hundred knife-grinders melted into one’ – to be the ‘real true work’ of a woman of her education. Nor did she. And the comic contrast fuelled her writing. She knew perfectly well that however sincerely Carlyle prayed, he was never going to defer to her needs as a writer as Robert Browning and G. H. Lewes deferred to their beloveds. Scribbling her letters to friends and family, she made an art of her role as a dutiful wife, a combination of ministering angel and martyr. In the recently re-opened and newly hung National Portrait Gallery, two portraits of Thomas Carlyle are on display, but I looked in vain for any portrait of Jane. The gallery owns many, including a stern profile by Samuel Lawrence. She doesn’t feature in the galleries of illustrious women nor among the Victorian writers. I found her, eventually, in the shop. You can buy a version of the Samuel Lawrence portrait as a roller blind. She would have had something wonderfully caustic to say about that.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Norma Clarke 2024