Relations with the Carlyle Family

Writings about Carlyle

1-Preface to the New Letters

2-The Imputation Medically Considered

3-The Truth about Carlyle

Relations with the Carlyle Family

Apart from the meeting with Carlyle in 1877, already described, Crichton-Browne seems to have had no other direct contact with him. He records in his commonplace book that Mary Aitken came to dinner in November of the same year. He had known her since childhood in Dumfries, although he was her senior by some eight years – presumably their parents were on a visiting basis. When she died in 1895 she left him Carlyle’s writing desk, which he was using as he wrote about it in the 1930’s. He would meet Alexander Carlyle through Mary, who married him, and he makes it clear that he was friendly with David Wilson. He cooperated with both these men in editing publications by and about the Carlyles, considered below.

Writings about Carlyle

In 1903 Crichton-Browne was involved in three publications about the Carlyles, and returned to the subject again in 1913. One, The Nemesis of Froude, written with David Wilson, contains little that is not repeated in the other two

The Preface to the New Letters

Crichton-Browne wrote a preface, running to eighty-five pages, for the New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, two volumes of letters unpublished by Froude, edited by Carlyle’s nephew, Alexander Carlyle. He devotes them to an attack on Froude, an attack on Jane, and an attack on Benjamin Jowett, who had said some wounding things about Carlyle

His accusations about Froude are three: he was inaccurate, should not have published the truth, and that he went against the wishes of Carlyle and Carlyle’s family about publication; if not about publishing at all, certainly about publishing so quickly. And the attack is personal, abetted by his medical/psychiatric authority. It was this preface, and these accusations, which goaded Froude’s children into publishing their father’s My Relations with Carlyle. Crichton-Browne has the grace to say that ‘it is impossible to believe that Froude contemplated or foresaw the evil he wrought.’ Although he would never have used the phrase, and had read no psychoanalysis at this time, he is about to attribute unconscious motives to Froude.

He claims that ‘to understand it is necessary to look into the character of Froude; and an examination of that reveals that his intellect, capacious and well-polished as it was, had the trick of distorting the impressions made on it.’ He made things conform to his ‘prepossessions and fancies’, ‘coloured them beyond recognition,’ and had a ‘positive genius for going wrong.’

He cites Froude’s novel The Nemesis of Faith as showing a boy driven by ill-treatment into falsehood and deceit. Even Froude’s loss of faith is presented as dishonesty. He points to the inaccuracies in his histories and other books.

‘His Carlyle manuscript should have been burned like The Nemesis of Faith.’

The attack continues: ‘a lunatic tendency to aberration’, ‘treacherous memory’, ‘got it into his head that Carlyle had mistreated his wife,’ ‘abandoned reasonable reticence’, ‘suppressing and altering texts’, and ‘dragging into the light of day what modesty and kindly consideration would fain have concealed.’

Froude had ‘constitutional inaccuracy, flamboyant tendencies, and proneness to preconceived ideas.’ This is presented like a psychiatric diagnosis. But although he seems to be saying that he had constitutional personality problems, and has already suggested that Froude could not possibly have foreseen the evil he was doing, he concludes that he was responsible for his actions, saying that he showed

‘gross wickedness in creating the impression that Carlyle gave Jane grave ground for jealousy.’

His next attack (and another disguised as a diagnosis) is on Jane, defending Carlyle against mis-conduct with Lady Ashburton . Jane is the ‘true key’.

She had a ‘mild but protracted attack of mental disturbance which could be technically called on it psychical side climacteric melancholia, and on its physical side neurasthenia.’ Even in the psychiatric nomenclature of the period this is difficult to follow. He is attempting to blind his readers with science.

Jane was tainted by heredity, he claims. His evidence for this is varied. She was a seventh-month child, an only child, she was brought up in hot-bed conditions and grew up highly neurotic, she had sick headaches even as a girl; her innumerable influenzas were rooted in her nervous system. She was unstable, excitable, intolerant of noise, had insomnia, took drugs, drank too much tea, and smoked cigarettes. ‘In short, the very woman in whom the physician would expect a nervous breakdown at a critical epoch of life.’

He believes she was ill for eleven years, starting in 1846, when she was forty--five, and worsening until 1855. He says he symptoms were all but completely dispelled by 1857, curiously enough the year of Lady Ashburton’s death.

‘Her Journal bears unmistakably the stigmata of mental disorder – not insanity…but delusional beliefs, having no rational foundation.’ This is the period she was writing famously about ‘that eternal Bath House’ that her husband visited so often. Crichton-Browne even quotes the very phrase, and concludes that the ‘the alienist will readily recognise the cerebral neurasthenia that is so often accompanied by profound dejection and mad fancies.’

Crichton-Browne makes light of her later 1863 neuralgias – she showed no jealousy then. In fact, a convincing case can be made for her having had a depressive illness in these years, rather than in the many years that Crichton-Browne believes she was so disturbed.

So Carlyle is blameless:

‘Carlyle, who, while wrestling with a heavy and brawny task and himself harassed by hypochondria, had to bear the incessant pinpricks, aye! And stiletto plunges too, of an ailing, unreasonable and hot-tempered wife, possessed by groundless jealousy.’

