In 1816 Carlyle, now aged 20, left his teaching post in Annan, and spent the summer with his family at Mainhill, the farm his family had moved to at Whitsun, 1815, renting it from General Sharpe of Hoddom. It was 'a wet clayey spot '. In 1816 his father was approaching sixty, his mother Margaret forty-five, and the eight children remaining at home ranged in
age from nineteen to three.
In the summer of 1816 or 1817 his mother became acutely disturbed. Froude deals with the episode succinctly, saying that she had a serious illness 'by which her mind was affected. It was necessary to place her for several weeks under restraint away from home - a step no doubt just and necessary, but which she never wholly forgave, but resented in her humorous way to the end of her life. The disorder soon passed off, and never returned.'
Carlyle mentions the episode in his Reminiscences about his father: 'Once. and I think once only, I saw him in a passion of tears. It was when the remains of my Mother's fever hung upon her (in 1817), and seemed to threaten the extinction of her reason: we were all of us nigh desperate, and ourselves mad. He burst, at last, into quite a torrent of grief, cried piteously and threw himself on the floor, and lay moaning. I wondered, and had no words, no tears. It was as if a rock of granite had melted, and was thawing into water. What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through?-'
Family letters do not make things clearer. There is a short letter from Mrs Carlyle to her son, dated June 10th 1817, which shows no sign of disorder whatever. 'Good night, Tom,' she finishes, 'for it is a very stormy night, and I must away to the byre to milk.' She signs herself : 'Your old Minnie.'
Froude later notes that she had not fully recovered by 1818, citing a letter from John to his brother Thomas: '....Our mother has grown better every day since you left us. She is as steady as ever she was, has been upon the haystacks three or four times, and has been at church every Sabbath since she came home, behaving always very decently. Also she has given over talking and singing..........She sleeps every night , and hinders no person to sleep, but can do with less than the generality of people. In fact we may conclude that she is as wise as could be expected. She has none of the hypocritical mask with which some people clothe their sentiments. One day, having met Agg Byers, she says: "Weel, Agg, lass, I've never spoken t'ye syne ye stole our coals. I'll gie ye an advice; never steal nae more." '
This reads as if she had been recently away from home, rather than in the previous year.
More detail about her symptoms is available from Wilson. When she had to be removed from home, she was taken to the Griersons' farm, near Dumfries. The first Mrs Grierson, her sister, had been dead for some years, 'but there were children of hers willing to help, and Mrs Grierson the second was a kind and clever woman ready to nurse her husband's sister-in-law.'
'The patient herself said to to Mrs Grierson: "Watch me, my feet are like hind's feet ". And so they found. In spite of all the precautions, she escaped them; but merely walked to her brother's house and was coaxed back.' A doctor attended, prescribed drugs to help her sleep, but rejected the administration of whisky suggested by Mrs Grierson.
'She continued to spend the nights awake in spite of drugs. She went out one day and mounted a horse, and sitting astride it without a saddle, galloped it about a field, and then dismounted quietly, unhurt.' This provoked Mrs Grierson to give her whisky despite the doctor's advice, and Wilson says that Mrs Carlyle slept for a long period, wakened well, 'herself again', and returned home in a week or so, 'apparently in perfect health'.
Wilson had all this from a John Grierson, grandson of Mrs Carlyle's sister, and Town Clerk of Dumfries, who had revealed the information in 1903, and discussed it again with Wilson in 1919. Grierson cannot have observed these events at first hand.
To confuse the issue further, the few Carlyle letters to his family at this period create further doubt about dates. On 17 March 1817 Thomas writes a long letter to his mother with offers of £20 to his father and a shawl for her.
'I need not say how much I was rejoiced to hear of your complete recovery; there was little enjoyment for any person at Mainhill when I was there last year; but I look forward to the ensuing autumn when I hope to have the happiness of discussing matters with you as we were wont to do of old.'
This says plainly that she was ill in the autumn of 1816, that he has heard more recently that she has completely recovered, that the illness had effects on all the family, and that she was unable to 'discuss matters' as usual during the illness ; all of which points to a psychiatric illness, and at the same season of the year as in the other descriptions.
The continuation of the letter is also puzzling. He relates the suicide of a friend of the family in vivid detail. The man had
been separated from his wife through poverty, and had taken an overdose of
laudanum, been discovered and treated. He then tied string round his neck and cut open his jugular vein. Not content with this Carlyle adds a comment on the anatomy of the jugular vein, and continues:
This seems a curiously insensitive letter to write to a mother who has recently had a psychotic breakdown. It is hard to believe that even the priggish young Carlyle would have written thus had his mother been depressed and suicidal.
