Download Thomas & Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage epub

Very well written and researched,this dual biography skilfully combines anaccount of Carlyle's ideas and his influence on his time with a picture of his 'wifkin' and their marriage. This was a partnership of two difficult people who needed but harmed as much as they helped each other.
Because of the time when they lived, Jane's talents were confined to writing wonderful letters and managing to run a household on not much money. It would be easy to see Thomas with his dyspeptic moods and general obstinacy as the villain of the piece,but this Ashton refuses to do. She reveals Jane's tendency to play the victim, and her sharp-tongued condemnation of those who did not appreciate her, as fully as she presents Thomas's selfishness and insensitivity--and she uses the portrait to give us lively details about life at the time when the Carlyles lived.
A nineteenth century ' Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

The marriage between the Carlyles was a complicated one. Jane Carlyle was very much a person in her own right, and her witty and often mocking letters suggest that she could have been an author herself. Visitors to their house in Chelsea were as charmed by her as they were impressed by her husband. There seems to have been little sexual attraction between them, and it has been suggested that their marriage was never consummated. They were often apart, Carlyle escaping the summer heat in London, and Jane, too, often travelling on her own.

She was proud of Carlyle's achievements, but resented the patronizing nature of his affection for her. The most fulfilment she found was in her friendship with foreign exiles, notably with Mazzini. Carlyle's besotted and extravagantly expressed admiration from the 1840s onwards for Lady Harriet Baring/Ashburton (much idolized also by many other Victorian worthies) put an enormous strain on Jane, though she frequently accepted Lady Harriet's hospitality not only together with her husband but even sometimes on her own. Her letters to her friends became more and more desperate and bitter about her husband, and for the last ten years of her life she also poured out her bitterness and resentment in a journal which a repentant Carlyle found after her death.

He had always been a difficult husband - frequently gloomy, bad-tempered and literally dyspeptic. He cavilled when his economical wife asked for more house-keeping money to meet rising costs. He dismissed concern for the role of women in society as `George Sandism'. Perhaps by way of assuaging his guilt, he would join in the laughter at Jane's public mocking descriptions his crotchetiness and his fits of temper; and he seems never to have written to or about her with the bitterness that she expressed about him. Until very nearly the end of her life, he seems to have been obtusely unaware of just how much she suffered. She was afflicted by a multitude of indispositions some of which may have been caused by the tensions she experienced in her life, and for which she took large doses of Victorian medication. There are occasional references to Carlyle's own mental torments, but that subject is not adequately explored.

Otherwise Rosemary Ashton leaves very little out, trivia included, and the book is rather swamped in exhaustively researched but often indigestible details about the couple's meetings with famous (and many not at all famous) people. In their prolific letters both Carlyle and Jane regularly give descriptions, often sarcastic, of the physical appearance and mannerisms of those they met; but for all that, relatively few of them truly come to life.

The book is far more than the `Portrait of a Marriage' of its subtitle. Not having read any biographies of Carlyle before this one, I would like to add something about the other aspects of his life that have interested me.

Carlyle's fame started late. There were a handful of people apart from Jane who early on appreciated his genius; but that was based on his conversation and on the reviews with which he eked out a penurious living for so many years. The subject of many of his reviews - his admiration of transcendental German thought and literature - was not initially something that would make him famous at home; but it was appreciated abroad, by no less a person than Goethe. Carlyle wrote a life of Schiller, who had been Goethe's friend. Goethe translated it into German, while Carlyle in turn published a translation of Goethe's `Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship'.

Carlyle's philosophical stance was unique: a critic of the Enlightenment and Utilitarianism for their materialism, he was at the same time critical of the pretensions of the ruling classes in Church and State. He sided with neither Reform nor Reaction, but thundered in his idiosyncratic declamatory style against both. He eventually made his breakthrough in 1837 with his dramatic history of the French Revolution, when he was 41; after which people began to read his `Sartor Resartus' (The Tailor Retailored), which, having been serialized in a magazine, was published in book form in 1838. In this book Carlyle's alter ego, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, among other things strips off the pompous clothing of his characters to show what, if anything, lies underneath.

His strong sense of justice gave him a genuine sympathy for the poor. This comes out most powerfully in `Past and Present' (1843), a `condition of England' story which became the precursor of many Victorian novels and of Engels' `Condition of the Working Class in England'. Carlyle believed that England could not look for remedies to the `National Palaver' (Parliament), but needed a strong leader. He had already lectured favourably on `Heroes and Hero-Worship' (published 1842), and would write books on heroes he admired: Oliver Cromwell (1845) and a six-volume life of Frederick the Great (1857 to 1865). In the middle of the Crimean War, he wrote that he preferred even Tsarist autocracy and `Grand-Turkism' to representative democracy.

Though still revered by many, Carlyle's high standing began to wane in the late 1840s as others became tired not only of his vehement style but also of the intemperate and unpleasant nature of his attacks on, for example: the Irish (much as he sympathized with their suffering during the Famine); the emancipated blacks and the concern of `rosepink Sentimentalism' for their continued oppression; the Americans (despite that fact that, thanks to the advocacy of Emerson, `Sartor Resartus' had been a success in America before it became famous in England); prisoners being `coddled' in newly built model-prisons; as well as his usual targets of parliamentary government, laissez-faire, Utilitarianism and the `Pig Philosophy' of organized Christianity.

Jane died suddenly in 1866. She had recovered from a severe illness in 1863/4; Carlyle at last showed her more affection and she felt more for him. After her death Carlyle wrote only one more work: a collection of her letters and his reminiscences of her. He left these to be published after his death (in 1881) to his biographer, J.A.Froude.

As I expected from Ashton (having read her admirable biographies of George Eliot and G.H. Lewes), this is an excellent biography, thorough and well-researched. Ashton is sympathetic to both Carlyles, who had a famously unhappy marriage, yet objective, never taking sides; she understands Carlyle's tortured genius and neglect of his wife as well as Jane's self-pity and repressed talents and observantly shows how their difficult personalities interacted with each other as well as with their friends and family.