Virginia Woolf with her father, Sir Leslie Stephen,1902.

Woolf's Education    Woolf on the Carlyles    The Stephen Family     Conclusions

Birthdays    Works Cited

In December 1918, when she was 36, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary:

‘What odd stray of knowledge makes me think that this is Carlyle’s birthday? Perhaps because I’m reading about Froude; - I go on to wonder whether any one else is thinking of Carlyle’s birthday, & if so whether it gives him any pleasure; & again of the curious superstition, haunting literary people, of the value of being remembered by posterity – but I had better rein myself in’(1,223).

Posterity has not forgotten her or the Carlyles, but Woolf is seen as very much a twentieth century writer, and the Carlyles as essentially Victorians. Surprisingly, she was born in 1882, less than a year after Carlyle’s death. And they are linked not just by the ‘odd stray of knowledge,’ but through their writings and through strong family connections. The Carlyles influenced Woolf’s writing and her life, directly and deviously.

Virginia Stephen, as she was then, was educated at home and given access to her father’s library at an early age. She and her siblings wrote a house newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, and when 13 she contributed a long report of a Mansion House meeting to rescue the Cheyne Row house ‘from the tooth of time.’ Father read French Revolution to her and her sister.

When she was 15, he gave her a list of books she should tackle in the next six months. Among this formidable list, which includes Dickens, Thackeray, Henry James, Pepys and Macaulay, are Carlyle’s Reminiscences, French Revolution, Cromwell, Life of Sterling, and Froude’s biography. Father advised her to read the first volume of Froude slowly; he thought his daughter devoured books ‘almost faster than I like’ (Stephen, MB,103). Later in life she recalled reading ‘masses of Carlyle’ when she was twenty.

When she was reading the Reminiscences, he took his daughter to visit the Cheyne Row house:

‘…After lunch, father took me to see Carlyle’s house in Chelsea. – Walked there – Went over the house, with an intelligent old woman, who knew father and every thing about him – We saw the drawing room, and dining room, and Carlyle’s sound proof room, with double walls – His writing table, and his pens, and scraps of his manuscripts – Pictures of him and of her everywhere….’ (Woolf, PA,24).

Unsurprisingly, she retained an interest in the Carlyles and their writings throughout her life. There is little evidence of this in her novels, although Carlyle is mentioned by characters in two of them. But there is no sign of Carlyle’s ideas or style in her fiction. She is known as an ‘experimental’ writer, often bracketed with her contemporary, James Joyce, but it is in Joyce’s work that we see the influence of Carlyle, who earns from him the tribute of a parody in Ulysses.

The Carlyles’ influence is more evident in her diaries, letters, reviews and essays, nowadays more highly valued by many critics than her novels. In 1916, in her early thirties, she is reading Carlyle again, and writes in a letter:

‘I’ve been reading Carlyle’s Past and Present. And wondering whether all his rant has made a scrap of difference practically’ (2,76).

But she admires his prose. In a 1916 essay she rates him highly:

‘Prose has been the chosen power of the greatest writers of our time – of Dostoevsky, of Carlyle, of Tolstoy’(2,70).

In 1921, reading her friend Lytton Strachey’s newly published Queen Victoria, which he had dedicated to her, she writes:

‘I have been lying recumbent all day reading Carlyle, and now Macaulay, first to see if Carlyle was better than Lytton, then to see if Macaulay sells better. Carlyle (Reminiscences) is more colloquial and scrappy than I remembered, but he has his merits. – more punch in his phrase than in Lytton’s (D2,70).

A fortnight later she records a conversation with Strachey:

‘I compared you with Carlyle the other day, I said. I read the Reminiscences. Well they’re the chatter of a toothless grave digger compared with you: only then he has phrases. Ah yes, he has them, said Lytton’(D2,115).

Stray references occur in letters and diaries right up to the end of her life: she interjects remarks like– ‘Patience, as Carlyle used to say ( in Italian)’, or ‘ "Significant of much." as Carlyle would say.’