He didn’t neglect her:

‘On the whole he spent much more time with her than the average husband is wont to spend with his wife.’ Sir James, with all his speeches, dinners and clubs, may be the average man he has in mind..

So Carlyle is redeemed by this scathing attack on his wife and on his biographer. These are not simply personal attacks. He is also exploiting his prestige and position as a psychiatrist to diagnose and label Jane, and to diagnose Froude’s failings. Not a word about Carlyle and his personality or his hypochondriasis.

This kind of appeal to medical authority is characteristic of Crichton- Browne in his other publications. Burns is a good example. The gist of his 1923 book is that Burns had rheumatic fever, and thus can’t have been a drunkard and a libertine. Another Scottish icon must be faultless. And in all his many papers and lectures he is the essence of professional assurance and Victorian dogmatism, even on subjects of which he can have little direct experience or knowledge.

Crichton-Browne is eager to put all blame on Jane. He suggests she was both frigid and infertile, and that her childlessness was the main cause of the unhappiness in the marriage. But neither of the Carlyles seemed especially interested in children, and the subject never seems to surface in their correspondence over the years, except for the one remark by Carlyle when writing about Jane’s little childhood chair in Cheyne Row: ‘No daughter or son of hers was to sit there: so it had been appointed to us, my Darling ……books are our only children.’

The Imputation Medically Considered -1903

‘Froude and Carlyle - The Imputation Medically Considered’ was published in the British Medical Journal in 1903. It reveals much about Crichton- Browne and about changing medical attitudes to impotence at the time.

–                           The context is important . There had been much criticism of Froude’s initial biography, and of his publication of the Reminiscences and Jane’s letters, all within a few years of Carlyle’s death in 1881. In 1903 Crichton-Browne and Alexander Carlyle published the New Letters and Memorials, with an introduction by Crichton-Browne. Their harsh words about Froude provoked Froude’s family into publishing Froude’s My Relations with Carlyle, This was a short essay he had written in 1887. He died in 1894. It was this paper, posthumously published after sixteen years, and not the earlier publications, that contained the imputation of impotence..

–                           Crichton-Browne begins by claiming that there are limits to the 'frank biography' and they have not until now 'been held to include the history of a man's sexual experiences.' He begins immediately to attack Froude – who had died nine years earlier and was unable to respond - in terms that are typical of the whole article:
'It has been reserved for Froude to set a most pernicious example and inflict a stain on English literature by proclaiming abroad a genital defect in the man whose life he had been commissioned to write.....Had this allegation of Froude's been a detached burst of spite, it might have passed unnoticed, and left to be blown away by a breeze of popular disgust or to fall back, sink, and vanish in the broad and deep unveracity of the man making it. But it is made the key to the lives of Carlyle and his wife...'

He omits to mention that both volumes of Froude’s biography were written and published without impotence being mentioned, and without it being made ‘the key’ to anything.
Next, Crichton- Browne assumes that impotence involves some 'physical defect' which prevented the consummation of the marriage. He is at pains to produce evidence that Carlyle had no 'physical malformation' , saying that the person who adjusted the truss for his inguinal hernia in Carlyle's latter years was alive and ready to testify to this effect. He also believes that he could not have been impotent because of the 'splendid virility of his writings.' 'Was there in his style, his manner, his voice, his appearance, his conduct, one of the traits we associate with maimed manhood?' he asks. He seems to believe, not only that impotence is accompanied by some visible physical abnormality, but also is betrayed by effeminate appearance and behaviour and even by literary style.
He claims that Froude and Geraldine Jewsbury fall back on 'some occult state of his organisation or "physical constitution" of which Carlyle was not cognizant when he married - but which was speedily brought home to him.

–                           He rejects Geraldine Jewsbury's claim that Carlyle, the morning after their wedding night, tore the flower garden at Comely Bank to pieces. There was no flower garden there, and, even if there was, there were unlikely to be flowers in an Edinburgh garden on October 18th!

–                           ‘If there was any frigidity , it was on her side.’ She had warned Carlyle that she was not in love with him. For the first eight years they shared a bedroom. These are fair points, but he insinuates that Jane may have been infertile; her side of the family became extinct, compared with the fertile Carlyles. He throws in the fact that she ‘was studious and allowed to study inordinately’ – his life-long view that this led to psychiatric disturbance in later life.
In short, Crichton- Browne believes that impotence can only be caused by physical causes or malformations, and that such a person would be effeminate, and does not even consider that impotence may have psychological causes, now accepted as much the most common reason for the symptom.

