The 'crackpot curmudgeon'

Or how to spend a day with Thomas Carlyle

What does Thomas Carlyle mean to you? If anything?

Carlyle surveys the River Thames from the foot of Cheyne Row

You may be a fan, you may even have read some of his books (early confession: I haven’t). But nearly 150 years since his death, the extraordinary impact of this man on Victorian society and culture has almost dissipated. You may know of him as the founder of the London Library, you may remember that he is the poor soul whose first manuscript of The French Revolution was used as a firelighter by John Stuart Mill’s maid. He survives in social media as a source of pithy epigrams such as:

‘The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none’;

‘The history of the world is but a biography of great men.’

‘No pressure, no diamonds’

‘A person usually has two reasons for doing something, a good reason and the real reason..’

(Note: I have relied on Good Reads for this, and not checked them back to the original. I have noticed that some of the best epigrams get attributed to many different people: I’m sure somewhere I can also discover that these ones originated with Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain or Winston Churchill.)

You may also have come across him in Phyllis Rose’s famous biographical study of five Victorian marriages, Parallel Lives - she coined the ‘crackpot curmudgeon’ phrase which I love.

The London Library in St James’s Square, London, founded by Carlyle in 1841

Carlyle first truly penetrated my consciousness when I was researching the lives of the Macmillan brothers. Suffice it to say, they were HUGE fans. They first came across his writings in 1840, when they were young shop assistants working at Seeley’s in The Strand. The fact that he originated, as they did, in fairly humble circumstances in Scotland, in fact born just sixty miles from their home town of Irvine, may have helped form a bond, but we know that Sartor Resartus, one of Carlyle’s earliest and oddest works, became their favourite book: Daniel would read chunks of it to Alexander while he was dressing in the morning in their lodgings in Charterhouse Square: Alexander being the most junior of shop assistants had to get up early to open the shop.

In January 1840, shortly after Carlyle published his pamphlet on Chartism, the author wrote in a letter to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson of an unexpected visit he had received: ‘Many applications have been made to me here: none more touching to me than one, the day before yesterday, by a fine innocent-looking Scotch lad, in the name of himself and certain other Booksellers’ shopmen eastward in the City! I cannot get them out of my head. Poor fellows! they have nobody to say an honest word to them, in this articulate-speaking world, and they apply to me.’ And again that same week he wrote to his mother “The day before yesterday, an innocent blithe wise-looking Scotch lad called upon me with a humble petition, which in his blateness [shyness] he could hardly get uttered, That I would come eastward into “the City” (the trading part of London), and lecture on any or on all sorts of things to certain young Booksellers’ shopmen and others of the like, who were very anxious about it! The more I think of these poor fellows, I am the more struck with such a request. They have nobody to preach a rational syllable to them on any subject whatever; and they want to hear rational words! I have half a mind sometimes to break out tumultuously, and begin lecturing like a lion over the whole world. But it is better, I do [believe], to stay at home quietly and write.” When I first read this in Carlyle’s letters, I really wanted this ‘Scotch lad’ to have been Daniel Macmillan; but I did discover that he was at least one of the group of enthusiastic shopmen who had sent the messenger.

Carlyle kept popping up in the life story of Alexander Macmillan: eventually he would be introduced to the great sage by David Masson, another Scot, who was the editor of Macmillan’s Magazine. Never one to miss an opportunity for networking, Alexander cultivated a friendship between Mrs Carlyle and his wife Caroline, inviting her to stay at his rather grand house in Tooting. The first visit in June 1865 was only a limited success; although Jane had enjoyed listening to Alexander singing Scotch songs, accompanied by the governess on the piano (Alexander would sing Scottish ballads at the drop of a hat, I fear), she was kept awake by the barking of the Macmillans’ dog. However she returned a few days later, the dog was confined to the washhouse, and Alexander gave her a toddy of whisky. She slept much better…

