The publication by Froude of Carlyle's Reminiscences and his own biography started a controversy that was to continue for many years. The story is a tangled one and a brief chronology may help to guide the reader through it:
There were plans to bury Carlyle in Westminster Abbey, but Carlyle had opted for Ecclefechan. The criticism began before he was cold in his local kirkyard. Most of the obituaries pointed out that, despite his achievements, he had in the latter part of his life become a caricature, a figure of fun, both for not living up to his own precepts and for his outrageous misanthropy.
Within a few years of his death Carlyle's reputation had been fatally damaged by the various publications, and his biographer had been brought down with him. Nearly all the reviews of the
biography were hostile, but a few were perceptive. Herbert Cowell, reviewing Froude in Blackwoods Magazine, wrote:
'Froude underestimates the gravity of Carlyle's faults and wholly exaggerates the consequences, at least as regards Mrs Carlyle, which he attributes to them........ But without in the least disparaging the virtue of that complete subjugation of his whole life and prospects to whatever he may have regarded as his ruling purpose, it is quite clear that no effort at all was made to recast his own character, temper, and habits in accordance with those views of duty which he was perpetually inculcating upon others..........But Mrs Carlyle was no victim. She knew exactly what she undertook.'
D A Wilson's Mr Froude and Carlyle was the first extended attack on Froude, accusing him at length of inaccuracy, and of
being concerned only to make money out of Carlyle, alleging that he had cultivated Carlyle over many years to this end.
The edition of new letters by Mrs Carlyle, published 1903, contained a savage attack by the psychiatrist Crichton Browne in the long introduction, and constant sniping by Carlyle's nephew Alexander in the footnotes. Both savaged the dead Froude. Provoked by this, Froude's family, who had discovered his essay 'My Relations with Carlyle' on his death, nine years earlier, now decided to publish it. In the same year Crichton-Browne also published his medical article Froude and Carlyle: The Imputation Medically Considered - an even more detailed and gratuitously vicious attack on Froude - and with Alexander Carlyle published the Nemesis of Froude as a rejoinder to My Relations. One or two lines will show the extreme tone:
'...Froude would hold Carlyle up to public obloquy as being all flaws, with no sound part in him, as selfish, cruel, arrogant, neglectful, hypocritical, as a man who ought never to have married, a Lothario and a wife-beater...'
This short pamphlet originated in a pencil notebook found, in a despatch box with Carlyle's will, after Froude's death in 1894.
It was written in Vedado, Cuba between the12th and 15th March, 1887. With it was a letter from Sir James Stephen, dated the 9th of December, 1886, which Froude had privately printed and circulated to justify his conduct in relation to the ownership of Carlyle's papers, including the Reminiscences and the letters. Carlyle had given them to Froude, but later told his niece, Mary Aitken, who acted as his personal secretary in his last years, that she could have them. None of this was put in writing, so the fault was Carlyles. Sir James Stephen was an executor with Froude and supported all his actions in a detailed letter. This account of material Froude had omitted from his biography was only made public by Froude's family nine years after his death, in 1903, and following the virulent attacks on him in the New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle.
Froude begins by describing his friendship with the Carlyles. He first met Carlyle in 1849, when Carlyle was 54. From the start 'It was evident that she was suffering; she was always in indifferent health, she had no natural cheerfulness, at least, none when I knew her.' Yet Jane was 'the most brilliant and interesting woman I had ever fallen in with; so much thought, so much lightness and brilliancy, such sparkling scorn and tenderness combined.'
He recounts what he heard in the Carlyle circle in these early years:- 'Rumour said that she and Carlyle quarrelled often, and I could easily see it from occasional expressions about him which fell from her.' .....'Various hints were dropped in the circle which gathered at the house in Cheyne Row, about the nature of the relations between them, that their marriage was not a real marriage, and was only companionship, etc.'
