On November 19, 1812, Jane Baillie Welsh, aged eleven, wrote to her aunt by marriage Mary Welsh (addressing her as “My dear Mrs Welsh”—none of that familiarity nonsense with close relations in those days) “to address to you a few lines.” She mentioned that “I have not begun Geography yet but I expect I will soon.” The letter, eight lines long in the complete Duke-Edinburgh edition, is, as the editors note, “without punctuation.” It is also the opening salvo in what has become a fifty-volume edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, a massive, historic, and scholastically magnificent enterprise whose first volume was published in 1970 and whose last has just appeared, fifty-three years later.

The project was conceived in 1952. It is a triumph of mainly British (but also some formidable American) scholarship made possible mostly by American money, mainly from a host of foundations. It would probably not happen now: those of a certain disposition who have studied Carlyle, and who find merit in applying the standards of today to the society of nearly two hundred years ago, tend to regard him as a prime candidate for cultural cancellation. One cannot see—at the current moment—beneficent foundations, trusts, and philanthropists in America, or in Britain, readily handing over money to promote the work of a man now regarded by some as a proto-fascist (after all, Goebbels read Carlyle’s Frederick the Great to Hitler in the bunker), a racist, a white supremacist, and a sexist. The fact that he was a genius and for a time the single most influential man in contemporary thought and letters counts, they feel, for little in that context.

Few would have room for the fifty volumes, or indeed the resources to buy a set, but Duke’s other great contribution to civilization and the advancement of knowledge is that the university has put the whole lot online, and they are there for everybody with a sufficiently enquiring mind—exhaustive footnotes and all. Only one of the collaborators survived the entire course of those fifty-three years from the first to the last volume: Ian Campbell, who became Professor of Scottish and Victorian Literature at Edinburgh University and whose own distinguished biography of Carlyle captures the essence of the man without emulating his occasional prolixity; Frederick the Great amounts to no fewer than eight volumes in the Centenary Edition, published at the end of the nineteenth century, but for all that is mostly a rather good read, thanks to Carlyle’s idiosyncratic, and always arresting, prose style and the lack of fear or reluctance that he had when it came to interpolating his own opinions.

Our first meeting with the Sage of Chelsea (born in 1795) in that initial volume comes directly after his future wife’s unpunctuated effort and is dated June 24, 1813. The letter is to his Edinburgh University friend Thomas Murray, who (a footnote tells us) was the first person to make Carlyle realize he might earn his living through literature. He did, but what a struggle it was. That letter, which includes much gossip about their shared acquaintances, comes from Carlyle’s modest house in the village of Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire, just over the border from England. Carlyle’s origins were humble: his father was a stonemason and then a farmer, but he had a thirst for self-improvement. The family took education seriously. The glories of the Scottish education system of the early nineteenth century meant that someone dismissed as an “Annandale peasant” could attend Edinburgh University (albeit living a hand-to-mouth existence) and aspire to joining the middle classes. As readers of Jude the Obscure (1895) know, no such opportunities existed in England until the twentieth century, with the waste of human capital and resources consequently being catastrophic.

Jane wrote from Haddington, a genteel town twenty miles east of Edinburgh, on the main Great North Road than runs down Scotland’s and then England’s east coast to London, nearly four hundred miles away. Her father was a doctor, and she was born ensconced in polite society. Eventually, in 1826, these two married despite their social differences and concerns from her family, and in 1834 they settled down for the rest of their lives in Chelsea, almost on the Thames embankment, in a little terraced house that became one of the hubs of the capital’s literary society—Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Tennyson, and Ruskin were to be among the regular visitors. Mill remained welcome despite his housemaid’s having burned the first draft of Carlyle’s French Revolution, left dumped by an armchair while the great philosopher accomplished yet more important work with his mistress, in March 1835. “The miserablest accident (as we name such things) of my whole life has just befallen me; almost the only accident of any magnitude I had ever to complain of,” Carlyle told James Fraser, his publisher:

I learned last night that my whole first volume, by the silliest oversight and mistake (not on my part or my wife’s) had been destroyed, except some three or four bits of leaves; and so the labour of five steadfast months had vanished irrecoverably; worse than if it had never been!

He did not name the culprit, but said he had “a far deeper sorrow than mine,” and consoled himself with the notion that “it is purely the hand of Providence.” Such was Mill’s anguish that he offered Carlyle £200, equivalent to around £25,000 today, untaxed. Such was Carlyle’s rectitude that he accepted only £100. He duly rewrote the first volume and considered the result superior.

