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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
On 5 june 1824 Thomas Carlyle, aged twenty-nine, sailed from Leith, Edinburgh, to London on a visit that was to last until March 1825. Within an hour of leaving he had sent his family copies of his translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, published in Edinburgh at the end of May; then he was off to the metropolis to visit his friend the Reverend Edward Irving and to resume his tutoring of young Charles Buller. “The expedition was an epoch in Carlyle's life,” writes Froude. “There was, perhaps, no one of his age in Scotland or England, who knew so much and had seen so little.” He had read enormously in history, poetry, philosophy—the whole range of modern literature in French, German, and English—yet he had seen no town larger than Glasgow and little cultivated society. He had no illusions of winning immediate recognition, but doubtless expected the kind of benefits he had foreseen for Jane Welsh had her hoped-for visit to London come to pass: “You will see new forms of life, you will converse with cultivated men, you may gather insight into character and manners, and what is equally desirable, into the nature and extent of your own powers and the best mode of turning them to use.”
1 J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of his Life, 1795-1835, 2 vols. in 1 (New York, 1884), i, 144-145. Carlyle's first London visit is treated in Froude, i, 144-196; in D. A. Wilson, Carlyle Till Marriage (London and New York, 1923), pp. 327-380; Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle, 1814-1826, Charles Eliot Norton ed. (London and New York, 1886), pp. 304-331; The Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, Alexander Carlyle ed. (London and New York, 1909), i, 333-400, ii, 1-109.
2 Love Letters, i, 295-296. Mrs. Irving prevented her visit (Wilson, pp. 329, 330, 338; Love Letters, ii, 51-52).
3 The Trustees of the Pierpont Morgan Library permit me to publish Mrs. Strachey's letters; the Yale Univ. Library, Carlyle's. All 5 letters are printed verbatim.
4 Froude, i, 152.
5 Spelled Montague by Carlyle.
6 Charles Eliot Norton ed., Everyman's Edition (London and New York, 1932).
7 Froude, i, 146.
8 See also John St. Loe Strachey, The Adventure of Living (New York and London, 1932), pp. 75-76.
9 Wilson, p. 335.
10 Early Letters, p. 305.
11 Froude, i, 149.
12 Early Letters, pp. 323, 325.
13 Froude, i, 151; Reminiscences, pp. 257-258.
14 Love Letters, i, 384-385, 399; ii, 3-14; Early Letters, pp. 312-313; Reminiscences, pp. 259-266; Froude, i, 152-158; Wilson, pp. 340-345.
15 Reminiscences, pp. 271, 266-273; Love Letters, ii, 6, 13-33; Early Letters, pp. 313-314; Froude, i, 160-167; Wilson, pp. 346-353.
16 Love Letters, ii, 35-37; Reminiscences, pp. 273-275.
17 Froude, i, 166.
18 Love Letters, ii, 58-59.
19 Reminiscences, pp. 248-249 on Montagu; 249, 253, Procter; 275, Cunningham; 252, Coleridge, Robinson, Lamb, Hazlitt; 255, Campbell; 264, De Quincey. See also Early Letters, p. 317; Froude, i, 147-148, 175-176.
20 Froude, i, 166; Early Letters, p. 324.
21 Early Letters, pp. 321, 324, 315.
22 Love Letters ii, 99, 102; Reminiscences, p. 279.
23 “Yesterday I had a letter from Mrs. Strachey, which was soon followed by a box containing a new present of the most superb writing-desk I have ever seen! I should think … it cannot have cost much less than twenty guineas” (letter of 4 March, Early Letters, p. 330). In 1866 Carlyle noted that Mrs. Strachey's gifts of a gold pencil and the desk “were soon Another's, ah me, and are still here!” (Reminiscences, p. 279; Early Letters, p. 326).
24 Love Letters, ii, 94.
25 Love Letters, ii, 7, 93.
26 G. Strachey, “Carlyle and the Rose-Goddess,” Nineteenth Century, xxxii (1892), 481, and “Reminiscences of Carlyle,” New Review, ix (1893), 21-22. See also Sir Edward Strachey (1812-1901), “Some Letters and Conversations of Thomas Carlyle,” Atlantic Monthly, lxxiii (1894), 831.
27 Early Letters, p. 330.
28 Love Letters, ii, 109 n.
29 Love Letters, ii, 133.
30 Reminiscences, p. 281. For descriptions of Carlyle's first months at Hoddam Hill, see pp. 280-283; Love Letters, ii, 109-155; Froude, i, 196-203; Wilson, pp. 381-390; Moncure D. Conway, Thomas Carlyle (New York, 1881), pp. 227-233; New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Alexander Carlyle ed. (London and New York, 1903), i, 3-8.
