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WORK TITLE: Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World
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http://www.ed.ac.uk/literatures-languages-cultures/english-literature/research/current/carlyle-letters/advisory-group * http://www.startribune.com/review-jane-welsh-carlyle-and-her-victorian-world-by-kathy-chamberlain/421379553/
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LC control no.: no2017065077
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rda
Personal name heading:
Chamberlain, Kathy
Found in: Jane Welsh Carlyle and her Victorian world, ©2017: title
page (Kathy Chamberlain) back flap (Professor, City
University of New York. Advisory board member of the
Edinburgh Carlyle Letters Office).
Associated language:
eng
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PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and educator. City University of New York, New York, NY, professor emeritus. Member of advisory board, Edinburgh Carlyle Letters Office, University of Edinburgh.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Historian Kathy Chamberlain retired after decades of work at the City University of New York. She “taught English for thirty-four years at BMCC/CUNY,” explained a contributor to the University of Edinburgh web site. “She has given lectures on Jane Welsh Carlyle at the CUNY Graduate Center.” Her biography Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Friendship, and Marriage tells the story of some of the most active years of one of the great Victorian letter writers: Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of essayist Thomas Carlyle. She “wrote scores of often humorous, always enlightening epistles,” declared Margaret Flanagan on the Duckworth Overlook website, “detailing, in dazzling prose, her fascinating experiences.”
Critics note that Chamberlain’s monograph portrays Carlyle as a dynamic and complex character. In Chamberlain’s biography, wrote Patricia L. Hagen in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Carlyle is revealed as “a valued friend and companion, a complicated woman whose struggles will trigger a flash of recognition even today. Chamberlain’s sensitivity, wit and deep knowledge of the period are beautifully suited to her subject, making this the most fascinating biography I have read in years.” “The focus of Chamberlain’s book is much more unusual than its main source. This is not a conventional biography,” warned Joe Pilling in the Victorian Web. “It concentrates on 1843-49 when its subject was in her mid-forties and that has both strengths and weaknesses. A normal biography would say much more about how its subject had emerged from her family background, education and the early years of marriage.” However, “the years are well-chosen: she is active socially, they include the momentous events of 1848 across Europe and the Irish famine, Jane’s response to her husband’s relationship with Lady Harriet Baring is covered in depth,” Pilling explained. “Chamberlain’s evocation of her is pitch-perfect. In the 1840s, Jane tried her hand at a memoir essay that she titled, with typical sardonic self-effacement, `Much ado about Nothing,” said Steve Donoghue in the Christian Science Monitor. “Chamberlain calls it one of her finest achievements, in which readers are confronted with `the jolting shock of the familiar having become alien, and oneself a ghost.’ `Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World’ carries something of that same shock; it gives us, at last, a Jane Carlyle who seems thrillingly alive.”
At the center of Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World are Carlyle’s letters themselves. “Jane’s letters, which have lost nothing of their freshness and mischief, take us immediately into her world, or rather into the world as she chose to construct it,” said Frances Wilson in the Spectator. “She saw her letters as a roman fleuve–`I must go on’, she writes to a friend, `to the end of the chapter’–in which she recorded conversations, sketched what she called `dramas in one scene’ (such as Carlyle’s throwing his Cromwell manuscript into the fire), and reshaped her days for comic effect.” “Chamberlain’s literary skills serve to showcase her expertise on a woman whom history has undeservedly ignored,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World is “a delightful book about the early stirrings of feminism in Victorian England.” “Letters are the stuff of this engaging book,” stated an Economist reviewer. “Though the marriage was not happy (Ms Chamberlain is wary of tales that it was unconsummated), Thomas and Jane wrote constantly whenever separated–curiously in need of each other, the author observes, and “attuned … to each other’s words.'””It isn’t unusual for letters to be an important source but it could scarcely be more fitting than for Jane Carlyle,” said Pilling. “Her [Oxford Dictionary of National Biography] entry begins `Carlyle, Jane Baillie Welsh (1801-1866), letter writer’ and later says `Yet it is scarcely disputed that she is the greatest woman letter writer in English.'” Chamberlain “succeeds in making her case,” declared Jenny Brewer in Library Journal, “… reminding readers that letter writing was considered an art form in 19th-century England.” “This humane, well-documented book,” concluded a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “provides a solid and readable lay introduction to a fascinating literary figure.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2017, Margaret Flanagan, review of Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Friendship, and Marriage, p. 9.
Christian Science Monitor, April 25, 2017, Steve Donoghue, “Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World Brings a Forgotten Talent to Life.”
Economist, April 15, 2017, “To Have and to Hold; A Very Victorian Marriage,” p. 71.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2017, review of review of Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World.
Library Journal, March 1, 2017, Jenny Brewer, review of Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World, p. 82.
Publishers Weekly, January 30, 2017, review of Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World, p. 191.
Spectator, March 11, 2017, Frances Wilson, “Back with a Vengeance: Jane Carlyle Found Comfort in Her Miserable Marriage by ‘Splashing off’ Whatever Was on Her Mind in Letters to Friends–Which Became Famous in her Own Lifetime.” p. 32.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), July 5, 2017, review of Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World.
