JANK WELSH AS A GIRL THE LOVE LETTERS OF THOMAS CARLYLE AND JANE WELSH EDITED BY ALEXANDER CARLYLE, M.A. WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS TWO IN COLOUR. TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I LONDON : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK : JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMIX Copyright in U.S.A., 1908 By JOHN LANE COMPANY . SECOND EDITION 4-4*3 V-l Set up and Electrotyped by . THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, Mass., U.S.A. Printed by THE BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh PREFACE CARLYLE'S injunction against the publication of the Letters which passed between himself and Miss Welsh before their marriage having been already violated, it has seemed to me to be no longer prohibitive : the holy of holies having been sacrilegiously forced, dese- crated, and polluted, and its sacred relics defaced, besmirched, and held up to ridicule, any further intrusion therein for the purpose of cleansing and admitting the purifying air and light of heaven can now be attended, in the long run, by nothing but good results. If entrance into the sacred pre- cincts, with this object, be an act of sacrilege, it is at worst a very venial one ! Had there been no previous intrusion no infraction of Carlyle's inter- dict I need hardly say that nothing in the world or beneath it would have induced me to intrude therein. But what would have been rank sacri- lege at one time has now, in the altered circum- stances, become a pious duty. I offer no apology, therefore, for publishing these Letters, for in my judgment none is needed. I should rather be in- clined to apologise for not having performed so obvious a duty long ere now. In the first volume of his "Life" of Carlyle Mr. Froude printed only one Letter in full (a very vi PREFACE Miss but he extracts short one from Welsh) ; gave 1 from thirty-three others. The extracts selected by Mr. Froude, and more into which he has woven especially the narrative them, have never seemed to impartial readers to give a true conception of the correspondence, or of the relations which subsisted between Carlyle and Miss Welsh. It would appear that Mr. Froude either never read the correspondence in its entirety, or that he failed to comprehend the plain meaning of the writers. It is indeed quite likely that he, being an English- man, failed to understand the nature of a Scottish wooing, and so came to wrong conclusions. This, however, was no excuse for misquoting the Letters, and misinterpreting their obvious meaning. Besides Mr. Froude and the present Editor, only two other men have hitherto read the full text of these Letters: the late Professor Charles Eliot Norton, and the late poet and essayist, William Allingham. Both of these litterateurs have condemned Mr. Froude's use or abuse of the correspondence. Nor- ton's condemnation appeared as an Appendix to the " second volume of the Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle," published in the year 1886. It is a master- piece of just, temperate, and effective criticism, which instantly opened the eyes of the public to the real character of Mr. Froude's discharge of the sacred task which had been entrusted to his care, and pro- duced a widespread distrust in him and sympathy with Carlyle. But Norton's excellent exposure of Mr. Froude's "methods," though it came as a revelation to many people, was, from the limited 1 The total extracts, including the short Letter above mentioned, cover in all of the " Life" the Letters forty pages ; Love printed in the present two volumes fill over seven hundred and thirty pages. PREFACE vii space at his command, necessarily incomplete and quite inadequate to the performance of the well- nigh endless task he had so well begun. Only a very few examples of Mr. Froude's aberrations could be noticed. "To exhibit completely," says Professor Norton, "the extent and quality of the divergence of Mr. Froude's narrative from the truth, the whole story would have to be re-written." Mr. Allingham's opinion of the "trusted bio- grapher's" work is pithily and tersely expressed " " in his lately published Diary," thus : Carlyle's ' Life.' Melancholy book. F. has manipulated his materials cunningly." My own opinion of Mr. Froude's treatment of the Carlyle papers, being to some extent already known to the public, I do not purpose to add any- thing here that can rationally give rise to unpleasant controversy. Indeed, since I have decided to pub- lish the Love Letters exactly as they were written, and thus lay open the materials on which Mr. Froude founded (or ought to have founded) his account of the love story of Carlyle and Miss Welsh, there will no longer be any grounds for controversy on the sub- because reader will have the full evidence ject ; every before him, and be in a position to judge for himself. Few friends of Carlyle or Miss Welsh will, I believe, disapprove of the publication of the Love Letters after they have read them and compared them with the version given in the first volume " " of Mr. Froude's Life of nor can Carlyle ; any friend of Mr. Froude reasonably make complaint; for, if his account of the courtship be true, the Letters will confirm it and him if it is only justify ; untrue, they will condemn him, but only to the Vlll PREFACE extent and in the degree which he justly merits. I have carefully refrained from commenting on, or even mentioning, except in three or four exceptional cases, Mr. Froude's mis-printing or mis-interpreting of these Letters. To have done so in detail would at least an additional volume have required ; and, moreover, the ungrateful task is now rendered superfluous, since the correct text is here placed before the reader. The possession of these Letters I have long felt be a and the to heavy responsibility ; question whether to publish or not to publish them has been for several years a subject of anxious de- liberation. Only three courses seemed to be open to me : First, to destroy the original Letters, and thus allow Mr. Froude's account of the courtship and his inaccurate version of the Letters to be handed down to posterity as true and correct, practically unchallenged except on the limited scale of Norton's Article, above referred to. This course seemed an impossible one : I was not Vandal enough to destroy such Letters as these, even if there had been nothing to consider but their literary value. Secondly, to preserve the originals, and leave them behind me to be published, perhaps in later years, by some one who would probably know very little of the subject. This, too, seemed to be an inadvisable course, for many reasons, though it certainly would have been the easiest one for me to follow ! Thirdly, to edit and publish them now. After deliberate consideration, and consultation with friends and relatives of Carlyle, I decided to adopt this last course. I have since been confirmed in my decision by the hearty approval of numerous PREFACE ix literary men and women to whom I have at various times read a considerable part of these Letters. And the more I consider the question myself in all its bearings, the more I am convinced that the course I have chosen is the best and the wisest. Professor Norton, in 1886, hesitated to follow this for the reason that some of the Letters plan, " were in his judgment too sacred for publication," though he did publish a few of them, and give extracts from others enough to prove that Mr. Froude's story was the reverse of true on many points, but not enough to exhibit more than a mere fraction of his perversions, or tell the true story with anything like completeness. Much has happened, moreover, since 1886. Mr. Froude's story assumed, a few years ago, another phase still more disreput- able and even disgusting. Reticence in the case of Carlyle's biography has unfortunately long ago ceased to be a virtue it into a vice. ; may easily degenerate for In the name, and the sake, of truth and justice, it is now clearly advisable that every possible ray of light should be thrown on the subject. To with- hold, much more to destroy, authentic and valuable evidence would be little short of a crime. Nor is it necessary to re-write the story of the courtship of Carlyle and Miss Welsh : it is already written beautifully, humanly, frankly, fully, and inimitably by two of the best Letter-writers of the nineteenth century. Nothing more is really necessary than to transcribe accurately their own words, and allow their Letters to speak for them- selves. I have printed, practically in full, all the Letters that have been preserved of this correspondence. x PREFACE from My copy has been taken in every case direct the care and exacti- the original Letter, with greatest to correct the and tude ; except spelling punctuation in some of Miss Welsh's Letters, I have not consci- the text ously deviated in the slightest point from which are few and of the originals. The omissions, of little importance, have been indicated in the usual way, and the nature or subject of the omitted matter, when deemed of sufficient interest, has been of pointed out in footnotes. Unfortunately some Miss Welsh's Letters, especially those of earlier date, have been lost, or destroyed probably by herself; but the collection has not been added to or diminished since it was returned by Mr.