Froude then left London for some years. returning in 1860. The following year Carlyle asked to see more of him. At that time Carlyle spent most of his day closeted in the soundproof room, and Jane was much alone: 'sarcastic when she spoke about her husband - a curious blend of pity, contempt, and other feelings. One had heard of violent quarrels from others who were admitted within the circle, and one began to realise that they might perhaps be true. One had heard that she had thought of leaving Carlyle, and as if she had a right to leave him if she pleased.' ....'Yet I never knew him admit that he felt well. He never spoke of himself without complaint as if he was an exceptional victim of the Destinies. She was weary of hearing a tale so often repeated, the importance of which she was so well able to value.' ....'He "recked not his own rede", and those whose practice falls short of their theories do not seem to believe really in their theories themselves. Carlyle was impatient, irritable, strangely forgetful of others, self-occupied and bursting into violence at the smallest and absurdest provocation - evidently a most difficult and trying household companion.'
Jane fell ill in 1862 - a 'strange illness' - a year in agonies. 'Carlyle's wild irritability (in one of her letters at the time she described her life with him as like keeping a madhouse) had shattered her at last.' He then realised she had been ill - gave her a carriage, and the last 18 months were the happiest of their married life since the first of it '- i.e. the first years. Carlyle often told him so.
'The worst of those faults I have concealed hitherto. I can conceal them no longer. He (Carlyle) found a remembrance in her Diary of the blue marks which in a fit of passion he had once inflicted on her arms.' Froude seems in no doubt about their origin: 'As soon as he could collect himself he put together a memoir of her, in which with deliberate courage he inserted the incriminating passages (by me omitted) of her Diary, the note of the blue marks among them, and he added an injunction that, however stern and tragic that record might be, it was never to be destroyed.'
This change in Carlyle, and his remorse, were what reminded Froude of the Oedipus myth and which made him regard Carlyle with more 'human feeling.' 'The story, I often said to myself, was as sternly tragic, as profoundly pathetic as the great Theban
drama.' He admits that previously he had found it difficult to like him, 'in the common sense of the word.'
In 1871 Froude was given a large parcel of papers by Carlyle: his memoir of his wife, other memoirs and fragments, and the collection of Jane's letters. Later Carlyle bequeathed them formally to him in his will.
Carlyle had written in his journal that there was 'a secret connected with him unknown to his closest friends, that no one knew and no one would know it, and that without a knowledge of it no true biography of him was possible. He never told Froude 'in words what the secret was, but I suppose he felt that I should learn it from his papers.' ...'When any subject was disagreeable it was his habit to thrust it away, and desire to hear no more of it.'
Froude read Jane's letters, 'and then for the first time I realised what a tragedy the life in Cheyne Row had been - a tragedy as stern and real as the story of Oedipus.' 'The quarrels had been fierce and violent, the remorse was needed and the letters were an expiation.'
He asked John Forster for advice about publication, and was told by him that there was another secret: about the first Lady Ashburton. She had fallen deeply in love with Carlyle; he had behaved nobly, and Lord Ashburton was greatly obliged!
But when Froude read Jane's diary he found it was Carlyle who had 'made himself the plaything of her caprices.'.... 'It was no creation of Mrs Carlyle's jealous fancies. There were in existence, or were, masses of extravagant letters of Carlyle's to the great lady, as ecstatic as Don Quixote to Dulcinea. There was one even in which he asked Lady Ashburton not to tell Mrs Carlyle of some visit which he had paid to her, as she was so angry when she heard of his having been with her.' There was nothing on Lady Ashburton's part but 'the imperious mistress'.
Presumably Froude thought for some time that he had found Carlyle's secret or secrets. Then Geraldine Jewsbury, the romantic novelist and a close friend of the Carlyles, gave him correspondence, and told him that Carlyle was: 'one of those persons who ought never to have married.'
Jane had longed for children and children were denied her. This was at the bottom of all the quarrels and unhappiness. Froude was not surprised, because of the gossip he had heard over the years. Jewsbury told him that Jane never forgave her husband, and had often resolved to leave him.
He asked her about the marks
mentioned in Jane's diary. Jewsbury said she had seen Jane the following day, and that they were caused by personal violence. She added that Jane could be very provoking, and that Carlyle was the nobler of the two.
Geraldine Jewsbury did not live for long after this. When she knew she was dying, she repeated all this to Froude 'with many curious details'. The morning after the wedding Carlyle had torn the flower garden at Comely Bank to pieces. Jane had told
Carlyle much later in their marriage that she had nearly left him. He replied: 'Well, I do not know that I should have missed you; I was very busy just then with Cromwell.'