Most oddly of all, he believes that, if the allegation were true, Carlyle's whole influence would be put at naught. 'Words of warning and wisdom must come from an unblemished source,' and 'a bankrupt prophet is of no account.'
Geraldine Jewsbury was Froude’s main witness and Crichton-Browne attacks her veracity. Her feelings towards Mrs Carlyle were 'highly extravagant and in some degree perverted,' he alleges, and convincingly demonstrates this from her correspondence, and that of the Carlyles. He concludes that she was 'utterly unreliable and erratic, or, as Carlyle summed her up, "a flimsy tatter of a creature".'
He castigates Froude for relying on her evidence and on rumours and anonymous letters. Crichton -Browne admits that he too heard many reports of Carlyle's impotence in 'London society', but always challenged them. He had heard these rumours many years earlier when he had first met the Carlyles. Some said the information came from Sir Richard (then Dr) Quain. who treated Mrs Carlyle for a number of years and gave her death certificate. Quain laughed this suggestion to scorn. As Chairman of the General Medical Council, he was the last man likely to reveal medical confidences to anyone.
Another and ludicrous rumour, but apparently current for many years, was that the house-surgeon at St Georges Hospital, where Jane was taken from Hyde Park after her death, had examined her, and found her to be a virgin. Crichton-Browne tracks down the very doctor - a Dr Ridge-Jones - who had been that house surgeon thirty-seven years earlier, and finds that no examination was made, nor was there any coroner's inquest.
Although he makes some important points against Froude, the whole tone of his article is intemperate, and today seems medically ill-informed. And it did to his contemporaries. Most letters to the British Medical Journal were critical of him: an 'impudent intrusion' said one. A 'lady correspondent' believed that 'Carlyle was created for higher and nobler ends than the mere propagation of his kind'. Other medical journals wrote unfavourable reviews. The Medical Times said that the controversy had been 'fanned by the wild incursion into the matter of perhaps the most injudicious writer of the present day', and that 'self-advertisement seems in certain minds to be the chief end to be attained.' The Medical Press noted that 'Sir James Crichton-Browne has now issued a peculiarly bitter and in many ways unfortunate and unsatisfactory reply to Froude's imputation......It will bring shame and distress and a measure of disgrace to all concerned in such exposure.' The British Medical Journal leader pointed out that 'there is a psychical as well as a physical impotence,' and noted that some 'strong men' 'never recover from the effects of an initial failure.' It regarded the controversy as unseemly and unedifying, and said: 'The fact is that there is no conclusive evidence either way.' – words that have echoed down the years. The leader writer also points out that the 'hypothesis' - that he was impotent - 'in no way touches the moral character or intellectual greatness of Carlyle.'.
It is comforting to find that Crichton-Browne's knowledge of the causes of impotence was not representative of the period. In retrospect, it seems clear that he and the Carlyle family had been deeply angered by the revelations of earlier years about Carlyle's personality and conduct. They could refute little in Froude's biography, and they could not argue when in the Reminiscences, Carlyle condemned himself out of his own mouth. The allegations of impotence, less easy to prove, and less convincing, were a golden opportunity for revenge.

The Truth about Carlyle by David Alec Wilson 1913

D A Wilson, who from 1923 on wrote six volumes of Carlyle biography, co-operated with Crichton-Browne on the Nemesis of Froude in 1903 and The Truth about Carlyle in 1913. Crichton-Browne later described him as a man who could account for every minute of Carlyle’s life.

Crichton Browne’s preface runs to 14 pages, brief by his standards, and was written at Dumfries; he was now 73, but not fully retired.

He obviously feels that his mission has not been a success.

‘It is deplorable that any such exposition should be necessary today….I had hoped that the lie was killed in 1903, but it seems it was only scotched and is wriggling about and envenoming whom it may. Froude boldly and grossly proclaimed in his memoir My Relations with Carlyle, 1887, but withheld from publication for 16 years’.

This is unpleasant. Froude wrote the essay in 1887, but died with the memoir unpublished, and it was only published by his family long after his death, and in the face of provocation; hardly boldly and grossly.

He revisits the question of a ‘physical defect’ again. ‘His reputation was dimmed – sadly dimmed – by Froude’s biography. In 1903 it was hideously besmirched by Froude’s brochure.'

He refers to his earlier BMJ article, claiming that he didn’t want to expose these facts to a lay audience but to an unbiased medical one:

‘My article must have reached the hands at least of over 20 000 medical men, and I am entitled to say that judgment was given in my favour. I received many letters from medical brethren expressing complete agreement with the conclusion at which I had arrived and not one dissenting from it.’ The medical press in 1903, as we have seen, did not support this claim.

He attacks more recent soft targets – the foolish claims of Frank Harris, and others:

‘It is evident that the Froude slander is again insidiously at work among us and must again be checked if its blighting influence is to be avoided.’

‘Prof Calderwood of Edinburgh University was saying in 1896 that if Froude’s story was false it was a duty to say so, as the fiction had a bad effect on the best of his students. And the fiction is bound to have a defiling effect on adolescent minds prone to dwell unduly on sexual topics. I have myself seen the shrugging of shoulders and supercilious smiles among youths to whom I have extolled C as the apostle of righteousness and clean living.’

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Sir James Crichton-Browne:

A Very Victorian Psychiatrist

1840-1937

Crichton-Browne and the Carlyles

Relations with the Carlyle Family

Writings about Carlyle

The Preface to the New Letters

The Imputation Medically Considered -1903

^{Sir James
Crichton-Browne:}