Carlyle Reviews and Essays

There is much about the Carlyles in her reviews and essays. In her early years she often mentions Carlyle favourably. Referring to a book by Frederick the Great’s sister, she says: ‘…Carlyle, with his keen eye for worth, finds it a human book…’ And reviewing William Allingham’s Diary: ‘‘But it is Carlyle , as usual, if we are to choose, whose sentences, cut from the context and dulled by time, still burn brightest. It is sometimes the obverse side of him that shows; when, for example, Allingham stands at the door and Carlyle is heard from within, "Go away, Sir! I can do nothing with you!"’ But for the most part he was generous and accessible and lavish with his uncompromising judgments.’(E,1)

She reviewed the Jane Carlyle letters in the Guardian in 1905, and the Love Letters for the TLS in 1909 (E,1,54-57, 257-261).

In 1905 she says that there is no longer any temptation for readers to use the letters to take sides in a ‘very unpleasant dispute.’ She claims that the generation who knew Carlyle has gone, and with it their morbid appetite for personal gossip. She is full of praise for Jane; for the ‘brilliant image’ of herself she casts on paper; and for the fact that she is rarely introspective but talks of herself as a ‘an active and practical human being.’

‘…if there were such a branch of learning as the study of human nature, Mrs Carlyle would have been one of its most distinguished professors.’ Woolf concludes: ‘Under other conditions she might have written more; she could hardly have written better.’ Here is the germ of A Room of One’s Own, twenty-four years before it was written.

When she reviewed the Love Letters four years later, she claimed that feeling about the Carlyles had changed over the last decade. The publication of Froude’s My Relations with Carlyle and Crichton-Browne’s Introduction to the New Letters demanded that people take sides; but the public no longer reads the letters for that reason. ‘…the more we see the less we can label, and both praise and blame become strangely irrelevant.’

‘We do not deny the truth of those "revelations" which startled the world when the letters were first published , but when we see them in relation to the rest, the facts, if they are still there, are different.’

Most of the review is taken up with an analysis of Jane’s development, and her side of the relationship.

‘She married him, and if it was a tragedy, yet a study of the letters convinces us that it was a noble tragedy.’

From this time on she writes little about Thomas, and shows much more interest in Jane. In 1929 she published an essay in the T.L.S.: Geraldine and Jane (CE, 4,27-39), written at the time of her affair with Vita Sackville-West. Always prone to exaggeration, Woolf says in a letter that she was ‘rather worried by the 72 volumes (or so) of the Carlyle letters, and rather pleased to be so accurate in getting the bits together. ….I daresay one could have found out more about Miss Jewsbury; I had only one volume of her letters to go upon. I could not read more than one of her novels….Her relation with Mrs Carlyle was interesting, and I had to be discreet’(L,4,30-32).

The essay is ostensibly a review of Geraldine’s novel Zoe, which she dismisses as worthless. She is baffled to find Jane admiring it. Instead she recounts the history of their friendship, with its many ups and downs and fallings-out. She has a surprising amount of sympathy for Geraldine, that most histrionic and difficult lady, because she was a more active supporter of women’s rights than Jane.

Clearly, Woolf believes Geraldine was sexually attracted to Jane. She quotes Geraldine’s letters: she had ‘vague undefined yearnings to be yours in some way’ and ‘….you will laugh, but I feel towards you much more like a lover than a female friend!’ ‘No doubt Mrs Carlyle did laugh’, adds Mrs Woolf.

She retained a life-long interest in the Cheyne Row house. In 1904 she is dismissive:

‘I do not know whether pilgrimages to the shrines of famous men ought not to be condemned as sentimental journeys. It is better to read Carlyle in your own study chair than to visit the sound-proof room and pore over the manuscripts at Chelsea. I should be inclined to set an examination on Frederick the Great in place of entrance fee; only, in that case, the house would soon have to be shut up’(E1,5-9).

Her views had changed by 1931 when she wrote Great Men’s Houses for Good Housekeeping (CE,2), and visited Cheyne Row again:

‘Take the Carlyles, for instance. One hour spent in 5 Cheyne Row will tell us more about them and their lives than we can learn from all the biographies.’

She was impressed by the lack of running water. 'They were Scots, fanatical about cleanliness.' She concludes that the house was a battlefield: 'the scene of labour, effort and perpetual struggle'. Woolf is referring to the housekeeping, not the marriage, and her sympathy for Jane is aroused. She looks at one of the pictures of her there: 'Her cheeks are hollow; bitterness and suffering mingle in the half-tender, half-tortured expression of the eyes. Such is the effect of a pump in the basement and a yellow tin bath up three pairs of stairs.’

