The Last Years
 1865-66: the latter days

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What Jane Thought

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HEALTH:

1 The Lady Harriet Years

2. The Last Years

3.Diagnosis

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HOMEPAGE

Thomas Carlyle

Hyde Park, where Jane died in her carriage

The right arm

In the early part of the year Jane was weak but otherwise in good health and spirits.   In late May 1865, a new symptom appeared. She wrote to  Lady Ashburton:  
"My Darling! my Darling! My heart is full of things to say to you; and I cannot get them said for my arm! Oh that arm! It keeps me miserable and incapable day after day, week after week! And the worst of it is, the pain of it has got to such a pitch that I cannot sleep ten minutes together! That morning after Mr. C went away, I sat down and cried! I felt so little up to taking care of myself by myself and perfectly unnecessary!'… If it weren't for my arm, I should rather like my position. But you know how a constant raging toothache in one's arm spoils the fine weather, and the kind people and everything for one. Tho' I suppose we suffer with a difference, the difference between rheumatism and neuralgia,  whatever that may be.’

Carlyle had left for Scotland on the 20^th May. She wrote to him on the 24^th:
‘When I had cried a very little at being left by myself, I lay on the sofa till mid-day, not sleeping, but considering what to do for the best with this arm, which had got to a pitch, and was reducing me to the state of last year in point of sleep.’

Doctors' Opinions

 She wrote to her husband again on the 3^rd June, telling him that she could only write briefly because of pain in her right hand, which had started a month earlier. She had already consulted both Dr Barnes and Dr Quain. Dr Barnes told her she had no organic disease but a strong predisposition to gout. Dr Quain said she had ‘much fever.’ When she told him his colleague’s diagnosis he concurred:
‘“Quite right,” he said, “that is the fact.”
“Then,” I asked, “perhaps this affair in my arm, so much more painful than what I had in the left arm, is gout?”
“I have not the least doubt that it is !!” was his answer. Pleasant.’

She describes the pain ‘as if a dog had got it in its teeth, and were gnawing at it, and shaking at it furiously.’ Despite all this, she had just completed the decoration of one of the rooms at Cheyne Row.

A few days later, on the 7^th June, Geraldine Jewsbury wrote on her behalf:
‘…not a matter of choice but of necessity, for the pain and swelling in her hand and fingers make them entirely helpless; and she has to feed herself with her left hand..’  She is sleeping ‘very poorly and pulled down by the pain, which seems to increase.’

Detailed Symptoms

On the 12^th of June, Jane wrote to Carlyle in pencil with her left hand – (‘already well done,’ he comments when editing the letters after her death) :
‘I must tell you about my hand: you think the swelling more important than it is; the two middle fingers were much as now for some weeks before you left, but with the thumb and forefinger I could still do much; now the forefinger is as powerless and pained as the other two, that is all the difference, but a conclusive one, for one can do nothing with only a thumb!  I could sometimes sit down and cry. The pain – the chief pain – that which wakes me from my sleep - is in the shoulder and forearm. Even hopeful Dr Quain does not tell me I shall soon get back my hand, only tells me blandly I must learn to write with my left; and it was he who told me to take a black-lead pencil.’

She had been taking anti-febrile powders, but Dr Quain suggested quinine again, and gave her a bumper of champagne. 

Move to Scotland 

She decided to go to Scotland, not to stay with her husband, but to Dr and Mrs Russell at Thornhill, where she had improved in her last illness. Carlyle was already in Dumfriesshire at the Gill, his sister’s home. Jane gave him no warning of her journey until she reached the Railway Hotel at Carlisle on 17^th June. She wrote arranging to meet him in Dumfries.

Her next letter, from Thornhill on 28^th June, is prefaced by Carlyle’s comment: ‘Fool! I had not the least conception of her utter feebleness.’ She reports to him in terms that make it difficult to tell whether she is bitter or considerate:
‘Don’t be bothering, making plans embracing me. The chief good of a holiday for a man is just that he should have shaken off home cares – the foremost of these a wife.’ She mentions their early hard life in Dumfriesshire and goes on :
‘Well my worried arm is pain enough for the present without recalling past griefs.  Today I feel rather easier. And I had more and better sleep last night.  Thanks to exhaustion! for the preceding night I had not closed my eyes at all….I could really feel ‘happy’ if it were not for my arm and the perfectly horrid nights it causes me.’