ONLINE
Duckworth Overlook, http://ducknet.co.uk/ (November 1, 2017), author profile.
University of Edinburgh Website, http://www.ed.ac.uk/ (November 1, 2017), author profile.
Victorian Web, http://www.victorianweb.org/ (April 12, 2017), Joe Pilling, review of Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World.
dvisory Group
The Advisory Group, introduced in 2009, gives formal project and financial management for the Carlyle Letters in Edinburgh.
Carlyle residence, Comely Bank Terrace, Edinburgh
Wall Plaque for Thomas Welsh Carlyle
Its remit is to oversee finance and fundraising; to give advice on broadening impact of the Letters in the wider community; to give advice with the transition to final volumes of the Letters after publication of volume 43 (1866, death of Jane Welsh Carlyle) and the evolution of the editorial team.
People
The Advisory Group consists of Professors:
William Christie (Sydney University)
Kathy Chamberlain (City University of New York, emeritus)
Glenda Norquay (Liverpool John Moores University)
Lindsay Paterson (Edinburgh University).
Kathy Chamberlain
Kathy Chamberlain is chair of Women Writing Women's Lives, an ongoing seminar for biographers founded in 1990 and affiliated with the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Women Writing Women's Lives
Professor Chamberlain taught English for 34 years at BMCC/CUNY. She has given lectures on Jane Welsh Carlyle at the CUNY Graduate Center and at conferences in the USA and UK, and has published several essays about JWC and problems of biography. She is currently writing a book about JWC's life in the 1840s.
Kathy Chamberlain has lectured on Jane Welsh Carlyle at the CUNY Graduate Center and at conferences in the US and UK, and has published numerous essays about Jane Welsh Carlyle and Virginia Woolf, writing reviews for the Virginia Woolf Society
of Great Britain.
Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Friendship, and Marriage
Margaret Flanagan
113.16 (Apr. 15, 2017): p9.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Friendship, and Marriage. By Kathy Chamberlain. Apr. 2017.400p. Illus. Overlook/Duckworth, $37.50 (9781468314205). 820.
Chamberlain, like Shelley DeWees in Not Just Jane (2016), has taken another overlooked female out of the literary closet, dusting off and reexamining the voluminous correspondence of Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of the brilliant yet unabashedly self-absorbed and chauvinistic writer, Thomas Carlyle. Traveling in rarefied Victorian literary circles that included such luminaries as William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Welsh Carlyle wrote scores of often humorous, always enlightening epistles detailing, in dazzling prose, her fascinating experiences and observations. More than just a chronicler of events, she also immersed herself in social causes dear to her heart. A true reflection of the Victorian Age in all its contradictions, Carlyle was, at once, both a product of her times constrained by societal strictures and a beacon for future female essayists, as she found a socially acceptable way to wield considerable influence through her writings.--Margaret Flanagan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Flanagan, Margaret. "Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Friendship, and Marriage." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2017, p. 9+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA492536074&it=r&asid=5f4fffc2586b2ff10505c234c17cf360. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492536074
To have and to hold; A very Victorian marriage
423.9036 (Apr. 15, 2017): p71(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
No underdog
"SOME kind of angel married to some kind of god!" So seemed Jane Welsh Carlyle and her husband, Thomas, to a friend in 1845. Her wit and his fame--as the author of "The French Revolution" (1837) and "On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History" (1841), among other books--had shot them into the literary firmament. Poets, novelists, philosophers and revolutionaries all beat a path to their door in Cheyne Row, Chelsea.
But the image was a fantasy. Thomas was a curmudgeon, a "self-tortured, aggravating mystery of a man" as Kathy Chamberlain writes in her new book, and a prize chauvinist besides. "The Man should rule in the house and not the Woman," he warned his bride-to-be. But Jane was a born ironist with "a genius", she said later, "for not being ruled!" No angel then, but fun. One friend saw dinner guests seated beside her "in incessant fits of laughter!", and her letters echo her talk--mocking, self-mocking, mercurial, "splashing off whatever is on my mind", in Jane's words.
Letters are the stuff of this engaging book. Though the marriage was not happy (Ms Chamberlain is wary of tales that it was unconsummated), Thomas and Jane wrote constantly whenever separated--curiously in need of each other, the author observes, and "attuned…to each other's words". Wisely, Ms Chamberlain focuses on a few interesting years, 1843 to 1849, a time of revolution. Her book is crowded with people and stories--overcrowded even, and a little rough at the edges. But one persistent and fascinating thread is Jane's search for what she called her "I-ity", her "self-subsisting and alas! self-seeking Me". Sometimes it was a craving for confirmation; she glowed after a visit from Alfred Lord Tennyson to "talk with me! by myself me!" Sometimes it was a longing for a mission, a purpose.
Above all, it was her need to write. She knew her worth. When Thomas praised her "charming bits of Letters", she flew at him: "as if I were some nice little Child writing…to its God papa…let us hear no more of my bits of Letters". She was after bigger fish--authenticity, "as it flies", she wrote. Chiding a cousin for her reserve, she demanded "the real transcript of your mind at the moment": "if a sadness, or a longing, or a perplexity, or a bedeviledness falls on you…then down with it on paper--tho' only six lines or six words".
