by Phyllis Rose
8. See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in the Erotic Life’ (‘Three Contributions to the Psychology of Love’), in Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, and Religion, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper & Row Torchbooks, 1958), 173–86. On Victorian sexuality, see also J. A. and Olive Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964); Fraser Harrison, The Dark Angel: Aspects of Victorian Sexuality (New York: Universe Books, 1977); Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 195–216; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London and New York: Longman, 1981).
9.See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). See also Lasch’s Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977), especially for its critique of the sociology of the family and its rediscovery of the anti-romantic studies of American courtship and marriage by Willard Waller, as in The Family: A Dynamic Interpretation (New York: The Dryden Press, 1938).
10.See Karl Scheibe, ‘In Defense of Lying: On the Moral Neutrality of Misrepresentation’, Berkshire Review 15 (1980): 15–24.
JANE WELSH
and
THOMAS CARLYLE
1821–1866
the carlyles’ courtship
Take the case of an heiress, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, who has lived some twenty years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. I borrow Jane Austen’s description of her most wilful heroine, Emma Woodhouse, in order to present another heiress, Jane Baillie Welsh, roughly her contemporary, living in the Scottish town of Haddington, and, like Emma, a young woman with rather too much the habit of having her own way.
Jane Welsh at eighteen seemed a fortunate being. She was the only child of prosperous parents who adored her. They were kindly people, between whom there was no discord, who lived comfortably but not ostentatiously, who were well respected in Haddington, a thriving county seat, some sixteen miles from Edinburgh. The Welshes indulged Jane, but she knew how far her power went with them. Unquestioning and absolute obedience to her parents, she said in later years, was the foundation of everything valuable in her character.
Jane particularly loved her father, a physician, and wanted to please him. Since what seemed to please him most were precocious displays of wit, that was what Jane laboured to produce. At the age of thirteen she wrote a novel. At fourteen she wrote a five-act tragedy which Dr Welsh admired so much that he sent it on to a friend. Words, clever words, written and spoken, were Jane’s way of winning her father’s approval, an approval she came to depend on. In 1819, when Jane was eighteen, Dr Welsh died suddenly. He contracted typhoid fever from a patient and was dead within four days. It was a devastating blow to Jane, who was left with no one to work for, no one to improve herself for. ‘I had no counselor that could direct me,’ she wrote, ‘no friend that understood me – the pole-star of my life was lost, and the world looked a dreary blank.’1
Her misery was profound, her consolations superficial; but there were consolations. Jane was attractive, with perky good looks and a liveliness of spirit which made her dark eyes sparkle and caused her to look even prettier than she was. Her light body, her small face with its pointed uptilting chin, her mocking eyes – everything about her suggested sprightliness and a buoyant confidence in her social worth. Her best friend in later life, Geraldine Jewsbury, was to say that Jane enjoyed flirtation. Thomas Carlyle vehemently denied it. No, Jane was simply a charming woman who liked to charm young men. She was witty, playful, irresistible. She was also moderately rich, for her father had passed most of his property on to her. No wonder so many men were attracted to her, and Jane enjoyed the attention, however much she liked to present herself as a Penelope, bothered by pesky suitors, kept by them from her serious business, the making of her web. For her, the life of the mind would always exist in tension with, resisting as it were, her social existence.
Like many other women raised in the Anglo-Saxon tradition until very recently, Jane assumed that the life of the mind was basically a male preserve. In her childhood, she wanted to study Latin, as boys did. Her parents would not allow it. Furtively, Jane consulted a local scholar and managed to teach herself the declension of a Latin noun, choosing – with unerring emphasis – the word penna. One night, when she was presumed to have gone to bed, she hid herself under a table in the drawing room and surprised her parents by reciting the purloined declension. ‘Penna, the pen; pennae, of the pen.’ In conclusion, she said, ‘I want to learn Latin; please let me be a boy.’2 Jane got her wish, at least to the extent that she was allowed to study Latin, but her pen envy did not diminish with the years. Until she decided to marry a writer, she wanted to be a writer herself, and from time to time it occurred to her that her courage and daring, her lively intelligence and ambition were wasted on a girl. She was fond of quoting an old woman of Haddington who said, after watching her skip along the mill-dam, that in Jane nature had ‘stickit a fine callant’, that is, thwarted a fine boy. A feminist consciousness flickers in Jane’s letters. But flickers merely. She saw the way that women were encouraged to waste themselves in social trivia, and she envied the cultural advantages of men, but she never realised that the barriers to achievement for women were internal as well as external. She would come to blame a lack of talent for her failure to achieve her goals, whereas the problem may have been a lack of confidence in her talent. Ignoring the difference between provincial Scotland and cosmopolitan France, between the middle class and the aristocracy, she took as her heroine and inspiration Madame de Staël.