Both Alexander and his editor, David Masson, were determined to commission some writing from Carlyle for the Magazine. Unfortunately, when it arrived, it was extremely controversial. In a publication known for being one of the most pro-North, anti-slavery titles in England during the American Civil War, Carlyle produced a very short piece, a dialogue, which characterised the dispute about emancipation in very unhappy terms, seeming to imply that it might be better to be a ‘slave for life’ in the South, than an unemployed worker in the North. Masson sat on it for a few months, but eventually it was published, to a storm of protest from some of Alexander’s closest Christian Socialist friends, including John Ludlow and FD Maurice. Ludlow wrote ‘It is a lie and the bad old man who wrote it knows it to be such’. Alexander’s reply is worth repeating:

My firm conviction that Thomas Carlyle is wrong in thinking that slavery and service from man to man for life are synonymous, does not render me unjust towards him. He is not a “bad old man” but a very noble and useful one, and even his wrong sayings have wisdom and significance in them which are wanting in the rabid vapid utterance of deepest truths.

Finally, the Magazine had the ‘honour’ to print Carlyle’s final piece of political journalism, although again, it must have pained the very liberal Macmillan and his readers. ‘Shooting Niagara’, as the piece was called, was a diatribe against popular suffrage, at a time when electoral reform was extending the vote far more widely. Carlyle was not a fan of ‘the people’, and had no time for democracy: he was, to use Phyllis Rose’s phrasing again, a ‘romantic authoritarian.’ He thought that extending the vote to the masses was like going over Niagara falls in a barrel. The words hurt, but the copies of the magazine and the pamphlet flew off the shelves.

When I was researching my book, I paid a visit to the Carlyles’ house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, close to the river. On the wall I saw framed a testimonial to Carlyle, signed by all the great and the good of Victorian England, including, to my delight, Alexander. Yesterday afternoon I was delighted to be invited back by the curator to talk to the volunteers who look after the house for the National Trust, about the Macmillans and their relationship with the Carlyles.

The Carlyles’ house in Cheyne Row

It rounded off what had been quite a Carlyle day, as I had spent the morning enjoying my newly purchased full membership of the London Library, working on my next project.

The stacks at the London Library, where you can wander at will.

The view from my desk

It was an excuse for me to think some more about Thomas and his wife Jane, a marriage which has been the subject of so many books, biographies and theories. It took Thomas many years to woo Jane. She was a very well-educated and attractive young woman, came from a better family, and was pursued by many men before she settled on Thomas. The truth is she was lured by the idea of being allowed to minister to the daily needs of a man of genius, delighted to be marrying ‘a scholar, a poet, a philosopher, a wise and noble man.’ However, the idealism faded in the harsh reality of a long childless marriage to a man who was permanently preoccupied and ungrateful.

Jane was said by many to be the cleverest woman in London, and she made a comic turn of herself for public consumption as the heroic housewife in the service of exapserating genius. But her diaries told a very different story, of an increasingly embittered and jealous woman. She died suddenly in April 1866, and when Carlyle found and read these diaries he was horrified. A man who purported to understand so much about the world, had known nothing about his wife. He spent the rest of his life trying to put right what could obviously not be mended, writing his wife’s biography in the most effusive of terms.

Jane Welsh Carlyle

Their marriage, as described in Carlyle’s Reminiscences and in his friend Froude’s biography, became a byword for unhappiness: the joke was repeated that the Carlyles married each other so that only two people would be unhappy, not four.

If the Carlyles lived today, Jane would probably have a funny diary column in The Spectator, and could write at length about her highly satisfactory divorce and her visits to various New Age health spas. And Thomas would be a Twitter-warrior, all over the internet venting his spleen when the MSM were too scared to publish him any more. I think Musk would have fitted right into Carlyle’s ‘great man of history’ theory, and the two of them would be re-tweeting each other constantly.

So, how to sum up my day with Carlyle? I’m glad that his history of the French Revolution gave us Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. I think a visit to Cheyne Row is always a delight. The London Library is wonderful. I’m quite happy that his words can inspire so many T-shirt slogans. I still don’t think I have the time or inclination to read any of his books. I am glad that by publishing even his ‘masterpieces of reaction’, Alexander Macmillan was able to demonstrate a laudable commitment to free speech. But in terms of his politics, and in how he so badly misunderstood and mismanaged the most basic of human relationships, I hope that he can remain a figure of the past, and not an influence on the present.