Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 31 | Issue 1 Article 22 1999 Book Reviews Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation (1999) "Book Reviews," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 31: Iss. 1. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol31/iss1/22 This Book Reviews is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Book Reviews The Collected Letters o/Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Senior Eds. Clyde de L. Ryals and Kenneth J. Fielding. Vols. 22-26 (July 1847-December 1851). Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995-1998. The Duke­ Edinburgh Edition. Reviewing the Collected Letters is always a pleasure, so rich are they in content, so splendidly are they edited. However, this review is marked by con­ siderable sadness, for Clyde Ryals, one of the Senior Editors, died in 1998. Snatched from us in the bloom of his celebrated career, far too early for his fellow Carlyleans who loved and respected his concise mind and gentle heart, Clyde will be sorely missed and never forgotten. The Collected Letters under review here remains a monument to the fore­ sight and skill of Clyde Ryals and Edinburgh Emeritus Saintsbury Professor of English Literature K. J. Fielding. The fact that these letters are edited so ex­ pertly is a tribute to the scholarly ingenuity of the editors. The project also in­ cludes a host of find subalterns, most notable among them Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson. Hilary J. Smith, and Sheila McIntosh. The Collected Letters is the result of the excellent teamwork that takes place, both simulta­ neously and independently, at the University of Edinburgh and Duke Univer­ sity. The project is nothing short of stupendous, both in content and in execu­ tion. Duke University Press continues to spare no effort in the quality of the print and in the production design. The Collected Letters is most deserving of Book Reviews 275 its acknowledged place as the stellar example of first-rate editorial scholarship that informs the whole of Victorian Studies. Vols. 22-26 are typical of the genius that surrounds the Collected Letters as a whole. In brief but informative introductions, K. J. Fielding leads us through the highlights, calling specific attention to the fact that of the letters of Vols. 22-24, "51 percent appear for the first time, and, of the remainder, 16.4 percent of the full total have been seen only in an incomplete form" (22, ix). Stunning figures, really. In effect, we have for the first time 67.4 percent new or almost new materials, not to mention the exceptionally informative notes that accompany the letters. The same holds true for Vol. 25, where "47 percent have not been previously published" (25, ix), and for Vol. 26, where the figure is "about 51 percent" (26, ix). (It should be noted that Vols. 25-26 establish a new policy for the Collected Letters. Each volume will now represent a spe­ cific year; here Vol. 25 covers 1850; Vol. 26 covers 1851.) These new materi­ als range widely, of course, from family letters, to business letters, to profes­ sional letters, to personal letters. Each and all are important as we fill in the heretofore blank or otherwise incomplete landscape in the lives of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Certainly these letters continue to correct the revisionist claims of recent biographical work. What they prove once again, if one cares to read them carefully, is that the Carlyles were not the psychotic monsters of the Victorian Midway, given to unceasing excesses of spleen and vitriolic expressions of melancholy. They were, in fact, behind the tumult of their ex­ traordinary circumstances, surprisingly constructive individuals who enjoyed a life of celebrityhood only partly of their making. To be sure, by mid-century Thomas was increasingly irritable, less willing to compromise, more prone to confrontation, as he looked on in horror at what he saw as the misplaced social vision of Utilitarian politics. Rightly or wrongly, mostly rightly, he felt that the governmental utilitarians had sapped the human conscience. His dismay finally led him to a rather bleak prophetic vision-he was quickly followed there by Dickens, witness Bleak House and Hard Times-as found in his pointed articles on the Condition of Ireland (1848), the controversial "An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" (1849), and the acerb Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850). Jane was equally irritable, equally confrontational, as she increasingly suffered from a variety of maladies not helped by the ingestion of tobacco, laudanum, and morphine to treat her often imagined hence real illnesses. She was equally capable of invective, especially when she felt abandoned, witness her declaration to Carlyle in August of 1850, that if she had "to lead another life in any of the planets I shall take precious good care not to hang myself round any man's neck either as a locket or a millstone!" (25, 163). Yet when these letters are read as a whole, we find that they more often than not reveal two compassionate, often loving, certainly affectionate, individuals, who served at the head of a coterie of intel­ lectuals the extent of which can easily startle even the most vivid imagination. 