The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle ed. by Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, David Sorensen

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyleed. by Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, David Sorensen David Paroissien Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, David Sorensen, eds. Duke-EdinburghEdition. Vol. 46. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2018. Pp. xxxix + 262. $30.00. ISBN. 978-1-4780-0349-6 Few descriptions of Carlyle later in life rival one by Charles Eliot Norton. Visiting him at home in Chelsea on 22 March 1869, the American author and journalist noted nothing about the seventy-four year old Carlyle to suggest "the feebleness of age." To the contrary, he saw someone who seemed "younger than his years," oddly dressed, perhaps, wearing a gray woolen wrapper rather like a long dressing gown, which reached to feet, "cased in slippers." But no one could see him, Norton concluded, "without being impressed by the massive shape and strong lines of his countenance and the force and brilliancy of his deep-set eyes." Carlyle received his American guest, we learn, "quietly and pleasantly, with a certain air of shyness," Norton fancied (qtd. 34n.). So much for Carlyle welcoming visitors to number 5 Cheyne Row. Evidently the Sage of Chelsea, considered "merely eccentric and wayward" to many of his fellow countrymen, retained the power accorded him across the Atlantic. It was America, John Tyndall noted in his "Personal Recollections," which had opened to Carlyle "her mind, her heart, her purse" (qtd. 34n.). The 126 letters written between January 1869 and April 1870 offer different impressions of Carlyle at this stage of his life, a widower of four years still deeply upset at the loss of Jane Welsh Carlyle in April 1866. Focus on the project to which he had committed himself of collecting and editing his wife's correspondence provided solace with a double edge. To get on with a task he viewed as "sacred" in the hope of seeing "the whole of those dear letterslying legible to good eyes (with the needful commentaries &c)" was indeed work worth doing (journal qtd. p. 64). At the same time, it was very much a "sad Task" unquestionably associated with a sense of end things, of a greater need to set "my poor house in order; wh hI wdfain finish in time, and occasionally fear I shan't" (10). Two other projects required sustained attention: (1) the compilation of materials related to Carlyle's Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches(2 vols. 1845) and his biography of Frederick the Great(6 vols. 1858–65) for a bequest to Harvard University and (2) preparation of his Collected Worksfor publication by Chapman and Hall. Commenting on his circumstances to Edward Fitzgerald at the end of October 1869, Carlyle explained that with the printing of "a 'Library Edition,' […] of my poor books," he was in regular receipt from the publishers of five or six proof-sheets to which he was bound to read. "This is pretty much my one prescribedemployment, but I have enough of othersvery much more interesting to me." Of these, [End Page 188]Carlyle noted "some pleasant conversation" now and then, and reading. In answer to Fitzgerald's confession that having tried three times and failed three times with Browning's Ring and The Book(12 bks., Nov.1868–Feb. 69), Carlyle confided that he had read it at Browning's insistence and found it "full of talent, of energy, and effort, but totally without backbone or vein of common-sense." In short, "among the absurdest books ever written by a gifted man." Far better the recently published Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, with a Selection from his Letters and a Memoir(2 vols. 1869). "Let me recommend that to you; I knew Clough, and loved him well" (101). For social life Carlyle had trusted resources. Chief of these was John Forster, both visiting and issuing invitations. Through Forster, Carlyle maintained contact with Dickens, receiving news of his reading tour in the United States and also learning more of the same from the novelist himself. "He talked to me ab tAmerica as a wonderer, by no means as a lover," Carlyle commented to his brother John Aitken Carlyle on...