Jane never published. She could cope with the "transcript" only in private; couldn't even write it down, she said, if there was anyone else in the room. A draft novel by two friends shocked her precisely by its authenticity: by the "exposure of their whole minds naked as before the fall". With one brief exception, the thought of publication froze her own attempts at formal writing. But then there was always someone in the room--Thomas's heroes gazing from the shelves, high among them the writer himself, "The Hero as Man of Letters", hailed by him as "our most important modern person". No wonder she kept her head down.
Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Friendship, and Marriage.
By Kathy Chamberlain.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"To have and to hold; A very Victorian marriage." The Economist, 15 Apr. 2017, p. 71(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA489447981&it=r&asid=fa3858747d09d26dccffde36b3635be1. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A489447981
Back with a vengeance: Jane Carlyle found comfort in her miserable marriage by 'splashing off' whatever was on her mind in letters to friends--which became famous in her own lifetime
Frances Wilson
333.9837 (Mar. 11, 2017): p32.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Friendship and Marriage
by Kathy Chamberlain
Duckworth, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 384
One hour in No. 5 Cheyne Row, Virginia Woolf observed, will tell you more about the Carlyles than all the biographies. The house lived in by Thomas and Jane Carlyle from 1834 until their respective deaths, and now owned by the National Trust, was one of the great battlegrounds of domestic history. Here Jane warred against bedbugs and coal dust and her husband's obsession with the vast and unstoppable Lady Harriet Ashburton (there were three people in her marriage), and Carlyle warred against the intrusions of the outside world. While next door's rooster kept him awake at night, by day, as Jane wrote in one of her peerless letters, he was disturbed by
men, women, children, omnibuses, carriages,
glass coaches, street coaches, wagons, carts,
dog-carts, steeple bells, doorbells, gentleman
raps, twopenny-post-raps and footmen-showers-of
raps.
Not to mention the dutiful piano-practising of the girl in the adjacent house, the racket of hawkers, organ-grinders and washerwomen, and the hourly chiming of the old Chelsea clock. No man could write under these conditions, and soundproofing his study made little difference.
Thomas Carlyle is now more famous for his feisty wife than his life of Frederick the Great, and observers of their marriage disagree over who was the most long-suffering. For some, he was the victim of a shrew who mockingly recorded his every gesture; for others she was the victim of a brute who failed to see her brilliance. 'Being married to him', said Jane's friend Anna Jameson --having just braved the consequences of interrupting the sage in one of his monologues --must be 'something next worse to being married to Satan himself'. Samuel Butler refused to take sides. 'It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another,' he quipped, 'and so make only two people miserable and not four.' Their quarrels might have been spared, thought Woolf as she toured the house, had the Carlyles possessed hot and cold running water. Domestic tensions are inevitable when taking a bath requires the maid, supervised by her mistress, to pump water from the well, boil it on the range, and transport it--soundlessly, of course--in bucketloads up three flights of stairs.
Kathy Chamberlain, in this hugely satisifying new life, is firmly in Jane's camp, but she has no interest in making a martyr of her subject. Chamberlain's Jane is a complex heroine, caught between a fierce regard for convention and the high romance of rebellion. Her closest male friend, after all, was Guiseppe Mazzini, the father of modern Italy, who was in exile in London until 1848.
Trimming away the fat of the story, Chamberlain focuses on the years 1843-1849, when the Carlyes are nearly 20 years into their marriage. Jane is in her forties and Carlyle, now famous for his novel, Sartor Resartus and his history of the French Revolution is suffering agonies over his life of Cromwell, the first draft of which he has just thrown on the fire, watched by his notetaking wife. They are childless, but apparently not unhappily so; their marriage is probably sexless; they sleep, at least, in separate rooms, although this might be due to mutual insomnia. We get brief snapshots of their previous life in Craigenputtock, Dumfriesshire, of his background as the son of a Calvinist stonemason and hers as the daughter of a doctor, and we are occasionally reminded of the crippling remorse he will feel following her death in 1866, when he discovers, from her writing, how unhappy she had been. But for the moment the Carlyles are carrying on the business of their daily lives.
Drawing from the 44 volumes of their letters and journals, Chamberlain catches Jane on the wing: supervising the servant, stitching the curtains, nailing down the carpet, smoking in her bedroom, sitting up late with Tennyson and smoothing her skirts when Mazzini comes to call. Also included amongst her friends are a Sapphic German governess called Amely Bolte, another young German abroad called Richard Plattnauer, who suffers from severe manic depression, and the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury. At the centre of her life, however, is her rival Lady Ashburton, whose invitations for prolonged visits cause Jane agony.
'The story begins,' writes Chamberlain, 'inside a house', and for the most part, unless she is marooned in one of Lady Ashburton's mansions or visiting friends in the north in protest against the presence of Lady Ashburton, the story stays in Jane's Chelsea house, where she is sometimes miserable, often ill, always busy, and at her happiest when, as she puts it, 'splashing off whatever is on my mind' in missives to her circle.