276 Book Reviews In reading the Collected Letters, we must repeatedly pinch ourselves into the realization that the Carlyles were, for the most part, beloved by their friends and lionized by their culture. The diversity of their menagerie as­ tounds. Chopin played their piano, grateful to them both for the introduction to London society. Mazzini, the insurrectionist, was welcomed, even admired. Emerson, the now famous expounder of theories Transcendental, was also welcomed and supported in spite of the weight of Carlyle's altering disposi­ tion. Gavan Duffy, the Irish Nationalist founder of The Nation, was an ever­ present admirer, partly but not wholly because Carlyle increasingly turned his attention to the plight of impoverished Ireland. Amalie Bolte, the German radical and friend of Varnhagen von Ense, bolted into the Carlyles' lives, claiming fealty to Jane and offering paradoxical impressions of Thomas who, she once asserted, "writes for humanity [while] human beings mean nothing to him" (22, xi). However, ofthe myriad characters who swam into Carlyles' ken during this period, perhaps the most remarkable is the forger William Squire, who convinced Thomas to convince himself that he, Squire, possessed hitherto unknown letters of Oliver Cromwell. The deception is one of the more curious episodes in the annals of nineteenth-century forgery, especially since Carlyle would not fully admit to himself or to close associates, like John Forster, that the so-called Squire letters were a hoax, no doubt because he had already pub­ lished them as genuine. Editor Fielding calls the whole episode "nonsense" (22, xii), which is a sort of modernist apology for Carlyle's initial stupidity and consequent bullheadedness. If this were not enough, Thomas was repeatedly plagued and on occasion intrigued by Geraldine Jewsbury, whose feminist guise and trenchant wit came even to embarrass Jane, who could stand val­ iantly before the barrages of Thomas but who withered under the rhetoric of Geraldine and her salacious fictions. If we add to this menagerie nearly every famous Victorian aesthete, and we mean here nearly every famous aesthete, we have a partial vision of the social and intellectual cornucopia headquartered at 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, the home of the most famous of Victorian couples. Not only were the Carlyles visited upon frequently, they were more often than they liked visitors themselves. One of the more remarkable instances chronicled by the Collected Letters is the venture of the Carlyles into the very den of the aristocracy. The occasion was the Bath House Ball held by Lord and Lady Ashburton on 24 June 1850, highlighted by the appearance of the Duke of Wellington, which occasioned this description by Carlyle in a Journal entry of 25 June: "By far the most impressive figure there was the old Duke of Wellington .... Truly a beautiful old man; I had never seen till now how beauti­ ful.. .. He glided slowly along, slightly saluting this and the other; clean, clear fresh as the June evening itself..." (25, 112n). This is only one of a series of remarkable descriptions that Carlyle records of that eventful evening when he saw, for the first time he declares, "5 to 7 hundred select aristocracy" (25, 112n), many of whom had been and were to be the phantom villains of his pen. It is of import to note that this commentary comes from Carlyle's unpublished Book Reviews 277 and, except to the editors, unavailable Journal, now held in the protective hands of the Carlyle descendents. What a bonus it is, as we read these letters, to have access, at least in part, to Carlyle's London Journal. The Editors use excerpts from the Journal both wisely and judiciously. It is obviously a re­ markable document, which we can only hope will someday, through the kind graces of the Carlyle family, be published in its whole. Jane's impressions of the Bath House Ball, written out to Helen Welsh, are of a more personal nature, and once again display her self-effacing humor and genuine wit. She fretted so much on how she might look, "being muffled up so many years," that she gained from Thomas the concession of a new dress, but only after he suggested that she might follow the lead of Eve and wear "no clothes at all!!!" In the end she "got a white silk dress-which first was made high and longsleeved-and then on the very day of the ball was sent back to be cut down to the due pitch of indecency!-I could have gone into fits of crying when I began to put it on-but I looked so astonishingly well in it by candle light, and when I got into the fine rooms amongst the universally bare people I felt so much in keeping that I forgot my neck and arms almost immediately" (25, 111).