Thomas & Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage Book

Devotees of the film Iris wishing to find a Victorian equivalent of a famous literary couple could do worse than turn to Rosemary Ashton's Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage. Like many famous Victorian men--Sir John Franklin, John Stuart Mill, Lord Palmerston all spring to mind--Thomas Carlyle would not have been quite the star he became without the considerable contribution of his partner. She was his intellectual muse and confidante, the centre-piece of the literary salon that was their home in Chelsea, and a magnet to a range of exotic and distinguished visitors, such as Charles Dickens, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Edward Irving. Was she more than a priceless adornment? Rosemary Ashton, who has few rivals as a biographer of the mid-Victorian literary intelligentsia, argues that Jane Carlyle's letters and journals add up to almost as important a contribution to Victorian literature as the essays and histories of her husband. She was certainly wittier and more comprehensible as many of the extracts suggest, although quite why she wrote in private and he in public is an intriguing question worth pondering more. For all their literary and social success, however, the Carlyles themselves had a difficult relationship, one which the author pursues with tact and sensibility. Before they met, Thomas Carlyle was unknown, after Jane died, Thomas lived for 15 more years, but wrote little of note. This scholarly and thorough double biography shows how what happened in between was achieved because of and not in spite of their marriage. --Miles TaylorRead More