Jane's letters, which have lost nothing of their freshness and mischief, take us immediately into her world, or rather into the world as she chose to construct it. She saw her letters as a roman fleuve--'I must go on', she writes to a friend, 'to the end of the chapter'--in which she recorded conversations, sketched what she called 'dramas in one scene' (such as Carlyle's throwing his Cromwell manuscript into the fire), and reshaped her days for comic effect. This is an example of a 'drama in one scene', in which Jane describes being cornered at a party by the rancid old gossip Samuel Rogers:
SR (pointing to a chair beside him): Sit down, my dear--I want to ask you, is your husband as much infatuated as ever with Lady Ashburton?
JC: Oh, of course (laughing). Why shouldn't he?
SR: Now--do you like her her?--tell me honestly is she kind to you--as kind as she is to your husband?
JC: Why you know it is impossible for me to know how kind she is to my husband ...
While Carlyle, who told us that 'history was the biography of great men', wrestled with his marathons in his attic study, Jane, poised in her parlour, threw off mock epics in which she starred as a Herculean housewife. What Woolf failed to see, and what Chamberlain fully appreciates, is that Jane liked housework. She liked the business of pumping and boiling and carrying water. A proud and fastidious Scot, she approached domestic combat with vigour and gusto. Her comic companion throughout these years is her tiny, alcoholic Scottish servant, Helen Mitchell: 'I think, talk, and write about my own servant,' Jane noted, 'as much as Geraldine does about her lovers.' Helen, who observes Jane as closely as Jane observes Helen, possessed, when sober, what Carlyle called 'an intellectual insight almost of genius'.
Jane's letters, which were famous in her lifetime, constituted what Elizabeth Hardwick has called 'a private writing career', but they were not private objects. They were written to be read aloud, passed around, quoted. She wrote for entertainment. Opening a letter from Jane, said Mrs Gaskell, 'I begin speech with you.' Chamberlain likens Jane Carlyle to Jane Austen (there is a touch of Mr Collins in Carlyle and of Lady Catherine de Burgh in Lady Ashburton), but the Carlyes, who thought Austen's novels were 'washy watergruel', would not have appreciated the comparison.
It is Chamberlain's own style which makes this book such a happy read. Choosing Jane's free-associative 'splashing' over Carlyle's solid biographical template, Chamberlain speaks with us. Talking about Mazzini, for example, who is sitting in Jane's parlour looking tragic and handsome, Chamberlain tells us about the school he has set up for impoverished children, 'such as the organ-grinder boys, hawkers of plaster casts, and trinket sellers who were common figures on the London streets'. This leads her to note how very much Carlyle disliked the noise made by impoverished children such as these, and how Helen Mitchell would order them, through an opened window, to 'move on'. It reminds her of the story told by Henry Mayhew about an organ-grinder boy, which Chamberlain in turn then tells us, eventually returning to poor Mazzini in the parlour and his fondness for Jane, who he described as 'the woman I value most in England'.
Later, when Mazzini returns to Italy and the Roman Republic is being established, Jane, Chamberlain tells us, 'had to confront a very special crisis in her kitchen'. Helen Mitchell was drunk again--'her mouth covered with blood', wrote Jane, 'her brown cheek and dark dress whitened with the chalk of the kitchen floor ... her hair streaming wildly from under a crushed cap--and her face wearing the smile of idiotic self-complacency'.
I'm not going to say what happened next. You have to buy the book, which you'll then read aloud, pass around, and quote from. Jane Carlyle is back with a vengeance.
Caption: Watercolour sketch of Jane Carlyle by Karl Hartmann (1850)
BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wilson, Frances. "Back with a vengeance: Jane Carlyle found comfort in her miserable marriage by 'splashing off' whatever was on her mind in letters to friends--which became famous in her own lifetime." Spectator, 11 Mar. 2017, p. 32+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA498485924&it=r&asid=2ddfad3a708300eaa2c880044b798a86. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498485924
Chamberlain, Kathy. Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Friendship, and Marriage
Jenny Brewer
142.4 (Mar. 1, 2017): p82.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Chamberlain, Kathy. Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Friendship, and Marriage. Overlook. Apr. 2017.400p. photos. notes, index. ISBN 9781468314205. $37.50; ebk. ISBN 9781468314212. LIT
Chamberlain's book is an exploration of Jane Welsh Carlyle's life in the Victorian age, with special emphasis on the period's ideas about gender and marriage. These ideas were very influential on Carlyle and play a prominent role in the first chapter, which devotes several pages to helping readers recognize her as a literary figure in her own right (Carlyle was married to essayist Thomas Carlyle), even if her audience would not be perceived as significant by today's standards. Chamberlain (formerly English, City Univ. of New York) largely succeeds in making her case, focusing on Carlyle's personal correspondence and reminding readers that letter writing was considered an art form in 19th-century England, with correspondences reaching far beyond their intended recipients as they were passed around among friends and family. She delves deeply into Thomas's affair with Harriet Taylor, the disruption it caused in Jane's life, and the ways in which the conventions of the age limited how she could respond and react to such disruption. VERDICT Recommended for readers with an interest in the Carlyles and Victorian life and literature in general.--Jenny Brewer, Helen Hall Lib., League City, TX
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Brewer, Jenny. "Chamberlain, Kathy. Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Friendship, and Marriage." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 82. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483702116&it=r&asid=751cd90870ff53571c3790ef9d7da6d0. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A483702116