The editors’ decision to include Mrs. Carlyle’s letters was entirely correct. She was her husband’s intellectual equal in many respects, and in London and British literary life they hunted as a pair. Her letters give a superb insight into their domestic and social life, and into her husband’s character. When he was working himself into the ground writing Frederick the Great, which took him the best part of a dozen years and was completed shortly before her death, he would lock himself into his soundproofed room at the top of their house. When he could write no more, he saddled his horse and went for a thirty-mile ride, often to Croydon (now in London’s farthest southern suburbs) and back. She hardly saw him. In March 1859, not quite halfway through this calvary, she wrote to a woman friend that “Mr Carlyle is hard at work as usual, and the house would be dull enough if it were not for the plenty of people—often more than enough—who come to see me in the forenoons . . .” These were not, she discloses elsewhere, always great literary figures stopping by to take coffee with her, but mostly a succession of tradesmen: such was the glamour of her life. Her health became precarious and she took to her bed more and more frequently: she said to a friend in 1863 that “you were quite right in thinking things must be wrong with me,” but said it was all down to servant trouble. That June, while taking a cure on the south coast, she told another woman friend that “it is so pleasant to be nursed, and made much of! My only regret is, that I must go home on Saturday and take up with the opposite of all that!”

Four volumes later, Frederick is finished, but so is poor Jane. She sent a lively letter of gossip to her husband, who was visiting Scotland, hours before her sudden death. The news was sent to him by his friend John Forster in a telegram. Carlyle replied that “the stroke that has fallen on me is immense; my heart is as if broken.” Even the Queen conveyed her sympathies; he replied to her lady-in-waiting, in a letter filled with gratitude, that “I can write to nobody; it is best for me, at present, when I do not even speak to anybody.” Writing on May 20, 1866, a month after his bereavement, to his patron Lady Ashburton, he said: “I am very quiet, as much as may be, silent; a dreary leaden sky of sorrow lying over me, whh [sic] will not abate, or soften into calm.” His epitaph to his wife was “the light of his life, as if gone out.” Jane had reacted with fury to her husband’s friendship with Lady Ashburton, which had no sexual side to it at all (it is far from clear that the Carlyles’ marriage was ever consummated: we shall never know, but on the morning after the first night of his honeymoon he went into the garden of the house where they were staying and trashed all the flower beds). As the letters show, Jane not only calmed down about it but became a devoted friend of Lady Ashburton too.

Carlyle’s devastation at his wife’s death stands uneasily with the best joke ever made about the couple—indeed perhaps the best joke ever made about nineteenth-century people of letters: Samuel Butler’s observation that “it was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another, and so make two people miserable and not four.” They did quarrel, and their shared disputatiousness comes across throughout many of the volumes, but there is no doubt that they had an emotional dependence on each other. Carlyle could be ferociously miserable—he famously described the period of writing his Latter-Day Pamphlets, in 1849–50, as one of “deep gloom, and bottomless dubitation”— and she could be scolding; one suspects their marriage is only unlike countless millions of others through the ages in that it is so well documented. These fifty volumes contain the most important documents.

The penultimate volume, published in 2022, began with Carlyle in late 1873, aged almost seventy-eight, apparently back to his old self in many regards: such as in praising Bismarck for a robust foreign policy in regard to the pope, who had complained about the limited rights of Catholics in the Second Reich.¹

Would to Heaven there were any English Minister now extant, or soon likely to be, who durst stand up in the name of this country (which was once the country of Cromwell, and protestant to the bone) and tell the accursed son of Chaos a similar story!

Nothing had diluted Carlyle the worshipper of heroes, of the strong man, of might is right. He was comforted in his widowerhood by his niece Mary Carlyle Aitken, who lived with him and cared for him. Ruskin frequently visited and wrote to him daily when abroad. John Forster (whose life of Dickens he greatly admires—“the narrative flows on with limpid clearness, soft harmony, perfection of phrase . . .”) and James Anthony Froude, who within a decade will be his biographer, were regulars, Froude the more so after he was widowed in 1874, leaving him “drowned in such black deluges of woe as no other man in London.”

