Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  63. George Eliot Letters, 7:287.

  64. Elizabeth Hardwick, ‘George Eliot’s Husband’ in A View of My Own, 87.

  65. George Eliot Letters, 7:212.

  66. Ibid., 211. (Wenn du bist nicht da: when you aren’t there); 213.

  67. Ibid., 283, 276, 273.

  68. See Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, 544–45; and John Walter Cross, ed., George Eliot’s Life, 3 vols. (New York: Harper and Bros, 1885), 3:293–94. Venetian fevers had likewise afflicted Alfred de Musset when he was on a romantic escape with George Sand, and before that, Lord Byron, who was nursed by pretty Marianna Segeti. See Curtis Cate, George Sand (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 255ff.

  69. George Eliot Letters, 7:302.

  70. Quoted by Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, 545.

  71. George Eliot Letters, 7:351. Around the corner, in Cheyne Row, Thomas Carlyle had been living without his wife for fourteen years. She too had died suddenly, not many months after Gavan Duffy came to call and they gossiped about George Eliot. Thomas Carlyle was now eighty-five and less than two months away from his own death.

  72. Huxley to Spencer, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, ed. Leonard Huxley, 2 vols. (London, 1900), 2:19.

  JANE WELSH

  and

  THOMAS CARLYLE

  1821–1866

  mr and mrs carlyle

  They had been living in London since 1834. Their house on Cheyne Row in Chelsea, near the river, was a centre of intellectual life. Although the Carlyles, like many city-dwellers, liked to complain about the noise, the dirt and the empty excitements of urban life, their move to London from Scotland was a complete success. Their marriage was a success as well – not without its strains and absences of satisfaction, of course, but stable and in unique ways satisfying to both of them. Each had fulfilled the compact made at the time of their engagement. Thomas had done his allotted days’ writing to such good effect that Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution and Cromwell had been born (for the Carlyles, too, talked of books as their children); as a thinker and man of letters he was respected beyond what Jane could have imagined possible back in Haddington. She had proved a superlative housewife, so clever at managing on a limited budget that no one could tell exactly how much money the Carlyles had: they seemed to live like people of good taste who had more money than they needed.

  Some people said Jane was the cleverest woman in London, and, quite apart from her husband, she had her own following. George Lewes visited her with his wife Agnes, and Dickens came with John Forster. Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s brother), Thackeray’s daughters, the political exiles Giuseppe Mazzini and Godefroy Cavaignac, were all members of her circle. Her friends had the highest estimate of her talents on the basis of her conversation and her brilliant letters. Dickens thought she would have been a great novelist, and Forster agreed. She was a personage in her own right. George Eliot sent her and not Mr Carlyle copies of her first two novels. Mazzini and Cavaignac, a French Republican in exile for conspiracy against Louis-Philippe and the younger brother of a future president of France, came principally to visit her, not Mr Carlyle. Indeed the dashing Cavaignac was a little bit in love with her, and she with him. In her own salon, anchored by a successful husband, she could resume the flirtations which had made her young womanhood such fun. People were charmed. With men, she tended to be more French in her style, more disparaging for example of the institution of marriage, more epigrammatic (she practised writing epigrams in her diary), but her great subject – especially with women – was herself as heroic housewife in the service of exasperating genius, a comic topos treated nowhere better than in the letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle.

  There were those, even her friends, who thought she tried too hard to be clever. One evening, talking, as she thought rather wittily, to Cavaignac, she was interrupted by a brusque rebuke. ‘Spare me your cleverness, Madame. Je ne le veux pas – moi! it is not my pleasure to rank among those for whom you have to make minced meat of yourself!’ Cavaignac found something tortuous and self-destructive in Jane’s display of wit; it required too great a suppression of her sentimental side, her sweetness and the warmth which endeared her to many people. Other people, less friendly to Jane, saw her as a self-important bluestocking who had never quite managed to rid herself of provinciality. Her conversation consisted largely of monologues, set pieces, narratives and the stories were often too long. Her Scotch accent was too pronounced. She called too much attention to herself and demanded too much deference. There were other women in London equally clever – Mrs Brookfield, Mrs Procter, Lady Harriet Ashburton – who made less of a fuss about it and didn’t seem to have to try so hard.