If Jane was to turn herself into Madame de Staël, education was necessary – not such an education as a boy would get, but better than that given to most girls. The man whom Dr Welsh engaged to teach Latin to the ten-year-old Jane was Edward Irving, then nineteen and master at the Haddington school. He was fair-skinned, dark-haired and, except for a squint, very handsome, a man of some charisma. He spent two years in Haddington before moving in 1812 to another school in Kirkcaldy, where his appointment proved to be controversial. Some of the parents of his pupils disliked his methods. They broke away and hired a rival schoolmaster, recommended by the same professors in Edinburgh who had recommended Irving. This man was Thomas Carlyle, three years Irving’s junior and, like him, an Annandale lad. He had followed Irving’s educational path and arrived at the same place.
Irving chose to treat Carlyle not as a competitor but as a friend, a fellow countryman happily met in a town far from home. They discussed books; they went on walking trips together. It was from Irving, who was probably in love with her at the time, that Carlyle first heard of Jane Welsh and her father. Irving spoke of Dr Welsh as ‘one of the wisest, truest and most dignified of men’, and Jane as ‘a paragon of gifted young girls’. To Carlyle they became ‘objects of distant reverence and unattainable longing’.3 The seeds, it seems, had been planted before he ever met Jane, and it is not surprising that he fell in love with her immediately.
By May of 1821, Dr Welsh was dead, Irving was preaching in Glasgow and Carlyle, who was to say that it was better to perish than to continue schoolmastering, had abandoned the school at Kirkcaldy for a wretched but independent life in Edinburgh. He was studying law half-heartedly and writing reviews to make money. His only pleasure was reading Goethe. He was lonely. He couldn’t sleep. His health was poor. When Edward Irving came by on a visit and proposed a brief jaunt to Haddington, he agreed with pleasure. They walked out on a sunny afternoon and paid a call on Mrs Welsh and Jane. The ladies seemed sad, still conscious of their loss. Carlyle found Mrs Welsh beautiful but ‘not of an intellectual or specially distinguished physiognomy’. The drawing room, however, seemed to him the finest apartment he had ever been in, bearing the stamp of the late owner’s solid temper. ‘Clean, all of it, as spring wat
er; solid and correct’, although there was perhaps on the tables of the drawing room ‘a superfluity of elegant whim-whams’. He felt ‘as one walking transiently in upper spheres’, where he had ‘little right even to make transit’.4
That night, back in the room they had taken at the George Inn, Carlyle and Irving discussed young ladies, beginning with Augusta Sibbald, a tall and shapely person, but giggly and foolish.
‘What would you take to marry Miss Augusta now?’ Irving asked.
‘Not for an entire and perfect chrysolite the size of this terraqueous globe.’
‘And what would you take to marry Miss Jeannie?’
‘Hah, I should not be so hard to deal with there I should imagine.’
They stayed for three days, with daily visits to the Welshes. The two ladies were ‘very humane’ and listened benevolently while the young men talked, Jane managing to convey even while silent, as intelligent people can, a lively understanding of all shades of meaning. Upon returning to Edinburgh, Carlyle wrote to his brother, ‘I came back so full of joy, that I have done nothing since but dream of it.’5
He sent Jane a parcel of books and included a letter, a mixture of pedagogy, sentimentality and absurdity in the form of a reading list, some flattering comparisons of Jane to Madame de Staël, and some references to the ‘Elysian hours’ they had spent together in Haddington. In returning the books a few weeks later, Jane cut off his attempt to establish a romantic correspondence with the curtest of notes: ‘with Miss Welsh’s compliments and very best thanks’.6 She misspelled his name. If it was not apparent to him that he was ineligible, it was clear enough to her. He was the son of a stonemason in the meagre town of Ecclefechan. She was the daughter of the leading man of Haddington. The superfluity of elegant whimwhams in the drawing room ought to have suggested to Carlyle, if nothing else did, that more was respected in the Welsh household than intelligence, and Jane was enough her conventional mother’s daughter to find unthinkable marriage with a man who had no station, no money, no prospects of improving his worldly position – nor even much ambition to do so.
