Thomas & Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage

by Rosemary Ashton

The Carlyles lived at the heart of English life in mid-Victorian London, but both were outsiders. A largely self-educated pair from Scotland, they often took a caustic look at the society they so influenced—Thomas through his writings and both through their network of acquaintences and correspondents. Thomas would write about matters of the day, while Jane would tell tales of everything from turmoil with dust to Dickens at a party. Yet despite everything, Jane suffered as Thomas grew infatuated with the lion-hunting Lady Ashburton, and the tensions in their own marriage made them sensitive to contemporary debates about the position of women, divorce, legitamacy, and prostitution. This joint biography describes their relationship with each other, from their first meeting in 1821 to Jane's death in 1866, and their relationship with the outside world.

Genres: Biography, History

548 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2002

About the author

Rosemary Ashton is Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature and an Honorary Fellow of UCL.

Reviews

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Samuel Butler got off one of the great lines of the nineteenth century when he said of the Carlyles, “It was very good of God to let Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable instead of four.” But isn’t that a good definition of marriage in general: a legally-sanctioned concentration of misery? I kid, I kid. Settle down.

Personally, I’ve never had much luck with Thomas Carlyle. That lumbering bombast, those prophetic poses – ugh. And let’s not even get into his politics. Like Ezra Pound, another “romantic authoritarian,” he’s always struck me as a talented crank.

No, the real reason I read this (excellent) double biography was my ghoulish crush on Jane Carlyle. Poor, witty, wonderful Jane. To whom some fusty old Tory once said, “You would be a great deal more amiable, my dear, if you weren’t so damnably clever.” Of whom somebody else said that she could tell a story about a broom handle and make it interesting. Who wrote some of the funniest, liveliest letters I’ve ever read. (Going through these same letters after she died, Carlyle declared her a better writer than his friends Dickens and Thackeray. A stretch, certainly, but not by much.)

But after spending four-hundred pages with Jane, I’ve decided I wouldn’t want to be married to her. In the Carlyle household, she seems to have played the role of court jester, constantly pelting the resident genius with zingers while he just sat there grimacing and the guests shifted uncomfortably. Her whole outlook was fundamentally ironic and skeptical, which is fine, but when you’re married to an acknowledged Great Man, with a gloomy, tormented soul, who just wants to finish his porridge and get back to work on his latest tome – well, you’re going to have problems.

In her introduction, Ashton remarks that the Carlyles had one of the best-documented marriages of the nineteenth century, with heaps of letters and memoirs and scattered tittle-tattle for her to draw on. Yet certain insoluble questions remain, and to a prurient posterity (i.e. ME), these just happen to be the most interesting ones. Did Thomas and Jane ever actually have sex? (There were rumours of impotence and a “blank marriage”). Was Jane addicted to morphine, or merely an occasional user? Did she fall in love with Giuseppe Mazzini, the fascinating Italian republican? Was Thomas in love with Lady Ashburton, the equally fascinating socialite? We’ll never know for sure. Every life has its lacunas. Or did have, before facebook.

In the end, I guess there’s nothing to be learned here. The Carlyle’s marriage is just another episode in the eternal tragicomedy of male-female relations. I think Jane, at least, understood this early on. When she was still young and hopeful, she wrote to her depressed husband from the other side of England:

I wanted to kiss you into something like cheerfulness and the length of a kingdom was betwixt us – and if it had not – the probabilities are that with the best intentions I should have quarrelled with you rather. Poor men and women! What a time they have in this world – by destiny and their own deserving – But as Mr Bradfute used to say ‘tell us something we do not know.’

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I expected from Ashton (having read her biographies of George Eliot and G.H. Lewes), this is an excellent biography, thorough and well-researched. The Carlyles had a famously unhappy marriage, and Ashton is sympathetic to both of them, yet objective, never taking sides; she understands Carlyle's tortured genius and neglect of his wife as well as Jane's self-pity and repressed talents, and she astutely shows how their difficult personalities interacted with each other as well as with their friends and family. I am now dying to get my hands on some of the Carlyles' letters, especially Jane's. (ETA 4/1/2022: Jane's letters are indeed corkers!)

[Ian Major · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find it a sobering venture to review another's life from their own writing and that of their intimate friends. The 'warts and all' remind me of my own frailties and follies, as well as the better aspects of my life. This biography of Thomas and Jane Carlyle is a fine example of that.

I came to Carlyle through his 'The French Revolution' and wanted to know more of this literary genius. I'm so glad to have come upon this work of Rosemary Ashton, for it captures so much of both their lives in detail. The brilliance and the distress of Mr and Mrs C., his fine and infamous views; her patience and exasperation with him. So much valuable insight also on their associates - Dickens, Ruskin, Thackery, etc.