The last years- 3
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HEALTH:
1864 (1)‘The Worst’
In the second week of the new year, Carlyle, in correspondence with Neuberg about the next volume of Frederick, adds:
‘We are in profound misery here;- I cannot for my life understand in what degree of danger - but the suffering itself is heartbreaking. The Fates are not kind to me in these months.. Ah me!’The doctors proposed a change of air – ‘getting to St Leonards as soon as the season would permit', Carlyle notes on her letters. He describes how she was transported there in early March, 1864. A special ‘sick carriage’, coffin-like in appearance, as husband and wife separately thought, was used to take her from Cheyne Row to the station, and by rail to St Leonards. When Carlyle left her there:
‘My little darling looked sweet gratitude upon me…but heaviness, sorrow, and a want of hope was written on her face.’She stayed there with her ex-maid, now married to a Dr Blakeston. Carlyle was despatched home the same evening, to resume work on the last volume of Frederick. Her hosts sent him vague bulletins about her health, and he wrote Jane short letters daily. He visited her at the end of the month, ‘but learned nothing intimate; as if she rather avoided much communication with me…Her mood of fixed quiet sorrow, with no hope in it but of enduring well, was painfully visible.’
At the end of April, the Carlyles, unwilling to accept further hospitality from the Blakestons, who would accept no remuneration, rented a small furnished house in St Leonards. Carlyle’s brother John came to stay with them there.
During these months Mrs Carlyle appears to have written no letters except for one at the end of |March, when Lord Ashburton died and she wrote briefly to her friend the second Lady Ashburton:
‘My spirit flies to your dear side, while my poor body is chained here with a cruel malady that I believe will prove fatal tho’ the doctors hold out hopes still.’Thereafter there are rare short notes to her husband. On the 8th April:
‘Oh, my darling! God have pity on us! Ever since the day after you left, whatever flattering accounts may have been sent you, the truth is I have been wretched – perfectly wretched day and night with that horrible malady. Dr B knows nothing about it more than the other doctors. So God help me, for on earth is no help!’On the 19th she writes:
‘It is no “morbid despondency”; it is a positive physical torment day and night – a burning, throbbing, maddening sensation in the most nervous part of me ever and ever.. How be in good spirits or have any hope but to die! When I spoke of going home it was to die there; here were the place for living, if one could! ‘The following week:
‘Oh, my husband! I am suffering torments! Each day I suffer more horribly. Oh, I would like you beside me! I am terribly alone. But I don’t want to interrupt your work..’At the end of April she writes to her aunts in Edinburgh:
‘…my sufferings are terrible. The malady is in my womb – you may fancy. It is the consequence of that unlucky fall; no disease there, the doctors say, but some nervous derangement. Oh, what I have suffered, my aunts!…..Ah, my aunts, I shall die; that is my belief!’Carlyle describes moving into the unsatisfactory house. Jane came to dinner the first night, 'but could hardly sit it out.’ She never attempted it again. He describes her: ‘With intellect clear and even inventive, her whole being was evidently plunged in continual woe, pain as if unbearable, and no hope left; in spite of our encouragements no steady hope at all.’ He took her for daily drives; she scarcely spoke. She would see none of the many visitors; ‘nothing could so indicate to what depth of despair the ever-gnawing pain and boundless misery had sunk this once brightest and openest of human souls.’
She developed, in addition to fears of dying and insanity, a strange fear of the sea. Recovered, a year later she wrote from a cliff-top house in Devonshire (10 3 65):
‘I am glad to find the insane horror I conceived of the sea, all in one night at St Leonards, has quite passed away.’By the end of June she was no better, and then for twelve nights she did not sleep at all. At the end of them she decided she must leave and insisted on moving by train to stay with the Forsters, escorted by John. The next day she ordered John to make arrangements to travel that night to Dumfries, to stay with her sister-in-law at the Gill. She stayed there until the 23rd July when she moved to the more congenial and quieter home of Dr Russell and his wife at Thornhill.