But if Jane did not want Thomas as a suitor, she wanted him very much as an intellectual companion. Her aspirations for literary achievement were serious, and there was no one in Haddington with whom to share them. It was pleasant, of course, to have young men admiring one’s person and wanting to marry one, but it was tedious, too. None of them cared about serious books or ideas. None of them valued her, as she wanted to be valued, for her judgment. Even Edward Irving thought that she was a little too snobbish, tended to cut herself off too much from the people around her, and he feared that more learning would only aggravate the problem.
So I suspect there was something of a struggle between Jane and Mrs Welsh on the subject of the brilliant young man who knew so much about German literature. Jane would claim that she did not think of him in the light of a suitor, but Mrs Welsh knew better, foresaw danger, and made Jane promise to correspond with him as little as possible, without absolutely cutting off the welcome flow of books from Edinburgh. So the curt note was succeeded, in response to the next parcel, by a note only slightly less curt, and when Carlyle asked if he might visit, Jane sent a polite refusal on her mother’s behalf. But she herself agreed to see him when she was in Edinburgh, in July of 1821 and again in November, and she had only to be in his presence to become his pupil. His idealism and largeness of mind overwhelmed her. With her eager, responsive intelligence, she adopted his way of seeing things, changed her vocabulary, forgot to be concerned with ‘prudence’ and ‘the reasonable’, and agreed to a ‘Romantic Friendship’. No sooner did she get back to Haddington and her mother’s influence than the forces of prudence and the reasonable reasserted themselves, and she begged Carlyle not to make her honour the promise he had extracted to write to him, a promise involving ‘disobedience and deceit’ to her mother.7 And yet, so great was her interest in Carlyle’s work, so great her need for him to be interested in hers, that she could not prevent herself from leaving a loophole: when he finished his essay on Faust, he might send it to her along with a letter.
Carlyle, lonely, poor, hopeless, liked the idea of working, in a sense, to win Jane. She was the grail, the object of his quest. If he were successful, if he made himself a name, perhaps he could gain her love. The very idea was enough to make him more buoyant than he had been in a long time. When he finished Faust, fulfilling the conditions for writing, he recklessly hinted at his secret hopes to Jane. ‘When I compare the aspect of the world to me now with what it was twelve months ago, I am far from desponding or complaining. I seem to have a motive and a rallying-word in the fight of life: … Alles für Ruhm und Ihr!’8
Jane replied with all the force of her wit.
‘Alles für Ruhm und Ihr’!! – On my word, most gay and gallantly said – One would almost believe the man fancies I have fallen in love with him, and entertain the splendid project of rewarding his literary labours with myself. Really Sir I do not design for you a recompense so worthless. If you render yourself an honoured member of society … I will be to you a true, a constant, a devoted friend – but not a Mistress – a Sister – but not a Wife – Falling in love and marrying like other Misses is quite out of the question.9
Already a formidable prose stylist at the age of twenty-one, Jane deploys her mockery like a knife, slashing through Carlyle’s solemn Teutonic motto, cutting its idealism to ribbons. Like most of Jane’s letters, this one displays its cleverness self-consciously, and its primary message is ‘Admire me’. Carlyle saw this clearly enough and acknowledged it to be ‘very spirited and very satirical and altogether very clever’.10 His letter is sad, earnest. He doesn’t understand why their friendship can’t proceed directly. He sees her as lonely, knows he is lonely. Why can’t they solace one another? He does not understand that he is a danger. He does not feel dangerous at all. Nor will he immediately allow himself to be contained by the role Jane and her mother are creating for him, the emasculated tutor of German.
