Ageing

As early as 1848, aged fifty-two, Carlyle was beginning to regard himself as aged. In his journal of 16 10 48 he writes:
'I am growing old, I am grown old. My next book must be that of an old man.'
He was right about the book. Frederick the Great was to occupy the next thirteen years, to make him an old man, and to ruin his wife's health.
His preoccupation with noise increased, leading him to construct a soundproof room at the top of the Chelsea house. With the years his hypochondriasis decreased a little, although he was always reluctant to admit it; while his feelings of depression, his insomnia, his sensitivity to noise, and his 'loneliness' increased. Ever contradictory, he complained of loneliness while deliberately isolating himself from society and his wife.
In these years too, Jane’s health deteriorated and she became increasingly bitter about her husband, and her health deteriorated. His infatuation with Lady Ashburton continued, and was now the cause of much domestic disharmony, especially after he visited Paris with the Ashburtons in October 1851.

1851

As 1851 begins he describes himself as sickly and dispirited. In his journal he writes:
'I can get to no work.' Both had flu in March. Jane had insomnia, neuralgia, was using morphia freely, and was irritable.
But he soon started his life of John Sterling and completed it within three months.

Taking the Waters

In the summer they visited the spa at Malvern to take the fashionable 'water cure' under the direction of the famous Dr Gully. They were not alone; Tennyson, George Eliot, Dickens, Ruskin, Darwin, Bulwer-Lytton, Macaulay and Florence Nightingale were others to do so.
James Gully, an Edinburgh graduate, had published a book on 'neuropathy' in 1837, and opened his establishment at Malvern in 1842, providing hot and cold baths for hypochondriasis, and a variety of water treatments, especially for 'nervous patients'. He edited the Water Cure Journal, first published in 1847, and Malvern became the premium spa for the next thirty years. The success of the treatment was probably due to discontinuing the many drugs that his patients had been taking before their arrival, some of which, especially mercury, were injurious to health. Water at least was harmless
Carlyle submitted himself to bathing, packing, and drinking, and concluded that water, taken as a medicine, was the most destructive thing he had tried. He felt no better for his sojourn, and found it 'strange, half-ridiculous.' The next month he was describing himself as 'full of gloom and heaviness, and totally out of health, bodily and spiritual.'
He was contemplating Frederick, and worried about his mother, now obviously declining in health. When he visited her in September she sensed all was not well between him and Jane, and was disappointed that he had come alone. 'I wad ha' liked well to see Janie ance mair.'

1852

The year was spent reading for Frederick, visiting Germany to research his subject, and finally making a start to the writing. From the start he regarded the book as something that had to be done, but in some ways a bad choice for him: he knew he would not enjoy the labour. Jane continued thin and unwell, and so hostile to her husband that, after nursing him through a minor illness, she could write to his mother:
'I am surprised that so good and sensible a woman as yourself should have brought up her son so badly that he should not know what patience and self denial mean.'
In June he was 'unusually torpid in the bowels and weak and lazy,' and complained constantly about his work. At the end of August he made his visit to Germany and described himself on tour as 'half dead', and suffering from 'indigestion, insomnia and continual chaotic wretchedness.' This did not prevent him making an extensive trip to Rotterdam, the Rhine towns, Luther country, Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin. At home, the cock in the neighbouring yard disturbed him, and plans for the soundproof room were made. On 9th Nov 1852 he reviews his 'conduct' in his journal:
'My survey of the last eight or nine years of my life yields little comfort in the present state of my feelings. Silent, weak rage, remorse even, which is not common with me... for my health is miserable too, diseased liver I privately preceive has much to do with the phenomenon; and I cannot yet learn to sleep again.... I am growing to preceive that I have become an old man.'

1853 - The Soundproof Room

Plagued by noises, especially the neighbours’ cock crowing, the soundproof room was constructed at the top of the house, and was completed by the end of the summer. It proved a disappointment, shutting out local noises but not those from the increasing railway traffic in the distance. Nevertheless he wrote there, isolated from most noises - and from his wife - until Frederick was completed twelve years later.