Froude says that he learned subsequently that all this was an open secret, and
that he received anonymous letters about it. When he published his biography, he decided to omit the bruises but tell of the quarrel. Nevertheless its publication was met with a hail of criticism, and in addition he had to face a lengthy legal quarrel with the family over the papers.
He concludes this private notebook: 'I was keeping back the essential part of the story which had governed my own action, and the world, not knowing the full truth, considered that I made too much of trifles which need not have been spoken at all. If I have now told all, it is because I see that nothing short of it will secure me the fair judgment to which I am entitled. I am certain that I have done the best for Carlyle's own memory. The whole facts are now made known. The worst has been said that can be said, and anything further which can now be told about him can only be to his honour; Already the tendency is to acquit Carlyle and lay the blame (such blame as there is) upon her. The usual custom is to begin with the brightest side and leave the faults to be discovered afterwards. It is dishonest and it does not answer. Of all literary sins, Carlyle himself detested most a false biography.'
There can be no doubt about Froude's sincerity. That he had letters supporting him privately printed, and that he left this notebook - the writing uncorrected - to be found after his death with Carlyle's will, show that he had half an eye on posthumous publication, and the restoration of his integrity and reputation with posterity.
The same could be said of Geraldine Jewsbury's sincerity. She repeated her account to Froude, with embellishments, when she was dying. Unfortunately, she was the most unreliable of witnesses, as the Carlyles themselves both attested. After Jane died and she learned that Carlyle was writing about her, she sent him many anecdotes about her.. Carlyle said of them that there were 'few correct in details, but a certain mythical truth in all or most of them.' She was, after all, a romantic novelist. At various times Jane had described her as a fussy, romantic, hysterical woman, a fool, and had nicknamed her 'Miss Gooseberrry.' Geraldine became passionately attached to Jane, and inordinately jealous of her friendships with other
women, to the extent that Jane wrote ' I am not at all sure she is not going mad.'
Crichton-Browne was a prominent psychiatrist with Dumfriesshire origins. He begins by claiming that there are limits to the 'frank biography' and that has not until now 'been held to include the history of a man's sexual experiences.' He begins immediately to attack Froude - dead and unable to respond - in terms that are typical of the whole article:
The Truth about Carlyle by D A Wilson , published in 1913, continued the attack, especially in the preface contributed by Crichton-Browne. Wilson devoted many years to sniping at Froude in the six volumes of his biography, a kind of scrapbook of previously unpublished material he collected, all designed to restore his hero's reputation. For a full biography, go to
Sir
James-Crichton-Browne - A Very Victorian Psychiatrist, also on this
site.
Nephew of Thomas, born 1842. Edited New letters and memorials of JWC in 1904. Was son of Alec who emigrated to Canada. Regarded by TC as scholarly. Married Mary Aitken, Carlyle's niece in 1879, and lived with her and Carlyle at Cheyne Row until Carlyle's death. Son born there in 1880. Published several volumes of Carlyle correspondence. Vindictive and hostile to Froude. Suppressed evidence, and refused other scholars access to manuscripts.
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Hostilities diminished in the 1930's after Wilson's death and the publication of Waldo H Dunn's Froude and Carlyle(1930), which in 365 pages calmly exposed both bias and suppression of evidence by Wilson, Alexander Carlyle and Crichton-Browne.
Dunn made the new claim that John Ruskin had known of Carlyle's sexual problems and had told Froude. Dr W J Richardson of Tunbridge Wells, a cousin of Ruskin, attended Mrs Carlyle, and suspected on examination that intercourse had not taken place. Jane had admitted it and spoke of her distress at having no children. The doctor told his aunt, Mrs Margaret Cox Ruskin, and John. In 1903 Mrs Joan Ruskin Severn verified Ruskin's statements in writing. This anecdote is typical of many: a third-hand account, a breach of confidence by a physician. It should be treated with reserve.
But Dunn's work is a careful and detailed analysis of the whole story, and he concluded: 'I think it is doubtful whether any man of letters in Great Britain of equal ability has been the object of such bitter misrepresentation as has Froude.'
