Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World by Kathy Chamberlain

Author:Kathy Chamberlain [CHAMBERLAIN, KATHY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000, BIO022000, BIO007000
ISBN: 9781468314212
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2017-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

“THREATENING SHIPWRECK”

“Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.”

—ALFRED TENNYSON, “Tears, Idle Tears”

TOWARD THE END OF JUNE 1846, OR THE BEGINNING OF JULY, THE Carlyles had a bitter, angry quarrel. The threat of shipwreck, or separation, hovered in the air. Since their letters do not provide a full explanation, a variety of circumstances—the context for their quarrel, that is—has to be considered.

On Jane’s part—some who wrote about the Carlyles put the blame on her—her forty-fifth birthday was fast approaching. No evidence exists that at this time she was taking opium. Menopause was probably not a cause, since the onset likely occurred later. Although she twice expressed fears for her sanity, she was never entirely specific as to why. Love complications most definitely played the major part in the accelerating tensions between husband and wife.

But Jane herself had spoken of work when she lamented in her letter of May 19, “One escapes so much suffering by dying young!—all the good one could possibly have enjoyed in longer life is not it seems to me to be put in the balance against the evil which one must necessarily have suffered. Surviving one after another of all one loved—one after another of all one’s beautiful illusions and even most reasonable hopes, surv[iv]ing in short one’s original self!” In a sort of limbo, Jane was looking forward and backward in apprehension, fearing she had lost touch with her original self, the playful, promising girl she had been, and worrying what the future might hold.

She was keenly conscious of mortality and her place on the timeline. Though Jane Carlyle may seem rather young to us, life expectancy was then around forty-five, the very age she was approaching. “[T]he latter part of ones life,” she continued, “may be cruelly embittered by the reflection, that ones best years, which might perhaps have produced something good have been suffered to run to waste, fertile only of tares [weeds] and nettles!” After relating that the Macready women had laughed at her amusing stories without glimpsing her underlying depression, Jane had written those telling words: “I wish I could find some hard work I could do—and saw any sense in doing—If I do not soon it will be the worse for me—”

By hard work Jane Carlyle might have meant a memoir-writing project like that in her journal notebook, describing intriguing visitors to Cheyne Row and the curious stories they told her. She might have been thinking of moral or autobiographical essays, or collaboration on a novel with Geraldine Jewsbury—a door that was always open. In the next paragraph she added, “Meanwhile all around me goes on as usual—C is just getting done with his work—”

Did the advance of his work make hers seem suddenly all the more tenuous and elusive? Although difficult to factor into Jane’s state of mind, her husband’s work was part of the picture.

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