Chamberlain, Kathy: JANE WELSH CARLYLE AND HER VICTORIAN WORLD
(Feb. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Chamberlain, Kathy JANE WELSH CARLYLE AND HER VICTORIAN WORLD Overlook (Adult Nonfiction) $37.50 4, 4 ISBN: 978-1-4683-1420-5
A biography of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-1866), the wife of essayist Thomas known for her "marvelous letters."A longtime professor at the City University of New York, Chamberlain has lectured and published numerous essays on Carlyle, widely regarded as one of England's great masters of the epistolary, a literary form of writing as much confessional as novelistic. Her letters--and her strong instructions to correspondents--insist that one must relate not only events, but also their effects. She believed that good letter writing involved a "splash of the mind," something like speaking. Encouraged by friends to pen a novel, she preferred her correspondence. Chamberlain traces her subject's lifelong quest to make a mark beyond the wifely duties of a Victorian wife. She worked tirelessly, through her many acquaintances, to help find work for unemployed women, and her husband's growing reputation as a writer brought all the brightest minds across their path: Dickens, Emerson, Thackeray, Margaret Fuller, Erasmus Darwin, and Giuseppe Mazzini, to name a few. One other acquaintance caused considerable trouble in their marriage: Lady Harriet Baring, with whom Thomas enjoyed a long, reportedly platonic relationship. Thomas, a patronizing, infantilizing husband, subjected Jane's jealousy to what the author terms "gaslighting." He was an influential Victorian literary figure but also a chauvinist who condemned abolitionists and derided blacks. Jane also found a place for German writer Amely Bolte as governess to a truly horrid child, whom the author points out would become a "three volume novel of a little charge," as well as the basis for Thackeray's cynical character in Vanity Fair Becky Sharp. Chamberlain's literary skills serve to showcase her expertise on a woman whom history has undeservedly ignored. A delightful book about the early stirrings of feminism in Victorian England and a celebration of the lost art of letter writing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Chamberlain, Kathy: JANE WELSH CARLYLE AND HER VICTORIAN WORLD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480921919&it=r&asid=5d9e68bc0c50b4f43ec29e6ba89a8389. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480921919
Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World
264.5 (Jan. 30, 2017): p191.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World
Kathy Chamberlain. Overlook, $37.50 (400p)
ISBN978-1-4683-1420-5
Jane Carlyle's main claim to fame is her marriage to Thomas Carlyle, a philosopher and historian who became one of the towering figures of the Victorian era. Carlyle herself never published in her lifetime, but Chamberlain, emeritus professor at City University of New York, argues that her vivid writings--letters, an essay, sporadic journals, all published posthumously--give her claim to independent renown. Chamberlain focuses on a short period, 1843-1849, that Carlyle wrote about in detail. The book covers famous people that she knew, including Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Giuseppe Mazzini. It also discusses Jane's servants and contemporary reform movements to help low-income people, ensuring a multidimensional view of Victorian society. Chamberlain's narrative nonfiction technique, richly descriptive, often places the reader in a scene. Like Carlyle's letters, the book flits from topic to topic and reads like an entertaining novel, including a love triangle as Thomas becomes increasingly, albeit platonically, enraptured with Lady Harriet Baring. This humane, well-documented book provides a solid and readable lay introduction to a fascinating literary figure and her world. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World." Publishers Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 191. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480195224&it=r&asid=41fddb2e6b8e6cad93112040dddb409a. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480195224
'Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World' brings a forgotten talent to life
Steve Donoghue
(Apr. 25, 2017): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Byline: Steve Donoghue
History hasn't been kind to Jane Welsh Carlyle, and her contemporaries over a century ago were often unkind as well, both about Jane individually and about her famously turbulent marriage to the great Victorian essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle. Samuel Butler famously quipped "It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four," and the quip has stuck to Thomas and especially Jane ever since.
She's viewed as that most chimerical of man-dominated censure: a difficult woman - prickly, contentious, and worst of all from a traditional 19th-century view, opinionated. She seldom gave her celebrity husband the kind of submission great men of all eras have expected from their wives, and in her private correspondence - the vivid, glorious, unstoppable outpouring of her letters - she pulls no punches about the couple's marital discord.
Kathy Chamberlain, Jane's latest and incomparably best biographer, is fully aware of all this negative historical momentum. At the start of her thoroughly excellent new biography, Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World, Chamberlain admits immediately that any modern biographer has to contend with Jane's problematic reputation. "The old myths about Jane Carlyle as part of a couple who ought never to have married - which the Victorians and their descendants largely conjured up from their own urgent sex and gender anxieties - do not reflect the complicated lives of the Carlyles as presented in their collected letters, nor do they speak to us," she writes. "Yet, most strangely, those stereotypes linger on."