31 Early Letters, p. 317; Love Letters, i, 295, 377-378; ii, 59. See also Conway, pp. 230-231; Reminiscences, pp. 250-251. By the time of Carlyle's second visit in London in 1831, the friendship of the Carlyles and Mrs. Montagu had run its course (Froude, ii, 108, 114, 145).
32 Early Letters, p. 326; Love Letters, ii, 103, 134.
33 Carlyle had taken to Hoddam Hill “some forty tomes of German fiction” (Love Letters, ii, 126), from which he had agreed to select and translate specimens, to be published by Tait in a series of volumes under the title of German Romance (ii, 116 n.).
34 Letter of 20 May in Conway, Carlyle, p. 232.
35 A serpent and a dove, emblems of remorse and grace, were carved above the door of the ancient Tower of Repentance mentioned in this paragraph (Reminiscences, p. 280 n.).
36 Alick and John, respectively.
37 Love Letters, ii, 112. See above, notes 30, 35.
38 Reminiscences, p. 250.
39 Mrs. Montagu had undertaken the correspondence that Carlyle had bespoken for his fiancée in his letter of 20 May, the only earlier letter of Carlyle to Mrs. Montagu to be preserved (Conway, p. 232). See also Love Letters, ii, 128; Wilson, pp. 384-385.
40 Had Carlyle known how much Mrs. Montagu's letter postmarked 20 July was to perturb Jane, and that on 24 July Jane would forward him this very letter in distress (Love Letters, ii, 146-150; Wilson, 391-394), he might not have written Mrs. Montagu so calmly of her service in corresponding with Jane. The “Noble Lady” was under the illusion it was her duty to “assist in reconciling Miss Welsh to her disappointment” in not marrying Irving! (Froude, i, 201; Love Letters, ii, 134 n.) See “Edward Irving and Jane Welsh,” Love Letters, ii, 404-426; Wilson, p. 383.
41 An inn near Harrogate (Love Letters, ii, 150, 162, 181).
42 Probably The Life of Schiller (Conway, p. 233).
43 Aids to Reflection (1825).
44 This sketch parallels descriptions of Coleridge in other letters written from London in 1824 and 1825: “a mass of richest spices putrified into a dunghill”; his “tawlk” makes Carlyle wish to worship, then toss him in a blanket (Froude, i, 193). He “wanders like a man sailing among many currents” (i, 148), is “a steam-engine of a hundred horses' power, with the boiler burst” (Conway, p. 195), is “like the hulk of a huge ship; his mast and sails and rudder have rotted quite away” (Love Letters, ii, 35).
45 Stepdaughter of Mrs. Montagu (Reminiscences, p. 249).
46 Mrs. Montagu's gift, a seal bearing Schiller's dying words, “Calmer and Calmer” (Early Letters, p. 326).
47 Froude, i, 171; Love Letters, ii, 59, 103.
48 Reminiscences, pp. 251-252.
49 Owned by the Yale Univ. Library.
50 Spectator, 19 March 1910.
51 Reminiscences, pp. 243, 246.
52 Love Letters, ii, 15, 20, 21, 29; Froude, i, 160.
53 D. A. Wilson, Carlyle to “The French Revolution” (London and New York, 1924), p. 238. For later refs., see Sir Edward Strachey, “Some Letters and Conversations” (n. 26, above), pp. 826, 831; D. A. Wilson, Carlyle on Cromwell and Others (London and New York, 1925), p. 227.
54 “… there never was any love-making between them, and never any unpleasantness” for the simple reason that Carlyle had “made his market”; he was too kind ever to disillusion Mrs. Phillipps of her notion that she was the original of Blumine (Carlyle Till Marriage, pp. 333-335). Carlyle was aware of his proximity to the “sole Mistress of herself and fifty thousand pounds” (Love Letters, ii, 15) and her not disinterested relatives. His comments provoked Jane Welsh to sarcasm (ii, 20-21, 235), but the series of staunch letters to Jane, beginning long before he met Kitty and continuing throughout the period of his London visit—with his engagement dating from Jan. 1825 (ii, 300)—refute Carlyle's romantic interest in the heiress, notwithstanding the theories of members of the Strachey family.
55 Nineteenth Century, xxxii, 485-486. I transcribe from the original. Letter not listed in Isaac Dyer, A Carlyle Bibliography (Portland, Me., 1928).
56 Reproduced in Love Letters, ii, 14. See Wilson, Carlyle Till Marriage, p. 336.
57 Furnished by Mrs. Strachey and Kitty as a surprise when Irving and his wife were away (Reminiscences, p. 243).
58 Love Letters, ii, 15.
59 See n. 26.
60 Froude, i. 166.