Jane Welsh Carlyle

The Lady Harriet years-4

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HEALTH:

1 The Lady Harriet Years

1853 –‘An Elderly Dame’

Carlyle began to think himself as an old man at an early age, reflecting the attitudes of his time. He felt the same about his wife when he wrote to his mother in January, 1853:
Jane ‘is stronger than in the past years. She reads now with specs in the candlelight, as well as I; uses her mother’s specs and indeed looks very well in them, going handsomely into the condition of an elderly dame. ’ She was fifty-two.

She visited Carlyle’s mother for what was to be the last time in the summer. At home the soundproof room was under construction.

In the summer she had two teeth extracted, one in error, and had to return to have the third and correct one removed, provoking one of her bilious attacks.

It was a year of deaths. Two of her Welsh relations in Liverpool died within weeks of each other, and Carlyle’s mother died on Christmas Day.

1854- More deaths, less Lady Harriet

Jane spent the winter reading and nursing her colds. Her husband worked steadily in the soundproof room and visited Bath House rarely.

Carlyle’s brother – ‘Doctor John’ – married. His young wife, well advanced in pregnancy, was killed in a railway accident. Jane, never close to him because of his unsympathetic attitude to her illnesses, was less than comforting:
‘……if she had stayed at home and taken the ordinary cares of herself their situations required, she might have borne a living child and done well.’

As for John, he was ‘in an apathetic state that I do not feel much interest in .’

The year was otherwise peaceful – she was in better health, and her husband was seeing less of Lady Harriet.

1855 – Troubles resumed

She retained her sense of humour, writing her Budget of a Femme Incomprise, a witty device to win more housekeeping money from her thoughtless husband which was immediately successful.

But Carlyle resumed his visits to Lady Harriet and Bath House. Jane’s close friend Geraldine Jewsbury had now moved to London, and Jane confided in her and Elizabeth Pepoli. It is likely that Geraldine encouraged Jane in her resentment. She quarrelled with her husband again, and began to argue with him in public. In the past she had joked and teased Carlyle in public, but her behaviour now was more obviously hostile. She interrupted him assertively, and it was noticed. Rogers said that ‘as soon as that man’s tongue stops, that woman’s begins.’ On a visit to Addiscombe in the summer, she walked out on Carlyle on one occasion.

A Journal and a Memoir

In 1855 she began to keep a journal, and about this time virtually dictated a memoir to Ellen Twisleton. This account of her time at Craigenputtock has only recently come to light (Fielding, 1999) and makes clear how unhappy she was there in the early years of the marriage. The journal - planned to be about only the ‘fact of things’ - soon showed her feelings, and she famously wrote:
‘That eternal Bath House. 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.’

Carlyle had shaved his beard off after a wager with Lord Ashburton. Jane thought he looked like an ‘escaped maniac.’ It is astonishing how often in her letters she uses the imagery of insanity. During the year she was continuing to take morphia for insomnia, and she had her own fears of insanity:
‘My constant and pressing anxiety is to stay out of Bedlam.’

In November she had to visit the Tax Commissioners on Carlyle’s behalf. Typically, he told her that he felt an obligation to go, but did not do so, and she was obliged to negotiate for him, to their astonishment and irritation.

At the end of the year she spent most of the time in the house, weak and unwell, but she went to the Grange for Christmas, determined to assert herself, and to compete socially with Lady Ashburton. Mrs Brookfield was a witness to the results:

‘In conversation, clever and amusing as she was, Mrs Carlyle had the fatal propensity of telling her stories at extraordinary length.,. With her Scotch accent and her perseverance in finishing off every detail, those who were merely friendly acquaintances and not devotees sometimes longed for an abridgement, and perhaps also to have their own turn in the conversation.’

Presents were always distributed by the hosts on Christmas Day, and Jane received a silk dress. She was furious, refused to accept it, and said that the gift was meant as a hint that her clothes were inadequate. Lady Harriet had to placate her. She returned home to spend the next few weeks in the house with her now invariable colds and ‘flu’. Carlyle wrote to Lady Harriet:
‘I dare not write to you, dare not speak to you, scarcely think of you…’

1856-57- Illness and Death

Jane was fatigued, exhausted. Her friend Geraldine thought she was dying; she abandoned former friends. But this ‘spell in my nerves’ vanished overnight on the return from the Falklands of an old friend, George Rennie: ‘…last week I was all for dying; this week all for ball dresses.’