We used to learn the most intimate details about Carlyle in his letters to his wife; now we benefit from the extensive correspondence he has with his brother John, a doctor. Thomas suffers from “the genius of indigestion” and “the genius of dyspepsia.” He asserted to his brother in November 1873 that “I am still as idle as ever,” yet explained that he does

nothing but read (poorish books, alas); walk daily a 3 or 4 miles[;] talk the while, if I have any company;—have always, alas, to spend so many hours out of my four and twenty in mere sleeping, misdigesting, and drearily endeavouring in vain to manage not insupportably the wretched dilapidated clay house where I have still to linger till the term come.

He added that “in general my mood is mournful; but seldom or never to be called quite miserable; occasionally strangely wonderful, tender and even solemn.” His reading and writing (mainly of letters) remained prodigious: he was working on a history of the early kings of Norway, with niece Mary as his amanuensis.

Carlyle may have been without “the light of his life,” but he was relatively rich (he had £2,779 10s 9d in his bank in January 1874, a typically excellent footnote tells us, a sum equivalent to around £350,000 today), and he was heaped with honor. He learned of the kaiser’s intention to award him the Prussian Order of Merit, in recognition of his work on Frederick the Great, by reading of it in a newspaper that same month. On St. Valentine’s Day he told John he had received from the German Ambassador

all the Documents and Insignia connected with our sublime elevation to the Prussian order of merit. . . . The star or symbolical decoration is really very pretty; a bright gold thing like a wheel with spokes about the size of a crown piece hung with a black ribbon, with silver edges.

Acclamation soon came from closer to home. On December 27, Benjamin Disraeli—whom at the time of the reform agitation in 1867 Carlyle had dismissed, in Shooting Niagara—and After, as a “superlative Hebrew conjuror”—had written to him stating that “A Government should recognise intellect. It elevates and sustains the tone of a nation,” offering him a high rank of knighthood (the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath) and a pension. Carlyle admitted “great surprise” at this “magnanimous and noble” offer “unexampled . . . in the history of governing persons towards men of letters at the present.” Yet he went on to say of “your splendid and generous proposals” that “must not any of them take effect.” He considered “titles of honour” to be “out of keeping with the tenour [sic] of my own poor existence” and a potential “encumbrance” and said his own means were “amply abundant, even superabundant,” so the pension was not necessary. Nonetheless, the offer showed just what a successful journey Carlyle had had: even if the twenty-first century cannot see it, or bring itself to see it, this was, as Disraeli knew, the most influential writer and thinker in the literary world of the nineteenth century.

The fiftieth and final volume opens in December 1875, as Carlyle is marking his eightieth birthday amid “a complete whirlwind of birthday gifts and congratulations,” though he told John he felt it would be his last.² Mary was now writing his letters for him, and he says how much he dislikes dictating. To reach eighty in the 1870s signified attaining great and remarkable old age, but Carlyle’s astonishing constitution was slowly packing up, however vigorous his mind remained. What meant most was that Bismarck wrote to him: “no honour could have been done to me, which I should have valued so much, or which shall live more brightly in my thoughts for the rest of my times in this world.” The correspondence with John intensified, though he was in decline too and predeceased his brother in September 1879, having (the editors tell us) earlier that year described the painful tumors in his stomach. Carlyle’s exhortation, the previous March, to “keep hoping, dear brother!” was sadly fruitless. The last letter Thomas directly composed was that month; the editors quote his friend William Allingham observing how, then aged eighty-three, he became “alarmingly weak” and began to sleep much of the time. In February 1881, he went into a coma and died. The last section of the volume contains letters from Mary about her uncle’s declining months; in November 1879 she informed a friend that despite reports of Carlyle being “dangerously ill” he was in fact “alarmingly well.” By July 1880, however, he was “exceedingly weak, hardly able to walk fifty yards without help.” It was a life of “lying on the sofa, reading in his easy chair, and smoking the occasional pipe.” At 2.30 p.m. each day he would be taken for a drive in his carriage, then come back to sleep on the sofa until dinner and an early bed. The end arrived not long after.

Throughout all fifty volumes of these letters the scholarship of the editorial team is simply stupendous. They have created one of the greatest historical resources in existence. Even if most libraries cannot run to acquiring the entire set, the letters’ availability online is the most generous act of academic philanthropy imaginable. These letters require no great grounding in the history and correspondence of the nineteenth century to be understood and enjoyed: they provide that very grounding. They are about the human condition and tell their own remarkable story. Everyone should read them.