In these pages Chamberlain makes more extensive and more adroit use of those letters than any previous writer chronicling this couple, and particularly Jane, whose fascination with the social innovations of her era competed unevenly in her mind with her respect for the conventions of married life; "Tradition and modernity contend very differently in individuals," Chamberlain writes, and this book is the fullest and most compelling portrait of that inner struggle that's ever been written about Jane, teasing out the nuances and complexities of this woman who could be fun or caustic by turns, who was devoted to her friends but every bit as capable as her irascible husband of making enemies, who had literary talents as prodigious as Thomas's but chose not to share them with the world, focusing instead on her unpublished satires, parodies, and letters, her "private writing career," as Elizabeth Hardwick put it.
Even in childhood, Jane herself had imagined a magical doorway to an adulthood that might somehow allow her more choices than she saw in her real-world future. In an 1859 letter to George Eliot, she wrote about that door, as Chamberlain quotes: "As a young girl, after a magical year of pondering the wondrous door, which Jane refers to as door-worship, it smote her 'like a slap on the face' that 'It was a door into - nothing! Make-believe! There for uniformity! Behind it was lath and plaster; behind that the Drawing-room with its familiar tables and chairs! Dispelled illusion no. 1!'"
That sense of jagged, almost wounded honesty pervades Chamberlain's book, which takes readers inside one of the most famous of all Victorian literary marriages and shows them far, far more than the standard picture of the Carlyles always at war with each other. Both were blazingly intelligent and equally impatient with the normal societal expectations of their day. Their sojourns in the country houses of friends and relatives are especially likely to irritate; "In letters to others," Chamberlain writes, "the Carlyles complain of idleness and donothingism, owing to the extravagant amount of time the English aristocracy managed to waste at house parties."
Jane's extensive network of personal relations is traced with energy and subtlety, from her family to her female friends to her housekeepers to gaunt and charismatic Erasmus Darwin (older brother of Charles), "the likest thing to a brother I ever had in the world." Oddly, and unfortunately, the only such relation that's sometimes disappointingly drawn in the book is the most central one, Thomas Carlyle; the book's passages dealing with his tormented personal life can be touched with purple prose ("It is not exaggeration to say that at the worst moments the dragon breath of madness blew down upon him"), and some of the armchair psychoanalysis lavished on him is less than convincing ("some unconscious connection involving projection seemed to exist between his reprehensible views on slavery and the Abolitionist movement, and his torment about his own writing-work").
But it's almost entirely Jane's book in any case, and Chamberlain's evocation of her is pitch-perfect. In the 1840s, Jane tried her hand at a memoir essay that she titled, with typical sardonic self-effacement, "Much ado about Nothing." Chamberlain calls it one of her finest achievements, in which readers are confronted with "the jolting shock of the familiar having become alien, and oneself a ghost."
"Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World" carries something of that same shock; it gives us, at last, a Jane Carlyle who seems thrillingly alive.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Donoghue, Steve. "'Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World' brings a forgotten talent to life." Christian Science Monitor, 25 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490615156&it=r&asid=cae02a6ecb2b7af8e47b533d86edb408. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490615156
Review: 'Jane Welsh Carlyle and her Victorian World,' by Kathy Chamberlain
NONFICTION: An engaging biography of British writer Thomas Carlyle's remarkable wife, Jane.
By PATRICIA HAGEN Special to the Star Tribune
May 5, 2017 — 10:31am
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For an era in which belief in Progress (with a capital P) was tantamount to religion, the Victorian age was rather a step backward for women.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women,” published in 1792, had by the mid-19th century become all but forgotten; the 18th-century tolerance (albeit halfhearted) of Bluestockings (a society of educated, intellectual women) had been supplanted by an ideology of the Angel in the House.
Women were expected to rule over the domestic sphere, seeing to the furnishings, meals and amenities, largely through overseeing the servants, who, due to economic conditions, were available in abundance, inexpensive enough to hire that the typical middle-class woman no longer needed to do the housekeeping and child rearing.
For the middle class, aping the upper, the “trend was toward wives of leisure, who came to seem like ornaments for display, enhancing the status of their husbands.”
The Victorian age was, in other words, a particularly fraught time for a woman of spirit, talent and intellect who wanted to be useful but also valued tradition and respectability. When the woman was the wife of a lionized writer — a Victorian Sage — matters became yet more complicated.
Kathy Chamberlain has written an intelligent, witty, thoroughly engaging biography of Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of Thomas Carlyle, one of the most significant men of letters in 19th-century England. While frequently considered an adjunct to — or a victim of — her literary giant of a husband, Jane emerges in these pages as a fascinating person in her own right, “very much a Victorian and of her era” but “at the same time moving toward the future.”
“Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World.” by Kathy Chamberlain
“Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World.” by Kathy Chamberlain
By focusing on only a few highly significant years in Jane’s life, Chamberlain develops a portrait quite astounding in breadth — it’s as fine a depiction of England in the 1840s as I have encountered — and depth. Drawing on Jane’s private correspondence, diary entries and notebooks, Chamberlain brings to life the domestic details, passionate friendships, jealousies, insecurities, fears and triumphs of a most remarkable woman, one who knew, and wrote about, everyone — German governesses and aristocrats, her own often inebriated maid, captains of industry and virtually the entire pantheon of authors and intellectuals of the age: Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, Erasmus Darwin, Margaret Fuller and the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini.
