Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. 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 The Carlyles lived at the heart of English life in mid-Victorian London, but both were outsiders.
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 to Jane's death in , and their relationship with the outside world.
Thomas & Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage
Hardcover , pages. Thomas Carlyle , Jane Welsh Carlyle. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Mar 08, Buck rated it really liked it Shelves: Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable instead of four. I kid, I kid. That lumbering bombast, those prophetic poses — ugh. No, the real reason I read this excellent double biography was my ghoulish crush on Jane Carlyle. Poor, witty, wonderful Jane. 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. 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. 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. ME , these just happen to be the most interesting ones. Did Thomas and Jane ever actually have sex?
Rosemary Ashton, Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a 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? Every life has its lacunas. Or did have, before facebook.
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! Lewes , this is an excellent biography, thorough and well-researched.
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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 astutely shows how their difficult personalities interacted with each other as well as with their friends As I expected from Ashton having read her biographies of George Eliot and G.
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 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.
I find it a sobering venture to review another's life from their own writing and that of their intimate friends. He was uncouth, he damaged things in her parents' house, and in their protracted pre-marital correspondence he was either too direct or too withdrawn: Ashton declares quite honestly if a bit gallingly to a reader with pages of the marriage to go , that their pre-nuptial relationship 'often seemed to lack inner urgency', both showing 'at times a marked reluctance to find the means to live together'.
It did not bode well.
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Jane came often to regret bitterly her choice of husband. He took her for granted, and his moods were tempestuous.
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In their early married life he insisted they retreat to a godforsaken Scottish farmhouse miles from anywhere, leaving her for six years with the housekeeping and desolation while he shut himself away with his books. Later in Chelsea he would enclose himself almost round the clock in a sound-proof study.
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Jane, a woman well-educated and clever, failed to find her own employment aside from small domestic 'victories' and the long, entertaining letters she wrote. With neither work nor children to keep her busy, she spent long days when she was often ill, probably psychosomatically.
Rosemary Ashton, Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage. - Free Online Library
Lacking dynamism from the marriage itself, this book winds along through Thomas Carlyle's career as a writer and the pair's reaction to the nineteenth century's great events. Through Thomas's eyes we witness the year-old Queen Victoria's ascent to the throne 'a bit modest nice sonsy [cheerful] little lassie I was heartily sorry for the poor wee bairn' , economic depression and social unrest, the Irish famine, the Crimean War 'that mad war in defence of the Turk' , the American Civil War and the agitation against slavery fomented by the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. That symbol of the age, the Crystal Palace, a showcase for the imperial and industrial nation encapsulating vast acres of sky and innumerable sparrows , Carlyle with typical scepticism labelled a 'monster of a Gigantic Birdcage', likely to contain 'fudge and boisterous ostentation'.
This biography also has a flavour of a visit to a Victorian Madame Tussaud's: Lamb, Carlyle cruelly judged, was 'a rickety creature in body and mind'; Hazlitt was taking 'his punch and oysters and rackets and whore at regular intervals; escaping from the bailiffs as he best can', but it was the ageing Coleridge, addicted to opium and financially dependent on others, who received the most corrosive depiction: Jane forms friendships with the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, and novelist Geraldine Jewsbury.
She is delighted by Dickens performing magic tricks at a party and comments more even-handedly than her husband on the 'George Sandism' free love of the era. Together they gossiped about changing mores: