The last years- 1863-1866

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Thomas Carlyle

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First published here 11/00

1863 - Before the Fall  

‘The Valley of the Shadow of Frederick’

On Tuesday, 22^nd September, 1863 Jane had an accident that was to precipitate the most incapacitating illness of her life. But this was against a background of years of minor ill-health, and she began 1863 unwell, and had a range of symptoms during the nine months that preceded the fall.

In January, she wrote to Mrs Russell of an illness caused by servants quarrelling and leaving:  
‘The illness I have had and am still having, has been caused palpably enough by a mental shock which struck me deadly sick at stomach, and struck the pain into my back, in the first moment of it.  And tho’ my mind has recovered its balance, these consequences still remain.’

She gives a witty description of these household events over several pages, and concludes:  
‘…read my paltry tale as a psychological illustration and it is  enough to throw one into a fit of misanthropy, besides making one sick at stomach and breaking one’s spine in two.’

Carlyle’s work on Frederick continued, and distressed her. She wrote to Mrs Austin on 26^th February:  
‘Life is too monotonous, and too dreary in the valley of the shadow of Frederick the Great!  I wonder how we shall live, what we shall do, where we shall go, when that terrible task is ended.’

Facial Neuralgia

There were new symptoms in March. On the 17^th she wrote to Grace Welsh of her head being in a ‘disorganised state’:  
‘The cold first came into my tongue, swelling it, and making it raw on one side, so that for days I had to live on slops, and restrict my speech to monosyllables; then it got into my jaws and every tooth in my mouth; and that is the present state of me.  I am writing with my pocket handkerchief tied over my lower face, and my imagination much overclouded by weary, gnawing pain there.’

Ten days later she was ‘almost cured’. This attack suggests trigeminal neuralgia. In another letter written to Grace Welsh about the same time she sympathises with her:  
‘I know what a wearing misery that neuralgia is.  I, too, have had it in my head and face till I have been nearly, indeed once altogether delirious. My long winter illnesses usually commence in that way; an intense toothache, as it were, all thro’ my head and face, that leaves me no moment’s ease, day or night…’

In late May she had a surprise visit from her first servant, Bessy Barnet, not seen for many years, and now married to a Dr Blakiston in St Leonards. Bessy was so distressed by Jane’s appearance that she told her, (Jane wrote at the time) that she ‘had no peace for thinking about me; I had looked so ill, she was sure I had some disease! Had I? I told her “None that I could specify, except the disease of old age, general weakness, and discomfort.”’ Bessy, said by Jane to have ‘an imagination morbid almost to insanity,’ also said that she looked ‘just like Mrs B looked when she was dying of cancer.’ Bessy pressed her to visit her at St Leonards, which she did in the first week of June.

On her return Jane wrote in her letters that St Leonards was ‘the pleasantest place I know.’ She liked the sea air, found her host to be a clever physician: he gave her medication, champagne and delicacies. She improved for two days but on her return to Chelsea she was sick for two days, could eat nothing at all, and after a week in bed, and Mr Barnes’ mustard blisters to her stomach,  was ‘weak as a dishclout.’ Carlyle was planning to take her to the Grange and the Ashburtons; she would rather have gone elsewhere.  In July she had a visit from Geraldine Jewsbury, who, also shocked by her appearance, wrote on 24^th July: ‘She looks terribly ill and weak. He is always in the depths of Frederick.’

'Devilry in my arm'

In the the next few weeks, before her sixty-second birthday on the 14^th July, she began to have pain in the left arm, which worsened when she visited the Grange in August.

She first gives details of this ‘devilry in my arm’, causing her ‘constant pain day and night’, in a letter of September 16^th:  
‘…not able to comb my hair, or do anything in which a left arm is needed as well as a right one!  I think I told you I had pain more or less in my left arm for two months before I left London. It was trifling in the beginning; indeed, nothing to speak of, when I did not move it backwards or upwards. I did not think it worth sending for Mr Barnes about at first.’

She went to the Grange; it worsened.  She consulted Dr Quain, Lord Ashburton’s physician. He told her :  
‘…before I had spoken a dozen words, that it wasn’t rheumatism I had got, but neuralgia (if any good Christian would explain to me the difference between these two things I should feel edified and grateful!)’

Dr Quain prescribed quinine and an embrocation of opium, aconite, camphor and chloroform, with doses of castor oil every second day. She found that the embrocation helped for a few minutes, but the arm was ‘as stiff and painful as ever when left to itself.’

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