She had much to provoke her. Through all these trials Carlyle kept a portrait of Lady Harriet hanging on one side of the mantelpiece, facing his own on the other!.

In June Jane wrote in her journal: ’blue marks on my wrist.’ Were they inflicted in a quarrel? Was Carlyle restraining her for some other reason? Was she threatening suicide? We do not know.

In July, Lady Harriet hired Queen Victoria’s saloon railway carriage to journey north to Scotland, and invited the Carlyles, who were also going north on holiday, to share it. While Lady Harriet enjoyed the Queen’s accommodation, the Carlyles were placed in a small adjoining carriage and shared the journey with Lady Harriet’s maid and personal physician. Jane showed no anger at the time but was hurt, especially when her husband defended Lady Harriet’s behaviour.

When he then joined the Ashburtons in the Highlands, her letters to him were hostile and for some time she signed herself ‘yours faithfully.’ He wrote to say that he was not enjoying himself. She replied:
‘In spite of all objections…..I dare say you are pretty comfortable. Why not? When you go to any house, one knows it is because you choose to go, and when you stay it is because you choose to stay. You don’t, as weakly amiable people do, sacrifice yourself for the pleasures of ‘others’. So pray do not think it necessary to be wishing yourself at home and ‘all that sort of thing’ on paper.’

She was writing from Thornhill in Dumfriesshire, where she was staying with her friends the Russells. Dr Russell must have been worried by her consumption of morphia, and advised her to stop taking it. She refused to accept a lift bqck to London with the Ashburtons.

In October 1856, with the onset of winter, her health worsened. She had a ‘fearful pain’ in her left side for a short time, but had improved within a month, although at the best of times she was ‘weak’, even when free from coughs and sleeping better. But the winter colds began, and she spent most of the winter confined to the house. For eight weeks she had not appeared at breakfast, she wrote on 24/12/56, and she was hardly ever out until the following April.

Two sure signs of significant ill-health characterise these months: her letters were rare, and she stopped seeing visitors. At Easter 1857 she wrote that she was ‘very ill again…..all these months confined to two rooms, coughing and not sleeping, and very weak and dull.’ In March Carlyle wrote to Lady Harriet (now on the Riviera for her health’s sake) ‘Jane has not breakfasted with me for five months.’

In short, Jane's physical health deteriorated in 1856-57, and her tolerance of her husband’s behaviour temporarily came to an end.

The Death of Lady Harriet

In May Lady Harriet died suddenly in Paris. She had been ill for some time with dropsy, but her death was unexpected. Carlyle told his brother: ‘I have indeed lost such a friend as I never had, not am again in the least likelihood to have, in this stranger world; a magnanimous and beautiful soul.’

Unsurprisingly, Jane did not share his feelings:
‘I was shocked and dispirited, and feeling silence best. But you could not guess the outward disturbance consequent on this event! The letters and calls of inquiry and condolence that have been eating up my days for the last two weeks! Distressingly and irritatingly.’

She was irritated by the many callers, who came to condole, but really to see how she and her husband were reacting to the news.

From now on Jane’s health and spirits steadily improved.

An independent private obituary of Lady Ashburton was given by Charles Greville, Clerk to the Privy Council. On the 10^th May he wrote in his diary:
‘Lady Ashburton was perhaps, on the whole, the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day.’
‘It is never difficult for a woman in a great position and with some talent for conversation to attract a large society around her, and to have a number of admirers and devoted habitués. Lady Ashburton laid herself out for this, and while she exercised hospitality on a great scale, she was more of a Precieuse than any woman I have known.’ (Greville Memoirs, Vol VII, 286-7))

He goes on to say that she was intimate with many literary celebrities; that ‘her vanity was flattered by the homage of such men, of whom Carlyle was the principal.’

Greville claims that Clarendon was the only man with whom she was ever in love, but that two men were certainly in love with her: John Mill – she didn’t return his love – and Charles Buller; she was very intimate with him but didn’t return his love. She and Buller were very alike.

Greville says that her faults were her capriciousness, and her disposition to quarrel over nothing. She fell out of love with her own brother and sister-in-law.

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