His mother's health had been steadily declining for a long time and she died on Christmas day, 1853. He reached Scotsbrig the previous day and was with her at the end. He had written her an affectionate and heartfelt letter three weeks earlier, but had not omitted to give her a bulletin about his own health:
'As to my health, I am almost surprised to report it is so good. In spite of all these tumbling and agitations, I really feell almost better than I have done in late years; certainly not worse; and at this time within sight of sixty it is strange how little decay I feel; nothing but my eyesight gone a very little; and my hope, but also my fear or care at all, about this world, gone a great deal!'

1854 - On the Interpretation of Dreams

In April, 1854, wrestling unhappily with the early stages of Frederick, he wrote in his journal:
'Surely now I am at the bottom of the wheel.'
'I dream horribly - the fruit of incurable biliousness: waste scenes of solitary desolation, gathered from Craigenputtoch, ......endless uplands of scraggy moors..... I am quite a hermit there too - fit to go into Dante's Inferno; with other visions less speakable, of a similar type. Every vision, I find, is the express symbol and suitable representation of the mood of mind then possessing me. Also, it is sometimes weeks after the actual dream, as of these Dantesque Galloway moors, when some other analogous dream or circumstance first brings them to my waking recollection - a thing rather curious to me.' Carlyle also believed that dreams were only remembered when the nerves were disturbed by ill-health.
Isolated by his work, he may not have been aware that gossip about him was already circulating round London. It was the year of the Ruskin scandal, his marriage annulled for non-consummation. Gossiping about it in the House of Commons Smoking Room, Gavin Duffy, an admirer of of Carlyle, was told that his hero, too, was impotent. At social gatherings Mrs Carlyle was quizzed about her husband's attachment to Lady Ashburton.
An end of year report to his Canadian relatives on 13 12 54 tells them:
'I have been in poorish health, rather worse than you used to witness in me, but not very much worse.' He blames the house repairs, mother's death, lack of progress with his work, but most of all, 'that most serious fact,' his age, but ends cheerily by adding that age has had wonderfully little effect on him - yet.

1855

As his solitary writing continued he became even more pessimistic, with thoughts of death, of ' freedom from the unworthy wretchedness of life.' In May he wrote to Emerson calling 'this last year a grimmer lonelier one with me than any I can recollect for a long time.' Frederick was 'a Task that I cannot do, that generally seems to me not worth doing, and yet must be done.'
Jane began a journal of her discontent in October, 'very bleak and barren', making explicit her reasons:
'That eternal Bath House. [Lady Ashburton's] I wonder how many thousand miles Mr C has walked between there and here, putting it altogether; setting up always another milestone and another betwixt himself and me.'
In the winter months she was spending weeks in bed with 'flu' and taking morphia regularly. Carlyle was either oblivious or unsympathetic. By November she was telling her journal that her 'most constant and pressing anxiety is to keep out of Bedlam.'

1856

When Carlyle did appear in public, his monologues became more and more grim, and he talked down all interruptions. Sydney Dobell, the poet, describes him travelling in 1856 from Edinburgh to Kirkcaldy by train, 'swaying like a wild creature, denouncing railways, the 19th century, steam engines, cheap literature, clever people, and civilisation generally.' His fellow-passengers did not know his identity but he put them into 'a state of mesmeric possession, and stilled every voice but his own.'

Domestic Violence?

Jane was more irritable. She made a cryptic journal entry on the 21st June, originally suppressed by Froude:
'...the chief interest of today expressed in blue marks on my wrists.' This suggests some struggle between husband and wife - it has even been suggested that he was restraining her from some suicidal attempt. There is nothing to support this.

 Later in the year, after being offered accommodation on Lady Ashburton's private train to Scotland, she and Carlyle found themselves travelling with the servants. Carlyle made no protest, but Jane was outraged and her correspondence with her husband during the summer is vitriolic, especially when he joined the Ashburtons in the Highlands.

1857 - Lady Ashburton's Death

Jane was now obviously unwell, thin, weak and with a cough. Lady Ashburton wintered on the Riviera, mortally ill with tuberculosis, She died suddenly in Paris on the 4th May. Carlyle wrote to his brother John:
'I have lost such a friend as I never had, nor am again in the least likelihood to have, in this stranger world; a magnanimous and beautiful soul.' …'The most queen-like woman I had ever known or seen. The honour of her constant regard had for ten years back been among my proudest and most valued possessions - lost now, gone - for ever gone!' His wife was not distressed, but irritatingly aware that many visitors came to Cheyne Row after the death only to see how her husband was taking the loss.
By June he was able to tell John that he was in better health, but 'in sombre, mournful mood, conscious of great weakness, and a defeated kind of creature...'
Jane was sleepless and had neuralgia later in the year. After a holiday in Scotland with his sister, he showed a little remorse for his conduct to his wife. His own strength was diminishing, but by the last day of the year he could write:
'I am holding on here; health still holding out.'

