Six Victorian marriages, part 1: Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle

"Shewing how wrath began." Illustration by Marcus Stone for Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right (1869). Image source: Project Gutenberg.

Every couple is an enigma to outsiders, and often even to itself. [1]

Marriage is a perilous undertaking. In the U.S. almost half as many people get divorced every year as get married, even though marriage rates have declined and the age of first marriage has increased steadily since the late 1950s, suggesting that the decision to marry is taken ever more deliberately. Even when, without social stigma, we can date dozens of people and live with partners for months or years in a kind of trial marriage to determine the compatibility of our political views, social preferences, domestic habits, family connections, monetary attitudes and sexual practices, we still have a nearly 50% failure rate when choosing spouses.

Imagine how much more difficult it was for the Victorians. Couples typically knew little about one another before uniting, and if they discovered they'd made a mistake there was little that they could do. Nineteenth-century marriages, no matter how miserable, usually were for life: until 1857 it generally took an Act of Parliament to obtain a divorce. 

In books by Phyllis Rose (the classic Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages) and Diane Johnson (The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives), six Victorian marriages are examined. Rose writes,

. . .like [John Stuart] Mill, I believe marriage to be the primary political experience in which most of us engage as adults, and so I am interested in the management of power between men and women in that microcosmic relationship. Whatever the balance, every marriage is based upon some understanding, articulated or not, about the relative importance, the priority of desires, between its two partners. Marriages go bad not when love fades—love can modulate into affection without driving two people apart—but when this understanding about the balance of power breaks down, when the weaker member feels exploited or the stronger feels unrewarded for his or her strength. [2]

But in the Victorian era, couples often discovered that those tacit or explicit understandings had been founded on inadequate evidence or false premises.

Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle

Jane Baillie Carlyle (née Welsh), attributed to Sir Anthony Coningham Sterling, after a painting by Samuel Laurence. Salt print, circa 1852, based on a work of circa 1851.
Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London.

Jane Welsh, like many other women hungry for knowledge then and since, faced the barrier of an implacably sexist educational system. Young middle-class women were supposed to become "accomplished," that is, learn to read and speak a smattering of French or Italian, play the harp or piano, sing, draw, and embroider. Actual learning—studying the classics of history, philosophy and literature—was the purview of men. 

Jane was witty, bright-eyed, and the only child of well-off parents. Not surprisingly she had several beaux, but all were unsatisfactory. They promised to enlarge neither the breadth of her experience nor the scope of her mind. She wanted a suitor who could convincingly play the role of Saint-Preux, tutor and lover of the heroine of Rousseau's Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Jane's favorite novel. 

The only suitor who came  anywhere close to St. Preux was the impecunious, uncouth, but brilliant Thomas Carlyle. He had almost immediately confessed his interest in her, but Jane did not think of him romantically:

Now Sir, once for all, I beg you to understand that I dislike as much as my Mother disapproves your somewhat too ardent expressions of Friendship towards me. . .I will be to you a true, a constant, and devoted friend—but not a Mistress—a Sister—but not a Wife—Falling in love and marrying like other Misses is quite out of the question—I have too little romance in my disposition ever to be in love with you or any other man; and too much ever to marry without love. [3]

Thomas Carlyle, 1854. Image source: Future Museum, South West Scotland.

Jane may have been concerned lest her mother forbid any correspondence, and for her Carlyle was an intellectual lifeline. He sent her books and reading lists, exchanged ideas, corrected the grammar of her translations, and urged her to undertake literary projects (for all of which Jane felt herself unsuited). But she steadfastly held him at arm's length—or, rather, pen's, because they kept up a frequent correspondence.

After she had exchanged letters with Carlyle for four years Jane was entering her mid-20s and recognized that she would either have to marry soon or live with her strong-willed mother for the rest of her life. But as a woman uninterested in conventional marriage her options were few. Carlyle had told her that if she married someone else he would stop writing to her, and she knew that likely the same would be true if he married someone else. So she grudgingly acknowledged that the only way they could be sure of continuing their intellectual exchanges was to marry: "Not many months ago, I would have said it was impossible that I should ever be your wife; at present I consider this to be the most probable destiny for me; in a year or so, perhaps, I shall consider it the only one." [4]

Her mother staunchly opposed the match, on the grounds of both Carlyle's relative poverty and his irascibility. (His temper must have been bad indeed for it to be apparent after only a couple of short visits.) Jane, distressingly, begins to sound like a woman making all the accommodations on her side: "No! my own Darling! we shall not be parted on this account. . .And tho' you should never be good-humoured, what then? Do we not love each other? And what is love if it cannot make all rough places smooth?" [5]

His own view of marriage, expressed in letters to her over the 18 months of their engagement, should have given her full warning about what she was letting herself in for: 

Do you not think, that when you on one side of our household shall have faithfully gone thro your housewife duties, and I on the other shall have written my allotted pages, we shall meet over our frugal meal with far happier and prouder hearts than thousands that are not blessed with any duties, and whose agony is the bitterest of all, "the agony of a too easy bed"? [6]

She is relegated to "housewife duties," while he, the great man (though, he warned her, "sick and sulky"), sits in his study while she caters to his needs. Her needs go unmentioned and unmet. 