Carlyle remained in London but wrote almost daily. On the 29th July, he wrote:
‘People do not help me much. Oh darling, when will you come back and protect me? God above will have arranged that for both of us, and it will be His will not ours that can rule it. My thoughts are a prayer for my poor little life-partner who has fallen lame beside me after travelling so many steep and thorny ways. I will stop this, lest I fall to crying altogether.’This is one of the more sympathetic of his letters; others tend to dwell on his own gloom and problems. He refused to see visitors enquiring after his wife.
In Scotland, Jane’s letters become longer and more frequent. She had not enjoyed her journey north:
‘I drank four glasses of champagne in the night! And took a good breakfast at Carlisle. John was dreadfully ill-tempered: we quarrelled incessantly, but he had the grace to be ashamed of himself after, and apologise. On the whole, it was a birthday of good omen. My horrible ailment kept off as by enchantment.’John continued to annoy her. On the day she left the Gill, he told her that if she had ‘ever done anything in her life this would not have been; that no poor woman with work to mind had ever such an ailment as this of mine since the world began’. Carlyle says that she never could forget what John had said.
She was no better at the beginning of August, despite being well-cared for:
‘…and when all this fails to bring me human sleep or endurable nervousness, can you wonder that I am in the lowest spirits about myself.. So long as I had a noisy bedroom or food miscooked even, I had something to attribute my sleeplessness to; now I can only lay it to my diseased nerves, and at my age such illness does not right itself.’But in the next few weeks there were modest signs of improvement. She reports that she is better apart from the sleeplessness, that she has gained five pounds in weight since April, and fears not for her life but for her reason. Then her sleep improved; on the 15th she could write to Carlyle:
‘For five nights now I have gone to sleep about two, and slept off and on till about six.’ Four days later :
‘Something occurred here last evening between the hours of 8 and 9, which produced an extraordinary sensation! Mrs Russell has not got over it yet! My Dear, I laughed! “The first time I had laughed since I came!” And it was no feeble attempt, but a good, loud, hearty laugh! This event and the return of her ability to report it in a witty manner are convincing evidence of improvement, and indeed of how depressed she had been.During the month she gained more weight – she was now eight stones twelve and a half pounds. She had rheumatic pains in her knees and could walk little. She feared the journey back to London. Neuralgic pains were still contributing to her insomnia. And there were black days still. On August 30th she was ‘profoundly disheartened. Every way I turn it looks dark, dark to me.’
By September 7th she seemed as bad as ever:
‘I cannot write. I have passed a terrible night. Sleeplessness and restlessness and the old pain (worse than it has ever been since I came here); and in addition to all that, an inward blackness of darkness….I cannot live through another such time: my reason, at least, cannot live through it.’Nevertheless, her letters show some periods of improvement; there are more of them, they are longer, with a return of her sense of the ridiculous and evidence of better concentration. And despite the quotations, they are not solely about her complaints. On Sept 16th
‘…it looks to my excited imagination, that bed I was born in, like an instrument of red-hot torture; after all those nights that I lay meditating on self-destruction as my only escape from insanity.’Although she is writing of thoughts of suicide as in the past now, she tells Carlyle a day or two later that the irritation is ‘pretty constant’, but not as severe as it used to be. It is worsened by her daily drives, and she dreads the long journey south.
At the end of the month, she laments that after several weeks of improvement she is as bad as ever. She is restless and feels the irritation to be unbearable. She reads in one of Dr Russell’s medical books of a lady with neuralgia who was ‘bent on self-destruction’. But plans are being made for her journey back to London. Despite her complaints her letters continue to be longer and to have more non-medical content.
Her last letter from Thornhill, on the 29th September, the day before the journey back to London, contains complaints about two nights of insomnia followed by a good sleep. The irritation is ‘unbearable.’ She left Scotland apparently improved at times, at others as distressed as ever.