  If her great subject was daily life – its problems and absurdities – her best audience was the person who followed the continuing drama on a daily basis, her husband. For his sake she squeezed each day like a citrus fruit, making it yield up its last drop of narrative interest. All through the day, she generated character sketches, ludicrous incidents, mock heroic accounts of running the household, until, sitting in front of the drawing-room fire in the evening, she could lay them before him, a Scottish Scheherazade. She gloried in her role. To feel herself interesting and amusing to one of the greatest men of his age as he sat quietly smoking his pipe after his labours was her reward for a lot.

  Yet there is some evidence he wasn’t really listening. In that dreadful thirteen-year period, from 1852 to 1865 when he was working on his life of Frederick the Great, spending the day, as he put it, immersed in Prussian Blockheadism, it is true that he looked forward to the horseback ride he allowed himself when his lonely, silent struggle was done for the day and to the hour he spent with Jane in the drawing room, smoking his pipe, perhaps sipping brandy, listening to her amusing stories. This was the bright spot of his day. But he loved her stories for their ‘spontaneous tinkling melody’, in other words as background music, while, it is to be feared, the narrative of Prussian Blockheadism continued in the forefront of his mind. He would tell her, day after day, about (let us say) the Battle of Mollwitz, while Jane, sitting silent, half listening, thought about her own illnesses and imagined herself to be dying.

  In the years of his unnervingly endless work on Frederick the Great, and reaching a nadir perhaps in 1856, Carlyle felt wholly alone, with no supporter in the world except his wife. He had lost a lot of his following with the publication in 1849 of the extremely reactionary Latter-Day Pamphlets, and any hopes he may have had of a public career, a political position (such as John Stuart Mill was to have), he realised would never be fulfilled. But if many people thought him a crackpot curmudgeon, his wife never wavered in her belief in his greatness. Later he would thank her for her ‘valiant strangling of serpents day after day done gaily … as I had to do it angrily and gloomily’, but at the time Jane’s vivacity and love made little dent in his loneliness and despair. He wanted a man with a mind like his to commune with. Jane, for all her humour and wit, could not discuss Prussian Blockheadism as it ought to be discussed. He wanted to talk with someone just like himself. Failing that, he wanted the attention of a woman whose attention would be flattering to him in the way a wife’s could never be, since it was owed him.

  Before we focus on the inner life of the Carlyles in this difficult period of the mid-1850s, with its inevitable dissatisfactions and failures of communion, it would be well to emphasise the outward poise of their marriage. Against the world’s hostility, whatever form it took – tiresome visitors, hapless servants, a recalcitrant, hard-to-run house, bedbugs, ugly interiors, maddening noises – they stood united, with Mrs Carlyle firmly and joyously playing the role of her husband’s protector, slaying the serpents without so that he could concentrate on slaying the serpents within. That gaunt, convenienceless house ran on Jane’s spirit the way houses today run on electricity. Rather, the house ran on servants, and the servants ran on Jane. She hired and fired them. She encouraged them to draw water, light fires, air bedrooms – to do whatever needed to be don
e. She also supervised repairs on the house, encouraging the workmen, while Carlyle escaped the uproar and retired somewhere else to write. She kept foolish people away from him, either putting them off with charmingly written excuses or, if that failed, by entertaining them herself. When they were called to account by the tax assessor, it was of course Jane who went. At the last minute Carlyle had said that ‘the voice of honour’ seemed to call on him to go himself. ‘But either it did not call loud enough,’ Jane commented, ‘or he would not listen to that charmer.’1 For both the Carlyles, the quintessential expression of Jane’s role within the marriage was her continuing battle to protect her husband from the crowing of cocks.