Another hint of a 1916 date for the episode is in a letter to a friend in the summer of of that year. On the 15th July he writes, after a fortnight confined to the house with a sore throat:
What is certain from all this, despite the confusion about the year, is that Margaret Carlyle had a psychotic breakdown, with acute symptoms for a few weeks, and probably milder symptoms for many months thereafter. She had no such illness before or after, and made a complete recovery. Friends and neighbours attributed it to worry about her son's loss of faith, and to his abandoning his studies for the ministry, but family tradition attributed it to her 'time of life'. It is likely that she was menopausal, the regular births having ceased some three or four years earlier.
Although 'fever' is mentioned it is evident that she was not physically ill; the
acute mental symptoms came after the fever, not during it. With this course and duration, and complete spontaneous remission, an affective illness is much the likeliest diagnosis at this age. The most common type would be a depression, but mania better fits the vague descriptions available of the symptoms. These included complete insomnia, irrational behaviour, perhaps violence (because of restraint being necessary), and overactivity - running away, bareback riding, talking and singing. This suggests elation than depression. Her behaviour must have been extremely disturbed to reduce her husband to the state his son describes. One can be confident that her symptoms would have had a religious content and would be interpreted by her and her family as a visitation or punishment. Carlyle's comments on suicide, quoted above, suggest what the family attitude would be. Had she been depressed, she would probably have lost her faith while ill, and perhaps been suicidal. If she was manic, she may have been disinhibited and irreverent. It would be such symptoms that would reduce her husband and family to despair.
While there is confusion about the date of the illness - 1816 to 1817 is most likely - and its duration, and insufficient material to be sure whether she was elated or depressed, there is no doubt that she had some kind of psychotic affective illness. This had implications, both genetic and psychological, for her first son.
Depressive personalities, such as Carlyle's, are more common in the relatives of
patients with affective illness.
He was to worry about his mother's health for the rest of her long life. He
wrote to her in June 1820, when his own symptoms had begun:
'This last winter and spring I have had more light thrown upon your various
indispositions than I ever got before. I may say I never till lately knew how to
pity you as I ought. These nerves when they get deranged are the most terrific
thing imaginable. I do entreat you , my dear Mother, to take the most minute and
scrupulous charge of your health - for the sakes of us all! No-one can tell what
you have endured already - Take care! take care!'
It is useful to place his mother's illness in relation to Carlyle's activities during these years. At the beginning of 1816 he was teaching at Annan Academy. He spent the summer at home. He was interviewed for a teaching post at Kirkcaldy in August, and moved there to start work in November. He had been unhappy and depressed before that, and did not enjoy his new post, but read voraciously during 1817, studying Hume - 'that clear and candid but cold-hearted narration ' - and consumed a volume of Gibbon daily for twelve days. Late in life he said: 'I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw that Christianity was not true.'
In February,1817 his father wrote to him : 'Times is very bad here for labourers - work is no brisker and living is high.' So great was the hardship that the local lairds and farmers were subsidising the cost of meal for the labourers and their families. In March, Carlyle travelled to Edinburgh to re-enrol at Divinity Hall, and finding the professor not at home, decided not to do so, and to abandon for good the idea of becoming a minister. In August he went on a walking tour of Scotland with some friends, ending up at Mainhill.
By the Spring of 1818 he was discontented, planning to give up teaching, to which he was ill-suited, and was studying maths and physics, and writing bad verse, His family continued to struggle financially at Mainhill, and Carlyle sent his father £15. On 23 October he resigned from his teaching post. He moved to Edinburgh at the end of November with the £70 he had saved, and with no clear plans for the future. He had met Margaret Gordon, been attracted to her, but was soon firmly rejected by her.
In these three years he had had much to contend with. His mother had had a serious illness; his family were struggling financially; and he had abandoned the ministry, and caused them more distress. He had taught unsuccessfully, and was now twenty-two years of age, with no clear idea of what he would do with his life or how he would support himself.
It is hardly surprising that the first record of his dyspepsia is in this month - November 1818. The next five years were to be the worst yet: 'my Edinburgh purgatory'.
If you can't see a frames menu on the left of
your screen, click here.
'....had his mind been directed by prudence (of which he was nearly destitute) and by religious or moral feelings - which in his wandering unhappy way of life had become greatly obscured to him - he might have lived to be a credit to his friends - and the country which produced him.'
'I have been extremely melancholy during the last six weeks, upon many accounts.'