‘… half their quarrels might have been spared and their lives immeasurably sweetened,’ Mrs Woolf believes, if they had had running water, gas fires in the bedrooms and indoor sanitation. But they would have been different people.

She is now more interested in, and has more sympathy for Jane than for Thomas. She identifies with Jane in her household problems; for she had servant difficulties which parallel Mrs Carlyle’s, and recorded them with just as much feeling. By supporting Jane, she may have kept alive disparagement of Carlyle as a husband, and began the process of making Jane an early feminist icon, as Woolf herself has now become.

She disparages and praises Thomas in almost equal measure; she does not ignore him. She wrote a revealing letter, in June 1933, to Daphne Sanger, a barrister’s daughter, who was raising money for the permanent preservation of the Cheyne Row house, given to the National Trust in 1936 by the Carlyle’s House Memorial Trust:

‘Dear Miss Sanger

I enclose £1 –1s for your Carlyle House Fund. I feel much more sympathy with Mrs Carlyle than with Mr., anyhow where the house is concerned. I believe if your circular put more stress on her, you would wring more money from our purses. But anyhow, I hope you’ll get it…..’(5,196).

In summary, her writings show that she admired Carlyle’s style, especially in his biographical writing, but was less impressed with his ideas, and least with his personality and conduct. She has unreserved admiration and sympathy for Jane both as a writer and as a person. Her father had told his teenage daughter that Jane was the most wonderful letter writer in the English language, and Virginia agreed with him (L,1,76).

But there is more to link her with the Carlyles, and more reasons for her interest in the Carlyles. Her grandfather, Sir James Stephen, her uncle, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, and her father Sir Leslie Stephen were all friends of Carlyle. The Stephens were a formidable family, of talented and industrious intellectuals, but prone to severe depressive illness. Virginia inherited all these characteristics

Sir James Stephen (1789-1859), her grandfather, was under-secretary for the colonies (1836-47), nicknamed the over-secretary, and later professor of modern history at Cambridge. He was friendly with the Carlyles and often visited Cheyne Row with his sons.

Carlyle invited him to Cheyne Row in early 1853, and reported the visit to his mother, describing Sir James as:

‘…a wise, religious and sensible man; and talked a great many excellent things (he governed the colonies a long time; and is a really clever man, independently of his love for me!) – and I could not grudge a three hours spent in such conversation, which, however, is very rare here…’(CL,28,23). For Carlyle this is a glowing testimonial.

Carlyle regarded him as serious and able, although he was amused when told by Lord Monteagle that Stephen always talked with his eyes shut as though dictating a colonial despatch. Carlyle said to Duffy:

‘He is a man of good brains. He was placed early in the Colonial Office, and had got trained in official life till he obtained a complete command of its formulas and agencies; and it was found , whoever was Colonial Minister, Stephen was the real governor of the colonies. He bowed to every suggestion of the Minister and was as smooth as silk, but somehow the thing he did not like was found never to be done at all. Charles Buller named him Mr Mother-Country’ (Duffy,78-82). Evidently he was the ‘Yes Minister’ and Sir Humphrey of his day.

It was Stephen who told Carlyle in 1853 that Prince Albert had put him forward for a pension, which Aberdeen, the prime minister, refused to grant. Later in that same year, Stephen took up Carlyle’s complaint about the noise made by a neighbour’s crowing cocks, writing to the neighbour with a successful outcome.

Sir James often took one of his lanky sons to Cheyne Row, more often the future Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-94). Jane nicknamed him the Fat Boy. When he first visited alone as an adult, he was repulsed by Jane, who mistook him for an American tourist (Stephen,Life,53). He grew up to be an author and journalist, but mainly a distinguished jurist and judge, who did much to reform Indian law, when he served there, and wrote a definitive History of the Criminal Law of England. Later, his Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, deploring extensions of democracy, was much influenced by his conversations with Carlyle,. He was a friend of Froude, one of the executors of Carlyles will, and very close to him in his last years.

