Family History

She was born in Haddington, near Edinburgh, but both her parents came from farming stock in the south-west of Scotland, as did her future husband. Both her parents had the same surname: Welsh, but their families were unrelated. Her father was born at Craigenputtoch, later to play a dramatic role in the Carlyles’ lives, and went to Edinburgh University to study medicine. After qualifying he served for three years with a famous Scottish regiment, making sufficient money to buy a partnership in a medical practice. He settled in Haddington, some 16 miles east of Edinburgh, a Royal Burgh, and at that time a prosperous county town on the mail-coach road to London.

Jane’s mother was Grace Baillie Welsh. Her family came from the Thornhill area of Dumfriesshire. Her mother, and Jane in her turn, liked to boast of an ancestry which included gypsies, William Wallace and John Knox. She grew up to be beautiful, charming and capricious, and the couple married in 1800. Their only child, Jane Baillie Welsh was born –two months prematurely -on July 14^th, 1801, at her parents’ home in the centre of Haddington, now a museum.

Dr Welsh soon became the senior partner in the practice. He was an intelligent, serious and industrious man, punctual and methodical; his wife was moody, temperamental, and flighty. Their daughter inherited a curious blend of her parents’ characters. Her father was a disciplinarian, his wife quite the opposite, indulging their daughter one moment, checking her the next.

Childhood

There are numerous anecdotes about her childhood, many of them set down in a memoir by her friend Geraldine Jewsbury, the novelist, immediately after Jane’s death. When Carlyle received them he said they had a ‘certain mythic truth’. Jane was precocious. When she was five she begged her father to be allowed to learn Latin, and sat up late at night to study. It seems no accident that Samuel Smiles- the author of Self Help, and the best-selling apostle of the work ethic - was also raised in Haddington. She was a tomboy, fighting with the boys at school, emulating their exploits, walking along the parapet of the long bridge over the river. She was lively and talkative, able from an early age to charm adults and other children.

She attended the local school, but when she was ten her father engaged a teacher there to give her extra tuition. His name was Edward Irving, later to be her admirer and suitor, and a famous charismatic preacher. A close friend of Thomas Carlyle, he later introduced him to Jane.

For the next year he taught Jane from six to eight each morning, and again at the end of each school day. Thereafter she had other tutors, attended a school for girls as a boarder for a year, but was unhappy there and returned to the local day school. In the summer she had holidays with her father’s family at Penfillan, their Nithsdale farm.

Adolescence

Her adolescent years were stormy. Her inconsistent mother found Jane uncontrollable: both had been spoiled. Grace Welsh was said to be ‘delicate’ in health, and Jane was already beginning to emulate her, complaining of headaches, and often moody, tearful and difficult, especially with her mother.

Jane wrote her first novel at thirteen, and the next year followed it with a tragedy in five acts. She wrote verse, played the piano, and sang. There were trips to Edinburgh relatives, and she began to take an interest in boys. Aged sixteen, she moved to the city to attend Miss Hall’s school – a kind of finishing school of the time – until she was eighteen. At about this time Edward Irving began visiting and courting her in Edinburgh, at her uncle’s house in George Square. She returned to Haddington in 1819 to an active social life, more quarrels with her mother, and frequent migrainous headaches.

In September, 1819 her father caught typhus fever from one his patients, and died within two days. Both Jane and her mother were shattered by his death, as was her mother, but Mrs Welsh was determined to remain in Haddington, and Jane resolved to repay her father for her education by taking some pupils.

Courtship

Meantime Carlyle had become a close friend of Edward Irving, and together they walked from Edinburgh to Haddington on 26^th May, 1821, when Carlyle met his future wife for the first time. He was smitten at once, and found her ‘beautiful, bright and earnest.’ She was less impressed, especially by his uncouth manners, rough speech, and clumsiness. But within a day she had been captivated by his conversation and his intelligence. He resolved to further her education , and his courtship, by teaching her German, and she agreed to his sending her books. This was the excuse for correspondence, and eventually for further visits. But five years were to pass before they married. Mrs Welsh was less than enthusiastic about Carlyle’s wish to marry her daughter, and even less about his prospects; and Jane herself, although gradually won over, made no secret of the fact that she did not love Carlyle. He was a father figure, and of this she was fully conscious. She wrote to Carlyle in Nov 1822:

‘Without plan, hope, or aim, I had lived two years when my Good Angel sent you hither. I had never heard the language of talent and genius but from my Father’s lips – I had thought I should never hear it more. You spoke like him; your eloquence awoke in my soul the slumbering admirations and ambitions that His first kindled there.’

Their correspondence became regular: they joked about Irving; Carlyle advised her about her hours of study; he made sure that she knew in detail about his dyspepsia and its torments. Her headaches remained frequent, sometimes keeping her in bed for several days.

In 1823, she told him in a letter that she loved him, but that she could only be his friend and never his wife. By 1824 she addressed him in letters as ‘Dearly Beloved’, but continued to flirt with other men. In the same year Carlyle visited London and Paris, and ten months passed without him seeing Jane. She had many suitors during his absence.

By 1825 Carlyle was thinking of taking up farming, and suggested he might rent Craigenputtoch, near Dumfries, a farm Jane inherited from her father. Jane told him she would as soon build a nest on the Bass Rock, and repeated that she loved him but was not in love with him – he would have to have a certain livelihood before she would marry him.

But by that summer they were planning marriage, and attempting to find the financial means to do so. There was a severe upset when Jane confessed something she had concealed from him: that she had been in love with Irving in the past. Carlyle wrote that he was poor, sick and helpless, lying upon ‘the thorny couch of pain,’ and ‘the iron pillow of despair.’ ‘Leave me, then!’ he wrote. Jane replied that she would never do so, and that they would be happy, and that if they were not, it were better that they suffer together. Prophetic words!

Eventually the practical problems were overcome, and Mrs Welsh was won over. But she was not to live with them after the marriage. Carlyle wrote to Jane: ‘The Man should bear rule in the house and not the Woman. This is an eternal axiom, the Law of Nature…’ With this grim warning, they embarked on married life on October 17^th , 1826, marrying at Templand, Thornhill, and moving to Comely Bank, Edinburgh, their first home, the same day.

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