For many years this seemed the final word. Some of the acrimony has now gone out of the debate, and Froude has been rehabilitated, although academics continue to carp at his minor inaccuracies, and some have serious reservations about him (Fielding and Tarr, 1976). Fielding, for example, calls Froude ' the most quoted and the least liked' of writers on Carlyle, labels him able, bitter, contentious, patronising, tactless, lacking in judgment, and inaccurate, and believes that he 'strongly leaves the impression of being untrustworthy'. Even at this late date the controversy can arouse strong feelings. Reviewing the whole sorry tale now, it is difficult not to conclude that most of these epithets apply
equally to Froude's opponents.
Broughton (1995) is the most recent scholar to tackle what he calls 'The Froude-Carlyle Embroilment: Married Life as a Literary Problem.' He asks: 'Why did any of it matter?' and finds the answer in the changing status of women and marriage at the end of the 19th century, and to some extent in the innovative, revealing biography that Froude had written. He relates the argument to divorce practice of the period, and to concepts of marital cruelty. The idealised conception of Victorian unions as a combination of patriarchal authority and companionate marriage was 'based on an illusory identity of incompatible interests.'
He rightly stresses the fact that the public outcry about Froude's revelations began before any of Froude's views about Carlyle's impotence were made public. It was the revelations that the marriage was unhappy, that there were quarrels, and that he was less than a perfect husband that caused the furor.
Broughton believes that the debate about Carlyle had been going on for some twenty years before Froude's biography and the sexual allegations of 1903. He had been turned form the omnipotent sage into the impotent husband. Broughton is right to say that rumours were widespread during this period - there are several independent sources apart from Froude himself, but Carlyle's reputation was surely more seriously damaged by the
Latter Day Pamphlets of 1850. From that time on he was no longer the honoured prophet. Broughton claims that there was ' a sense of public dissatisfaction with the figure of the openly autocratic husband.'
This can be seen in 1894, in the speeches made when Leslie Stephen launched the Carlyle Memorial fund in December, with a view to purchasing the Cheyne Row house. The 'keynote' address was given by the M.P., Leonard Courtney, and he felt obliged, even at this early date, in the middle of a glowing encomium, to comment on Carlyle: 'As a husband he showed something too much of the arrogance and isolation of genius.' The sexual 'revelations' were not published until 1903.
There was also a widely held belief in the 1890's, which may have come from Carlyle's reputation, that the vocation of writing might lead to failure as a husband. Leslie Stephen, Virginia
Woolf's father illustrates this well.
From these years of rumour and counter-rumour, claim and counter-claim, attack and counter-attack, what remains? And what did it all matter?
There was no disputing the picture that Froude drew of Carlyle's personality in his biography. There were too many independent witnesses to his conduct, and there was the direct testimony of both husband and wife in the
Reminiscences and in their journals and correspondence.
The specific sexual
accusations are less easy to disentangle. There were many rumours, some well-established in the popular imagination, and not all have been mentioned above. There was a well-known story given out by Frank Harris that Carlyle had confessed his sexual failings to him at the spot in Hyde Park where Jane died. Despite Frank Harris being famously unreliable in all his works and dealings, this had wide currency. There were many other tales. A set of baby clothes was said to have been found among Jane's effects after her death; she was said to have been pregnant while at
Craigenputtoch and to have miscarried. Many doctors were said to have been confided in by Mrs Carlyle, and later to have told someone over the dinner table that she was
virgo intacto. Like most rumours most of these stories came at third-hand.
There were others. All these were scrupulously investigated over the years by the family, Crichton-Browne and others, tracing them to their sources. None stood up to scrutiny.
What remains?
Firstly, the provoking fact that Carlyle said that he had a secret, and that no-one
could hope to understand him or write his life because the secret was not known. Any convincing theory must state what the secret was. It can be argued that, when so much is known about his life, his wife and his family, there are no convincing alternatives to a sexual secret. If not that, then what?
Principally, there remains the written evidence about the
marriage night, which shows that there was considerable distress. Carlyle immediately felt ill, opted for separate beds, and wrote to his doctor brother saying that he wished to consult him as a doctor. His letters to his mother describe all this. At the very least there was some temporary sexual problem - perhaps premature ejaculation - at the worst there was a failure to consummate the marriage then.
We do not know what happened subsequently. Their letters throughout their marriage show great affection - absence certainly made their hearts grow fonder. In particular the letters when they are apart during the Carigenputtock years show great affection, including physical affection, with talk of kissing and cuddling.