This letter was dictated to the housemaid  because her left hand had taken cramp. She mentions that she is now taking quinine and iron. 

Return to London

She returned to London on the 24^th July, Carlyle and she having pursued their separate holidays meantime, with one meeting at Dumfries. He joined her train at Dumfries when she travelled south, and accompanied her the few miles to Annan, before resuming his holiday. This, he noted after her death, was to be her last railway journey. ‘I felt,’ he says, ‘in secret extremely miserable; agitated she, no doubt, and even terrified, but resolute – and the lid shut down.’

Back in London, by the 27^th July she was shopping and paying visits. She bought a sling for her arm that fastened round her back. She had been using a ribbon round her neck to support the arm, but it had hurt her neck and ‘drawn it down’; this was a great improvement. Before she left, Dr Russell, unasked, had given her a gloomy prognosis, predicting that both the pain and the inability to use her right arm would continue. 

Improvement 

But she began to improve, and on the 30^th July writes that her hand ‘if not more capable, is at least more venturesome.’ Dr Quain approved the fact that she had discontinued all medication.

By the 7^th August, ‘ the pain is greatly gone out of my arm, and I use my hand a little; this charming penmanship is from my right hand.’ She was fit enough to have cleaned Carlyle’s study and boasts that about three thousand  volumes have passed through her hands. When she writes to Carlyle on the 12^th August she does not even mention her health.

By the 19^th of the month, now holidaying in Folkestone, she is sleeping better than for the last three years, but is weak and unable to walk far. She writes a lengthy letter before finishing: ‘But my hand will do no more.’ By the 23^rd August, 1865, she can write:
‘And the pain is entirely gone out of my arm; I can’t move it any better yet but that is small matter in comparison.  I can do many things with my hand: write (as you can see) – knit – I have knitted myself a  pair of garters – I can play on the piano a little, and I do a few stitches with a very coarse needle.’

Six weeks later, on the 11^th October, she tells Mrs Austin:
‘For me, my neuralgia continues in abeyance – no pain in my left arm, or hand, or anywhere.  And tho’ a certain stiffness remains, I can do myself, without help, almost everything I need to do, and some things not needed. For example, I made myself yesterday a lovely bonnet.’

In December there is no mention of the arm, but she complains of the ‘agony of sick headache.’ 

The Last Days

She was to live for four more months, her mood cheerful, her mind active, but weak and failing in body. Latterly she experienced sharp pains in her back brought on by emotional upsets. These led her to stay in London rather than accompany Carlyle to Edinburgh for his rectorial address. She told him:  
‘You are to speak extempore…now if anything should happen to you, I find upon any sudden alarm there is a sharp twinge comes into my back, which is like to cut my breath, and seems to stop the heart almost; I should take some fit in the crowded house; it will never do, really!’ (Carlyle, Reminiscences)

This was almost certainly angina pectoris. She was found dead in her carriage after such an upset – her dog had injured his paw. 

Summary 

 This episode of pain and loss of power in the right arm was severe and lasted  some five months. In a way it acts as a controlled experiment, enabling a comparison between this right-sided attack and the almost identical episode involving the left arm a year earlier. The symptoms were similar – pain and loss of function – and indeed she states that the pain was more severe in the second attack. Both probably had a similar cause – cervical spondylosis. The difference, an astonishing one, is in her state of mind in the two episodes. In the first she was crushed, profoundly depressed, took to bed, and wrote no letters; in the second she remained stoical, continued all her activities, and made strenuous efforts to overcome the disability, and wrote with her left hand.

 The cessation of correspondence is highly significant. It must be the only occasion in all her adult life that it happened for so long, and will be more accurately measurable when the collected letters reach these years. This technique was shown to be an objective measure of mood  and ill-health in the case of Virginia Woolf, where variations in her huge output, in letters and diaries alone, proved a sensitive index of even her minor illnesses.

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