Jane Baillie Carlyle (née Welsh), attributed to Sir Anthony Coningham Sterling. Salt print, 1855?.
Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London.

Indeed, a "too easy bed" would not be her lot. James Froude, who was chosen by Carlyle to be his biographer, wrote that "Carlyle was impatient, irritable, strangely forgetful of others, self-occupied and bursting into violence at the smallest and absurdest provocation—evidently a most difficult and trying household companion. . .Mrs. Carlyle's pale, drawn, suffering face haunted me in my dreams." [7]

Carlyle's violence was more than verbal: Jane's journal recorded an incident where Carlyle left "blue marks" on her arms because he had grabbed her so forcefully. After her death Carlyle read her diary and "saw that he had made her entirely miserable; that she had sacrificed her life to him; and that he had made a wretched return for her devotion." [8] Jane herself had a sharp tongue and keen wit, of course—she wrote to a childhood friend, "if you but knew what a brimstone of a creature I am behind all this beautiful amiability!"—but no provocation could excuse physical violence. [9]

Froude wrote of Jane,

I thought her the most brilliant and interesting woman that I had ever fallen in with; so much thought, so much lightness and brilliancy, such sparkling scorn and tenderness combined, I had never met with together in any human being. It was evident that she was suffering; she was always in indifferent health, she had no natural cheerfulness, at least, none when I knew her. Rumour said that she and Carlyle quarrelled often, and I could easily believe it from occasional expressions about him. [10]

Their marriage was probably unconsummated, to Jane's dismay. Her friend Geraldine Jewsbury, in whom Jane confided, told Froude that "'Carlyle was one of those persons who ought never to have married,'" because he was uninterested in or incapable of providing physical affection to his wife. [11] And meanwhile Jane was expected to deal with all of the unpleasant tasks of daily life (including talking to their neighbors about the early-morning crowing of their roosters) in order to free Carlyle from such petty concerns and enable him to devote his time to writing. 

After thirty years of marriage Carlyle began to spend more and more time at the soirées of Lady Harriet Ashburton. Although Jane cultivated her own circle of acquaintances, she justifiably felt neglected and taken for granted:

Intellectual and spiritual affection being all which he had to give, Mrs. Carlyle naturally looked on these at least as exclusively her own. She had once been his idol, she was now a household drudge, and the imaginative homage which had been once hers was given to another. This had been the occasion of the most violent outbreaks between them.  [12]

 

Jane Baillie Carlyle (née Welsh), by Robert Scott Tait. Albumen print, April 1855.
Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London.

At this point Jane considered leaving him, but was unable to make the final break. She died a decade later in 1866 after forty years of marriage, and after being in ill health for many years. Remarkably Carlyle decided to publish her journal and letters, which painted him in an extremely unflattering light. Perhaps he considered it a penance. Froude wrote, "He shut himself up in the house with her diaries and papers, and for the first time was compelled to look himself in the face, and to see what his faults had been." [13]

Samuel Butler later wrote to a female friend that "it was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four." [14] It seems clear, though, that in their marriage most of the misery was on one side.

Next time: Effie Gray and John Ruskin 

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1. Rachel Donadio, "Domenico Starnone’s New Novel Is Also a Piece in the Elena Ferrante Puzzle," New York Times, 9 March 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/books/review/ties-domenico-starnone-jhumpa-lahiri.html
2. Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. Alfred Knopf, 1984, p. 7.
3. Jane Baillie Welsh to Thomas Carlyle, ca. 17 January 1822. Carlyle Letters Online, Duke University Press, 2019: https://carlyleletters.dukeupress.edu/volume/02/lt-18220117-JBW-TC-01
4. Jane Baillie Welsh to Thomas Carlyle, 29 January 1825. Carlyle Letters Online, https://carlyleletters.dukeupress.edu/volume/03/lt-18250129-JBW-TC-01
5. Quoted in Rose, p. 42.
6. Quoted in Rose, pp. 42-43.
7. James Froude, My Relations With Carlyle, Longmans, Green and Co., 1903, p. 8. https://archive.org/details/a582586800frouuoft/page/n19/mode/1up
8. Froude, p. 11. https://archive.org/details/a582586800frouuoft/page/n22/mode/1up
9. Jane Welsh Carlyle to Elizabeth Stodartc, a. 29 February 1836. Carlyle Letters Online, https://carlyleletters.dukeupress.edu/volume/08/lt-18360229-JWC-EA-01
10. Froude, p. 3. https://archive.org/details/a582586800frouuoft/page/n14/mode/1up
11. Quoted in Froude, p. 21. https://archive.org/details/a582586800frouuoft/page/n32/mode/1up
12. Froude, p. 22. https://archive.org/details/a582586800frouuoft/page/n33/mode/1up
13. Froude, p. 11. https://archive.org/details/a582586800frouuoft/page/n22/mode/1up
14. Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835-1902), A Memoir. Macmillan and Co, 1919, p. 429.