1858

Jane had the worst winter yet - colds, pleuritic pain, and servant problems. She was drinking more spirits than were good for her. Their friend Froude remarks that Carlyle was 'amazingly patient for him).'
Carlyle remained isolated , and became agitated and fearful at times, sleeping poorly and thinking that he would not live to complete his book. But the first part of the work went to the printers in May. As was now becoming a regular habit, he holidayed alone in Scotland at his sisters, and as always was more sympathetic to his wife by letter and when separated from her. On the 9th July:
'My poor, heavy-laden, brave, uncomplaining Jeannie! Oh, forgive me, forgive me for the much I have thoughtlessly done and omitted, far, far, at all times, from the poor purpose of my mind.'
Two days later:
'Oh my little woman! What a suffering thou hast had , and how nobly borne! With a simplicity, a silence, courage, and patient heroism which are only now too evident to me.'
HIs letters failed to reassure her. Lady A was gone, but she feared his letters may have been written with one eye on a future biographer.
Despite everything, and in his 63rd year, he was able to make another strenuous German tour including Prague and a return to Berlin and Dresden, with many visits to battlefields associated with Frederick.

1859-1863 - A Babe in the Wood

The following years continued in much the same way, as Frederick dragged on. Even Carlyle began to drink brandy regularly. His mood fluctuated, and he was slowing down. 1861 brought another attack of lumbago.
He was difficult about Jane's absences from home. On 30.8.61 she writes to her friend Mrs Russell:
'My servants are pretty well got into the routine of the house now, and if Mr C. were like other men, he might be left to their care for two or three weeks, without fear of consequences. But he is much more like a spoiled baby than like other men. I tried him alone for a few days, when I was afraid of falling seriously ill, unless I had a change of air.....But the letter that came from him every morning was like the letter of a Babe in the Wood, who would be found buried with dead leaves by the robins if I didn't look to it.' She had planned to stay away for two or three weeks but returned within days. '..I found him so out of sorts on my return that I gave it up, with inward protest and appeal to posterity.'
An 1862 letter from Carlyle written to her when she was at Folkestone makes his dependence clear:
'Nothing is wrong about the house here, nor have I failed in sleep or had other misfortune; nevertheless, I am dreadfully low-spirited, and feel like a child wishing Mammy back.' [His italics]

Jane's Illness

Photographs show his wife thin and ill. She had stomach complaints, neuralgic pains in the face and arm, and finally, on the 22nd September, fell badly in the street trying to board an omnibus and avoid a passing cab. She tore ligaments in her leg, was brought back to the house and tried to shield Carlyle from the seriousness of her injuries. The nerves and muscles were injured on the side she fell on, and for a time she was unable to close her mouth. Her husband told her:
'Jane, ye had better shut your mouth.' She tried to tell him that she couldn't.
'Jane, ye'll find yourself in a more compact and pious frame of mind, if ye shut your mouth.' He went on to tell her that she should be grateful the accident was no worse. She wrote to a friend:
'Thankful! Thankful for what? For having been thrown down in the street when I had gone on an errand of charity? For being disabled, crushed, made to suffer in this way? I am not thankful, and I will not say that I am.' Carlyle told her he was sorry to see her so rebellious.
For the next year she was very ill. She became profoundly depressed by her pain and her situation. In his Reminiscences Carlyle relates how she made him promise that he would not put her in a madhouse should she lose her wits. At another time she gave him instructions for her burial.
Like her husband, she was prone to exaggeration, but the evidence points to her being physically and mentally very ill in 1863-64. She sought treatment at home, went to St Leonards for a holiday, with no improvement. Finally she travelled back to Scotland and Thornhill to stay with a friend and her doctor husband, There she slowly improved, and returned to London in October weak but much improved. Her husband was greatly relieved. 

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