While Jane met most of them through or because of her husband, they sought her out in her own right, frequently preferring her perception, irony and conversation to his windy orations and rants. Reading excerpts from Jane’s letters, which Chamberlain rightly views as a significant literary achievement, it is easy to see why she was such a valued friend and companion, a complicated woman whose struggles will trigger a flash of recognition even today.
Chamberlain’s sensitivity, wit and deep knowledge of the period are beautifully suited to her subject, making this the most fascinating biography I have read in years.
Patricia L. Hagen teaches English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth.
Jane Welsh Carlyle and her Victorian World
By: Kathy Chamberlain.
Publisher: Overlook Press, 398 pages, $37.50.
[A Review of] Kathy Chamberlain's Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Marriage, and Friendship
Joe Pilling
[Victorian Web Home —> Social History —> Authors —> Book Reviews]
Except for the first one, the illustrations here have been added from our own website. Click on them for larger pictures, and for more information. — Jacqueline Banerjee.
book cover
Cover of the book under review.
The Duke-Edinburgh edition of the Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle is incomplete but has already produced forty-four printed volumes. These letters and particularly those by Jane Carlyle are the major source for Kathy Chamberlain's book. It isn't unusual for letters to be an important source but it could scarcely be more fitting than for Jane Carlyle. Her ODNB entry begins "Carlyle, Jane Baillie Welsh (1801-1866), letter writer" and later says "Yet it is scarcely disputed that she is the greatest woman letter writer in English." Kathy Chamberlain doesn't go quite so far but she would broadly agree. She quotes Virginia Woolf praising her letters for "the hawk-like swoop and descent of her mind upon facts. Nothing escapes her. She sees through clear water down to the rocks at the bottom" (32).
If Jane Welsh Carlyle is the greatest woman letter writer in English it seems almost certain that she will retain the accolade for all time because first the telephone and then information technology have reduced to vanishing point the number of men or women writing hundreds of letters each year. She was writing at the precise point when cheap postal rates and the railways provided new incentives to write letters. Apart from letters, she wrote very little. The seriousness with which the book takes a thirteen-page memoir essay, Much Ado About Nothing, suggests that the author would have welcomed Jane using her skills in other literary forms. A full discussion of why she wrote so little save for letters would have been interesting.
An unconventional biography
Left: Street view of the Carlyles' house. Right: The Carlyles' house from the back garden.
The focus of Chamberlain's book is much more unusual than its main source. This is not a conventional biography. It concentrates on 1843-49 when its subject was in her mid-forties and that has both strengths and weaknesses. A normal biography would say much more about how its subject had emerged from her family background, education and the early years of marriage. A reader unfamiliar with the person at the centre of the book would not be left frustrated and wanting to know more about her later life. On the other hand the years are well-chosen: she is active socially, they include the momentous events of 1848 across Europe and the Irish famine, Jane's response to her husband's relationship with Lady Harriet Baring is covered in depth and the best novel of her closest friend, Geraldine Jewsbury, The Half Sisters, is published. These and much more, including her management of her home and her succession of servants, could not be covered in anything like this detail in a full biography without making it unappealingly long for most readers. They will be glad to have read what this book has to offer and either read an existing conventional biography or hope that its author's next project might be a full biography of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Its readers are unlikely to want to read a book on both Carlyles because they would fear that it might be unbalanced in Thomas's favour.
The servant problem
Early in the book there is an illuminating chapter on the life of a Victorian servant in a modest middle-class household. Later a contrast is drawn with a wealthy upper class establishment. The Carlyles had a single servant, a maid of all work who
had to cook, serve meals, pump water, wash dishes, feed the cat, make beds, open and close shutters, light the lamps, sweep the floors, and empty the slops. Going up and down steep flights of stairs several times a day would alone have been daunting. The half dozen fireplaces at Cheyne Row meant a constant cleaning of grates, as well as the building and tending of fires, and keeping up a steady supply of coals.... London households engaged in strenuous battles against soot, dirt, beetles, worms, bedbugs, moths, mice and even rats. A maid had to hurry to the front door whenever a knock came from a tradesman or guest, and answer bells when her employer pulled on a bell rope. [39]
There were occasions when they were between servants that Jane Carlyle had to cope with all of this without help and even when there was a maid she had to take a share in the hardest physical work in order to keep the household going. She took very seriously the training of a replacement maid when one had gone. Sadly the admirable Helen, to whom Jane wrote when she was away from home and whose excessive drinking was not too disastrous during her first stint as their maid, had to go not long after returning to them because her drinking was then out of control. In view of the size of their London home and the low pay of servants, it is hard to understand why the Carlyles were unwilling to pay for more help even as their income became greater and more assured.
Visitors and friends
Jane Carlyle's friend Giuseppe Mazzini, in the Illustrated London News of 19 May 1849.