We know that Carlyle could be attracted to women -to Edinburgh girls in his teens, to Margaret Gordon when he was in Kirkcaldy, and famously and for many years to Lady Ashburton. These were not physical relations, but he doted on the last two.
We know that Jane took much persuasion to marry, and that she told Carlyle that she did not love him before their marriage. We know that she was hurt, angry, and depressed during the years when he was constantly at the Ashburtons.
We know that they did not share a bedroom for most of their marriage, for nearly all the years at Cheyne Row.
We know that they were childless, and in all their huge correspondence there is no hint of disappointment from him or from her.
Carlyle's view of women was hugely influenced by his excessive attachment to his mother, and he sought a mother figure as much as a wife. Jane, whose father died when she was an adolescent, was seeking a father figure in her husband. It was a recipe for marital
conflict and sexual problems.
There are few other hard facts, but a great weight of rumour. There is probably some kernel of truth in Geraldine Jewsbury's revelations to Froude, but she was well-known for embroidering her stories, and it is best to discount all she said. But Froude had heard such rumours as soon as he entered the Carlyle circle in 1849, so that they were current and accepted by many around them for many years, and while both were alive. It has been suggested that there are vague references to them by Carlyle when he discusses his Frederick in a similar position.
Why were such rumours so prevalent and how did they arise? There would be talk about their quarrels among their friends. Carlyle's temper and aggressive conversational style were constantly on public display, increasingly so from this period on. And Jane does seem to have been bitter and critical about her husband to close friends over many years. It is possible that she may have hinted at sexual difficulties to female friends, and if they were like Geraldine Jewsbury, the stories may well have quickly been exaggerated as they were passed on.
Rumours are not evidence, but there were so many,
so early and for so long, that it is reasonable to suspect some source of fire to provoke
such smoke.
It is safe to conclude that sexual difficulties existed in the marriage. The marriage may or may not have been consummated, but whatever sexual relations there were did not last for many years. The fault for this may well have been on both sides, and its resolution by abstinence a happy solution for both partners. Mrs Carlyle may have been sterile - her health was not robust even in her youth. Further than this it is vain to speculate, nor is any further evidence likely to appear. It is unfortunate that all that lingers in the popular imagination about the Carlyles is a notion of a failed and unhappy marriage. The truth, as always, is more complicated.
There are interesting parallels with other Victorian marriages - the Ruskins and others - and with
Virginia Woolf's marriage.
Why does it matter?
It matters that Carlyle set himself up as a prophet, and failed in most respects to live up to his own precepts in his day-to-day behaviour. It matters that biography should be truthful, and not simply hagiography. Carlyle was one of the first to advocate this, and did so early in his life.
It matters not at all today whether or not he was impotent, whether the marriage was consummated or not, except to help to explain the relationship between the man and woman. No-one would suggest today that impotence would render all Carlyle's work useless or worthless, or make us devalue the man in any way. As recent work has emphasised, such beliefs and
opinions from a century ago tell us more about the mores of the period than they do about the Carlyles.
FROUDE, James Anthony
1818-1894. Historian. While at Oxford lost his faith when Newman left the Church of England . Wrote a novel the Nemesis of Faith (1849). It was burned publicly
at Oxford, and he was forced to resign his fellowship. Moved to London and worked as a journalist.- and editor. Wrote a 12 vol Tudor History, basis of all future Tudor studies. First English historian to make systematic use of archive material. Much controversy culminating in Carlyle biography. Given Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford in 1892. Brilliant speaker.
CRICHTON-BROWNE Sir James
1840-1938. Born Dumfries. His father, W A F Browne was first Superintendent of Crichton Royal Institute, and author of the seminal 'What Asylums are, are not, and ought to be', recently republished. Educated Dumfries, Edinburgh, and Paris. One of the first psychiatrists to set up research in a mental hospital, publishing annual West Riding Lunatic Asylum Reports. Edited Brain. Was President of the Medical Society, London, the Neurological Society, and the Medico-Psychological Association. Knew Carlyle in old age. Latterly a Widmerpool-like figure in his many volumes of 'Victorian jottings', 1926-37.
CARLYLE, Alexander