The most important link between Carlyle and Woolf is her father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904). At first glance he seems to be the typical Eminent Victorian – an intellectual and a muscular Christian, dedicated to the religion of work. A weak and sickly child, he transformed himself into an outstanding athlete at Cambridge, where he was a fanatical oarsman, and walked the 50 miles from Cambridge to London for dinner in 12 hours. He ran the mile in 5 minutes 4 seconds. Later he was an outstanding climber, made several first ascents of Swiss peaks, and became president of the Alpine Club and editor of the Alpine Journal. He took Holy Orders on becoming a Cambridge Don, resigned when he discovered he was an agnostic, and became a journalist, editing the Cornhill magazine for eleven years. He knew, and published work by, Hardy, Stevenson, Gosse, and Henry James. When he was in Edinburgh to give an Alpine lecture in 1875, he visited W E Henley in the Royal Infirmary and introduced him to Stevenson, the start of an important friendship.

He wrote a history of eighteenth century thought, and latterly was a founder editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, sole editor of 21 volumes, and contributing 378 entries, covering a thousand pages. He married twice; firstly Minnie, Thackeray’s daughter, in 1867. She died in pregnancy eight years later. Carlyle met him in Cromwell Road a few days later, and shook hands with him, but Stephen did not speak. ‘Carlyle says "I am very sorry for you , sir. My own loss did not come in so grievous a way." S departs without a word.’ (Allingham,241)

His second marriage was to Julia, widow of Herbert Butterworth. She was to bear him four children, including Virginia and Vanessa, and like his first wife died young, aged 48.

Leslie Stephen and Carlyle

Sir Leslie first met Carlyle – 37 years his senior - when taken to visit by his father when he was a young man. He met him frequently in Carlyles old age. He was attracted to Carlyle but thought some of his views out-dated. Writing to J R Lowell, in 1872, when Carlyle was in his late seventies, he said:
'I see the prophet pretty often myself and am almost equally repelled and attracted by him. Personally, indeed, I am simply attracted, for he is a really noble old cove, and by far the best specimen of the literary gent we can at present produce. He has grown milder too with age. But politically and philosophically he talks a good deal of what I call nonsense. He is indeed a genuine poet and a great humorist, which makes even his nonsense attractive in its way....He could not be made reasonable without ceasing to be Carlyle, so we must take what he can give and be grateful.’

And in a letter to Norton: ‘I regret very much my position to the old prophet but I cannot help it. Whenever I see him it is the old story: I like him, indeed I might say, I feel a strong affection for him, but he always rants at me…..I think he dislikes me’(Maitland,228,230-2).

Later, in his Mausoleum book, a memoir for his children, he wrote that he was ‘always afraid of Carlyle. without any cause except his fame’(9). He ‘felt something like the editor of a Saducee’s gazette interviewing John the Baptist.’

Of course Carlyle was tactless, once telling Leslie Stephen he’d as soon wash his face in a dirty puddle as write journalism. Scarcely tactful to a man who edited the Cornhill magazine for eleven years.

He admired Carlyle’s work: ‘You might return from the strange gloom and splendour of French Revolution and Sartor Resartus revolted or fascinated, but to read it with appreciation was to go through an intellectual crisis……You were never the same man afterwards. No one ever exercised such a potent sway over the inmost being of his disciples’ (Annan, 172)

He recalled that he thought better of Carlyle’s conduct at the time of the Reminiscences than most people did, and thought that Froude suffered from ‘constitutional inaccuracy.’ In the year before he died he wrote the Carlyle biography for the Dictionary of National Biography, and in sixteen pages gives a balanced account of Carlyle’s achievement and of the marriage – he mentions ‘Carlyle’s explosions of excessive irritability’ and his ‘constant gloom’, and says of Jane that she had ‘a marked power of uttering unpleasant truths.’ And he gives much space to Jane (DNB,3,1019).

Personality

We know much about his personality – perhaps too much – both from his own and from his daughter’s memoirs. He was a quiet, gloomy man, and had at least one attack of depression, as did his father and his daughter, his own brought on by overwork on the dictionary. He was a street saint and a fireside devil.

Writing his memoir in the weeks following his second wife’s death, he is self-critical, and accuses himself of being oversensitive, nervously irritable, absent minded, absorbed in his books and writing. Forgetting things he had been told became a standard family joke against him. He knew he was fidgety, easily bored, and troublesome socially. Julia managed their finances. ‘I am apt to be nervous about my solvency.’ He confesses that he used to run himself down to attract compliments and reassurance from his wife. Then he concludes:

‘If I felt I had a burthen upon my conscience like that which tortured poor Carlyle, I think that I should be almost tempted to commit suicide. I cannot, I am thankful to say, feel that. Yet neither can I feel myself to be absolutely free from blame as I would wish to feel’(MB,89)

Woolf’s Memoirs

In fact he was worse than he admitted. In 1940, his daughter set down her view of all this; his behaviour had rankled for all these years.