  Although it is a strange accident of language that the fight Carlyle most thanked Jane for fighting on his behalf was this war against cocks, no one who has been awakened in darkness by cock crows will be tempted to put down his resentment of cocks as wholly symbolic. He was extremely sensitive to noise. A dog barking kept him from work; a cock crowing kept him from sleep. Beyond that, the noises aroused in him a fury which in itself upset his work. Noise was an insult to his creativity and genius. ‘A man has work … which the Powers would not quite wish to have suppressed by two-and-sixpence worth of bantams,’ he said, and she agreed. ‘We must extinguish those demon fowls or they will extinguish us.’2 And ‘the world, which can do me no good, shall at least not torment me with its street and backyard noises’.3 Jane understood the way in which the cocks were an obsession with her husband, involving a question of his ego and status – ‘a question, Shall I, a man of genius, or you, “a sooty washerwoman”, be master here?’4 She was willing to do battle to establish that he and not the sooty washerwoman (or whoever owned the cocks) was master.

  There was never any question but that establishing his mastery was her job, not his. Once, when Jane left a house party at Addiscombe to return to London on some cock business, the other guests asked Carlyle why he hadn’t gone himself. He replied that she could manage it better. And she did. Usually a letter or a conversation with the owner of the cocks, alluding to her husband’s genius and sensitivity to noise, was enough, but Jane was prepared to go to even greater lengths: she once considered buying the house next door to theirs to silence the cocks. Even in her dreams, she fended off cocks.

  I was dreaming last night about going to some strange house, among strange people, to make representations about cocks! I went on my knees at last, weeping, to an old man with a cast-metal face and grey hair; and while I was explaining all about how you were an author, and couldn’t get sleep for these new cocks, my auditor flounced off, and I became aware he was the man who had three serpent-daughters, and kept people in glass bottles in Hoffman’s Tale!5

  Constructing a soundproof room on the top floor of the house in Cheyne Row was the Carlyles’ last desperate defence against the cocks, but even there the cocks triumphed over the great author. In addition to being hot and airless, the soundproof room was not entirely soundproof. Carlyle hated the room. It was an example of shoddy British craftsmanship, a falling away from past standards of which somehow, surely, the cocks were another example.

  Most of the Carlyles’ great cockfights were in the early 1850s, but in 1865, not long before Jane died, the whole business started up again, like a reprise of the main theme before the end of the symphony. Thanks to her heroic efforts at exterminating nuisances she had won her victory over noise many years since when, one night, lying in bed, she heard with horror the old summons to battle, the crowing of a cock. She had been ill. She no longer had the strength, the hope, the energy required for such skirmishing. She lay anxiously in bed listening to the cock crow and waiting to hear Mr C.’s foot stamping frantically on the floor above as it had of old. But Mr C. did not hear it. He was, at the moment, morbidly tuned in to the sound of railway whistles. After a night of anxiety, Jane, despite a headache, went briskly to work the next morning. She discovered that a hen-hutch had been erected more or less overnight in the garden next door with nine large hens and one very large cock sauntering under their windows. She arranged, with her usual efficiency, that the cock be shut in a cellar all night until after the Carlyles’ breakfast. In exchange she bound herself (one wonders if the quid pro quo was really necessary) to tutor a little boy in reading three days a week. When Carlyle heard the story, he clasped his wife in his arms and called her his guardian angel. ‘No sinecure,’ she commented at the end of her mock-heroic account of this affair to her friend Mrs Russell. It was one of her last great pieces of mock-heroic writing, but Carlyle, editing Jane’s letters after her death, screened out the comedy and regarded this episode as particularly moving. ‘The noble soul heroically started up … and with all her old skill and energy gained victory, complete once more. For me – for me! And it was her last!’6

  So long as Carlyle clasped her in his arms and called her his guardian angel, Jane was content to do battle on his behalf. She took care of him; he was grateful. She sacrificed; he thanked her. That was the equilibrium of their marriage, but in the mid-1850s it broke down, in a manner characteristic of marriages in which the wife feels she has given up a lot for her husband’s sake. All of a sudden, he is not grateful enough. She feels herself taken for granted. She feels herself slighted and somebody else favoured. Jane kept telling herself that she had been an only child, an heiress, sought by many. Had she given up wealth, ease and position, had she sacrificed her talents and turned herself into a household drudge so that her husband should spend his evenings at the feet of another woman, listening to her stories and not to Jane’s?