Jane was not being coy. Her interest in Carlyle was not romantic. Letters to her cousin Eliza Stodart show that the romantic drama she imagined herself enacting involved George Rennie, a year younger than Jane, who was later to achieve some distinction as a sculptor, a Member of Parliament and governor of the Falkland Islands. He had made some sort of declaration to Jane, exchanged letters with her, but now was leaving her to travel abroad. Jane wrote for her cousin a description of their leave-taking which features strong feeling at war with correct behaviour – the kind of scene Jane Austen so loved to depict.
He took leave of my Mother then looked at me as if uncertain what to do – I held out my hand he took it and said ‘Good bye’! I answered him ‘Farewell’ He left the house! – such was the concluding scene of our Romance! – Great God He left the house – the very room where – no matter – as if he had never been in it in his life before – unfeeling wretch! – It was a dreadful trial to me to be obliged to save appearances even for some minutes after he was gone but I went through it bravely!11
She returned his letters, scorning to keep them ‘like a sword over his head’. One doubts the weight of the sword, the depth of the romance, but not Jane’s delight in portraying herself the stoic, dignified and tragically disappointed heroine of this domestic drama.
At about the same time, a much more powerful and unconventional paradigm of romance began to inform the way she imagined her own experience. She was reading Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and was immensely moved by Julie’s passionate love for her tutor, Saint-Preux, whom she cannot marry because of his social inferiority, and by her resolution to marry the man of her father’s choice, M. de Wolmar. Julie’s passion is so strong that she cannot keep herself from yielding to Saint-Preux, but the instinct of duty is stronger yet, and she nobly compels herself to live the rest of her life as a virtuous wife and mother.
The first impact of this reading on Jane was to strengthen her resolve never to marry.
No
lover will Jane Welsh ever find like St Preux – no Husband like Wolmar … and to no man will she give her heart and pretty hand who bears to these no resemblance – George Rennie! James Aitken! Robert MacTurk! James Baird!!! Robby Angus! – O Lord O Lord! where is the St Preux? Where is the Wolmar?12
A little further thought, however, suggested that Scottish reality might after all have something to measure up to the fictional world of Rousseau. Craig Buchanan was too lame, too bald, too given to puns and flattery to pass for Wolmar, but Thomas Carlyle was not a bad Saint-Preux. ‘He has his talents – his vast and cultivated mind – his vivid imagination – his independence of soul and his high souled principles of honour – But then Ah these buts! St Preux never kicked the fire irons – nor made puddings in his teacup.’13 ‘Want of elegance’, which Rousseau said was a defect no woman could overlook, was decidedly an obstacle in raising Carlyle to the level of a beau idéal. Imagination? Yes, he had that. Genius, brilliance, passion of a sort. But elegance? By no stretch of the imagination. The roughness, the cragginess of his physical appearance, so attractive to contemporary eyes, was not attractive to Jane. He was awkward, his manners uncouth. His physical presence – particularly his tendency to flail about with his arms and legs – made Jane so uncomfortable that she wished she could tie up all his ‘members’, leaving at liberty only his tongue.14
Against Jane’s wishes, Carlyle went to Haddington for a visit in early February of 1822. She had not wanted him to come because of the gossip it would provoke: people would think she was receiving him as a suitor. Since he insisted on coming, Jane made sure he would not mistake the nature of his reception. She was cold and formal. This visit, along with a few more letters of elegant mockery and a two month silence, finally made Carlyle understand that if his friendship with Jane were to continue, he must accept the purely tutorial role she offered. And so, by a year after their first meeting, they had settled into a comfortable relationship based on the exchange of books and responses to books, a relationship which satisfied Jane entirely. By a judicious wielding of anger, mockery and coolness, she had won the initial struggle for power between them and it was a long time before the stronger power of his imagination could impose itself on hers. The letters which Jane and Thomas wrote between 1821 when they met and 1826 when they were married are called by their first editor ‘love letters’, but that is misleading. Jane ruled out love or even passionate friendship as a subject for much of the correspondence and if the letters form an epistolary novel, the genre they belong to is not romance but Bildungsroman, the novel of education. Carlyle had thought that if he worked hard to improve himself he might win Jane. That was not to be. His task instead was to educate Jane so that finally she would appreciate him. Without consciously setting out to do so, he trained his pupil so well, so transformed her values, that she was able to perceive him finally as the only fit object for her love.