The years covered by the book are largely dealt with chronologically. The result is a relative lack of pattern as Jane sees certain individuals for some months and then they fade from view. She sees W. E. Forster when she visits the North of England. Emerson and Chopin make relatively brief but significant appearances as do Dickens and Tennyson. Accompanied by his publisher Tennyson visited Cheyne Row to see Thomas when he happened to be out to dinner. Jane plied him with pipes, tobacco, brandy, water and tea. She wrote:
The effect of these accessories was miraculous — he professed to be ashamed of polluting my room "felt" he said "as if he were stealing cups and sacred vessels in the Temple" but he smoked on all the same — for three mortal hours! — talking like an angel — only exactly as though he were talking with a clever man — which — being a thing I am not used to — men always adapting their conversation to what they take to be a woman's taste — strained me to a terrible pitch of intellectuality — [155]
Some of Jane Carlyle's more interesting relationships were with less celebrated people. The book deals at length with Amely Bölte and Richard Plattnauer. Amely was a well-educated but poor young woman who irritated and interested Jane Carlyle in turn. Jane helped to find her some of the better paid governess posts available in the 1840s. In one case she was dismissed by Sir James Graham, then the Home Secretary, and his wife for failing to answer adequately a question from the children as to what the Holy Ghost was like. Richard Plattnauer had bouts of serious mental illness. Jane visited him in hospital. Surprisingly and to Richard's great good fortune he chanced to be taken into what must have been one of the most progressive hospitals in the field where he was in the care of Sir Alexander Morison whom, as a result, Jane got to know.
Her closest relationship with a man in the 1840s was with Mazzini who was campaigning and working for a united Italy from London:
Among the jealousies and jostlings rampant in London's literary and political circles, Jane Carlyle and Giuseppe Mazzini's friendship was remarkably warm and affectionate, although they were in many ways opposites. He disliked the ironic stance towards life, when irony was her métier. She distrusted airy theories and was suspicious of martyrdom, whereas he, with his whole heart, was a self-sacrificing idealist. Yet both were tolerant enough to befriend the tantalizing qualities in each other that they disavowed for themselves. [78-79]
Closer relationships
Carlyle, by the sculptor Joseph Edgar Boehm, 1881 (detail of seated statue).
In the later part of the book there loom large the relationships between Thomas and Lady Harriet Baring, between Jane and Lady Harriet and the rows between Jane and Thomas as a result of Thomas's relationship with Lady Harriet which ranged through worship, love and infatuation. The reader is confused because the principals were confused. Jane almost certainly never saw the letters Thomas wrote to Harriet which had a devoted tone wholly absent from the letters he was writing to his wife at the time. There is little likelihood of a physical relationship between Thomas and Harriet partly because Thomas seems to have been very inhibited and partly because Harriet had no intention of jeopardising her prominent place in English society. But Jane could hardly have been expected to be accepting of her husband's relationship with another woman and she wasn't.
To add to the complexity Jane and Harriet had a strong relationship for much of the years covered by this book, prompted in part by their interest in each other and in part by it being only possible for Thomas to stay with Harriet in the country when Harriet's husband was in London if he was accompanied by Jane. It was obviously painful and deplorable for Jane to be under pressure to facilitate the Thomas/Harriet relationship by going to the Baring country house but even that is complicated by the benefits to her health that she sometimes experienced as a result of staying in the country for weeks on end.
The relationship between the Barings (later the Ashburtons when William inherited his father's title) and the Carlyles challenges any easy assumptions about the sharpness of social divides in the Victorian period based on class origins and wealth. Thomas was the son of a stonemason, admittedly a Scottish stonemason. Jane goes from hard physical labour in her Cheyne Row home, in support of her one servant, to be a guest in a house with seemingly unlimited resources. Jane gradually became socially more confident and must have surprised the Barings by going to their kitchens to teach their housekeeper how to make marmalade using "real marmalade oranges" (328) She wrote to Thomas about it in an April letter which suggests that the real oranges were available in England quite a bit later in the nineteenth century.
Kathy Chamberlain touches on the physical relationship between Jane and Thomas on which, as she says, many gallons of ink were spilled decades after the 1840s. It would be odd to avoid the subject altogether and she clearly thinks it more likely than not that there was some physical relationship early in the marriage which came to an unusually early end without any ready explanation. She makes no claim to certainty and, given the lack of conclusive evidence, she must be right to give the subject relatively little space.
"Her Victorian World"
In one sense Jane Carlyle is an obvious subject for a contemporary scholar concerned with the place of women in society but she is not without disappointment. She was far from being radical. In her discussions with Geraldine Jewsbury Geraldine voiced more progressive ideas. Jane seems to have accepted unquestioningly that all a wife's property was controlled by her husband once she married. Although a reader might sense that Kathy Chamberlain would have liked Jane Carlyle to be less conservative and tolerant she is scrupulous not to project on to Jane twenty-first century insights and values.
For an English reader it would be less distracting without the American spellings and syntax and it is odd that one has to derive a bibliography from the footnotes at the end of the book. These are trivial comments about a book that can fairly claim to be about "Her Victorian World" as well as about Jane Welsh Carlyle herself. It is a fine achievement and worthy of a fascinating subject.
Related Material
Thomas Carlyle: A Brief Biography
The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing
The Penny Post
Bibliography
Chamberlain, Kathy. Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Marriage, and Friendship. London: Duckworth Overlook, 2017. Hardcover. 400pp. £19.99. ISBN: 978-0715651650.