He had been bad-tempered since childhood, made scenes with his second wife, and when she died, with his step-daughter Stella. Woolf witnessed them as a teenager, and was affected by them for the rest of her life. In 1920, she described some of what happened, and in 1940 returned to the subject in more detail.

Sir Leslie, after his second wife died, became very dependent on Stella. ‘I was not as bad as Carlyle, was I,’ he repeatedly asked her. Woolf adds: ‘Stella perhaps knew little of Carlyle, but her assurance came over and over again, tired but persistent’(MOB,48).

Later, when Stella died, Vanessa and Virginia were subjected to his weekly rages over the household accounts:

‘The books were presented. Silence. He was putting on his glasses. He had read the figures. Down came his fist on the account book. There was a roar. His veins filled. His face flushed. Then he shouted, "I am ruined." Then he beat his breast. He went through an extraordinary dramatization of self-pity, anger and despair. He was ruined – dying…tortured by the wanton extravagance of Vanessa and Sophie." And you stand there like a block of stone. Don’t you pity me? Haven’t you a word to say to me?" and so on…..With a deep groan he picked up his pen and with ostentatiously trembling fingers wrote out the cheque……Never have I felt such rage and frustration’(MOB,158).

It was scenes like these that, many years later, fuelled her portrait of Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. But she was her father’s favourite child, and he was well aware of her literary talent. And she was fond of him, and was very like him in many ways. But only in the last year of her life could she write: ‘But in me…rage alternated with love. It was only the other day when I read Freud for the first time that I discovered that the violently disturbing conflict of love and hate is a common feeling; and is called ambivalence.’.

When Woolf recorded all this she tried to explain his behaviour. Some of his temper she attributed to being spoiled in childhood. ‘But,’ she goes on, ‘it was also, I guess , the convention, supported by the great men of the time, Carlyle, Tennyson, that men of genius were naturally uncontrolled…..I think he said unconsciously as he worked himself up into one of those violent outbursts: "This is a sign of my genius," and he called in Carlyle to confirm him, and let himself fly’(MOB,121).

So Sir Leslie has much to answer for, and so, perhaps, has Carlyle. These posthumous revelations, gradually emerging over many years, strangely mirror those that followed Carlyle’s death.

Post-modern critics do not approve of linking the life and the text. Even the most fanatical of them would have difficulty denying the relevance of the Stephens’ family life to Woolf’s views of the Carlyles, especially when the evidence comes from the author herself.

From her reading of the Carlyles alone, she might well have come to admire Jane more than Thomas. She would also read her father’s views of the couple. But, believing as she did that he had modelled his tantrums on Carlyle, the influence of Carlyle on her father’s behaviour is something she must have found difficult to forgive. To use another term from psychology, her reactions to the Carlyles are over-determined. Her opinions were not simply formed by reading their books and letters. Added to that was her ambivalent relationship to her father, and the fact that he constantly compared himself to Carlyle in her early years.

Not only did this colour her view of Thomas; it must also have prejudiced her further in favour of Jane, comparing her father’s treatment of her mother with Carlyle’s of Jane. It could be argued that these factors helped to develop her feminist ideas.

I began with Mrs Woolf remembering that it was Carlyle’s birthday. At another point in her diaries she remembers that it is her father’s birthday, and makes a calculation:

‘Father’s birthday. He would have been 1928/1832/96; 96, yes, today; & could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; - inconceivable. I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind’(3,208).

It’s curious that she should remember these two birthdays. Especially when throughout her childhood her father’s birthday was never celebrated, never allowed to be mentioned; for his first wife, Minnie, died on one of his birthdays.

And a final confusing curiosity: Woolf penned that diary entry, remembering his birthday, on the 3^rd December; Carlyle was born on the 4^th! A Freudian might make much of such a slip.

So there is more than an ‘odd stray of knowledge’ to explain her recalling Carlyle’s birthday, accurately or not. But just as she concluded that diary entry, ‘I had better rein myself in’.

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