While Ruskin was in Italy, writing home to his father, his future mentor, Thomas Carlyle, was corresponding with individuals about their Cromwell letters and asking for information on the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. He was also keeping friends and family informed by letter about the agonies of editing and writing, as he wrestled with the difficulty of making Oliver Cromwell ‘legible’ to a modern audience. Meanwhile he seemed to be oblivious to the fact that his infatuation with a wealthy aristocratic woman was driving his wife Jane towards nervous collapse. In a letter of 17 April 1845, Jane Welsh Carlyle, famed for her wit and kindliness as an informal literary hostess and for her brilliance as a letter-writer, shared her agony with her own family in Scotland. She told John Forster that her husband was ‘too much occupied with the Dead just now to bestow a moment on the Living’. The emotional crisis Jane experienced that month proved to be the turning point in a protracted drama within her marriage, which played out between 1844 and 1846. At the heart of that drama lay conflicting ideas relating to life and death, both in reality and symbolically.

The scandal associated with the opening of Giuseppe Mazzini’s private letters by the Post Office, on the orders of the government, fuelled a series of debates in the cockpit of the House of Commons. Those outside the House relied upon press reports on the debates for information, reports that included accounts of private letters and secret dispatches being brandished as evidence by both the home secretary, Sir James Graham, and his opponents. Two open letters to newspaper editors – Carlyle’s of June 1844 and Mazzini’s of February 1845 – were influential in their commentary upon the central themes of political honour and public morality. And Sir James Graham, leading statesman and devout evangelical, was humiliated when the ‘Grahamizing’ of letters became a craze, encouraged by Punch. But the general public remained on the outside, looking in upon the parliamentary hurly-burly.