  Lady Harriet Ashburton, with her inherited privilege, her looks, her clothes, her townhouse in London, country house, shooting lodge in Scotland, with the scale of hospitality she was able to deploy, commanded considerable glamour. She was one of the greatest hostesses of her time, and to Thomas Carlyle, she was Gloriana, a mythical, romantic figure whose attention carried with it the flattery of all aristocracies past and present. She was the perfect antidote to his daily immersion in Prussian Blockheadism, and, although the Carlyles had known the Ashburtons since 1845, he began to spend more and more time at Lady Harriet’s houses – Bath House in London, the Grange at Addiscombe – as his work on Frederick the Great dragged on.

  Jane, of course, was welcome to accompany him, but she chose to do so less and less. Travelling in those circles, she felt like an animate suitcase with Mr Carlyle’s name on it. It was too clear she was invited only as his wife. Her stories did not go over as well in this sophisticated company as they did in her own home. She felt badly dressed and frequently patronised by Lady Harriet, who did not take Jane’s illnesses as seriously as she thought they ought to be taken. The house parties at Addiscombe were particularly trying for Jane. She had nothing whatever to do. Carlyle could continue reading and writing even in luxurious circumstances, but luxurious circumstances cut the ground out from Jane’s being. She needed bugs to rout, servants to chide, cocks to fend off. Without the daily struggle of her household she had no role; she had no identity, no material for moulding into letters and anecdotes. She was reduced to playing shuttlecock and changing her clothes several times a day, as she had in her youth. But there were no suitors at Addiscombe to make it tolerable – and amusing to talk of. The youthful fiction that she was being kept by this vain show from serious intellectual work was no longer credible. She kept on complaining about fashionable life, but the comic tension was gone and only a self-righteous, somewhat spoilsport tone remained.

  I was thinking the other night, at ‘the most magnificent ball of the season’, how much better I should like to see people making hay, than all these ladies in laces and diamonds, waltzing! One grows so sick of diamonds, and bare shoulders, and all that sort of thing, after a while. It is the old story of the Irishman put into a Sedan chair without a bottom: ‘If it weren’t for the honour of the thing, I might as well have walked!’7

  That was for public consumption. The real and sadder story – Jane’s fear of not measuri
ng up in glamorous company – comes out in her diary, where she dreads, even before it takes place, a trip to the Grange. ‘To have to care for my dress at this time of day more than I ever did when young and pretty and happy (God bless me, to think that I was once all that!) on penalty of being regarded as a blot on the Grange gold and azure, is really too bad. Ach Gott! if we had been left in the sphere of life we belong to, how much better it would have been for us in many ways!’8

  Jane’s diary, begun in 1855, was a significant event in the joint life of the Carlyles. By no means a neutral recording of daily occurrences, it is a crafted work with a theme – the misery that Carlyle’s relationship with Lady Harriet caused Jane, the unfairness that all her sacrifices for him should be repaid with such neglect. It constituted, I would suggest, Jane’s revenge on her husband – a spectacularly successful one – for the wounds he had caused her in marriage. If Carlyle, at this low point in his life, thought about his wife’s inner life, it was to regret that she had so few resources for keeping herself amused at Addiscombe. He understood that taking care of him was her full-time occupation, but he did not realise how devastating an absence was created when that occupation, even for a weekend, was removed from her. After years of gratitude to her for having given up her self in his favour, he now wished she had more self – so she could leave him alone with his fantasies. If he saw that his friendship with Lady Harriet gave her any pain, he merely thought the pain was unreasonable. Their relationship was sexually innocent. Moreover such intimacy with the great should be flattering. What could Jane object to? Jane, perhaps, tried to give some signs of her misery, but she would joke to friends that as long as she was standing on two feet, Mr Carlyle never even noticed that she was ill. And it went against every instinct of self-presentation to underscore misery. Gaiety was her mode. To make the essential points about their married life – as they had done in their courtship – they had to turn to the written word.