Vol. 6 No. 13 · 19 July 1984
pages 21-22 | 2742 words
Fuming
Richard Altick
- Thomas Carlyle: A Biography by Fred Kaplan
Cambridge, 614 pp, £25.00, January 1984, ISBN 0 521 25854 5
- Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose
Chatto, 318 pp, £11.95, March 1984, ISBN 0 7011 2825 9
- A Carlyle Reader edited by G.B. Tennyson
Cambridge, 544 pp, £25.00, May 1984, ISBN 0 521 26238 0
Most conscientious biographers are aware of their subjects’ shades vigilantly or solicitously hovering over their shoulders as they write. The biographer of Thomas Carlyle is supervised more severely than most: the irritable, brooding Scotsman, the would-be redeemer, and, failing that, the scourge of Victorian England, seems to breathe flame down his neck. To write about Carlyle with both authority and imagination is a daunting enterprise. For one thing, Dr Johnson apart, no English man of letters has ever held a higher opinion of the dignity of biography as a literary form, or inferentially expected more from its practitioners. Carlyle’s most famous dictum, ‘History is the essence of innumerable biographies,’ may have been meant only metaphorically, but another is specific enough: ‘Biography is by nature the most universally profitable, universally pleasant of all things: especially biography of distinguished individuals.’
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[*] Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols, £20 each, 1982, 0 333 26254 9 and 0 333 26255 7.
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Letters
Vol. 6 No. 14 · 2 August 1984
From Neil Berry
SIR: In his review of Fred Caplan’s biography of Carlyle (LRB, Vol. 6, No 13) Richard Altick endorses Caplan’s opinion that the six-volume life of the Sage of Cheyne Walk by D.A. Wilson published in the 1920s amounts to an ‘historical grotesquerie, a mass of undigested and unevaluated documentation whose main purpose was to prove that Carlyle was a saint and Froude a liar’. This seems to me to be, at best, misleading, for if Wilson was a hagiographer, he was also a zealous researcher and he blended primary material and narrative dexterously enough – at least as dexterously as Caplan, to judge from Altick’s account of his book. Admittedly nobody in his right mind would want to read all six volumes, but anyone interested in Carlyle’s development, especially his early development, is likely to find Wilson both informative and readable.
Wilson’s life is particularly valuable for its full presentation of Carlyle’s encounters with Francis Jeffrey. Carlyle began by defining his outlook against the rationalist, Enlightenment ethos of the Edinburgh Review, an ethos which, as editor of the journal, Jeffrey strenuously promoted, but which Carlyle came to find sterile and impoverishing. Recalling Carlyle’s involvement with the Edinburgh Review, John Sterling was to express surprise that he had ever written in its pages. The fact is that when Jeffrey first met him and Jane Welsh Carlyle, he was captivated by them, and they were no less captivated by him. Their relationship is of great interest, its inexorable decline from initial fascination into querulous mutual incomprehension and eventual estrangement representing a literary drama on its own account and also an instructive episode in the cultural history of the early 19th century. Strange that books, and for that matter, reviews of books, about Carlyle do not make more of it.
Neil Berry
London W1
