Reminiscences (Carlyle)

Last updated

Reminiscences
Title page of Reminiscences.jpg
Title page of the first English edition
Author Thomas Carlyle
LanguageEnglish
GenreAutobiography
Published1881
Publisher Longmans, Green, and Co.
Publication placeEngland

Reminiscences is a book by historian and social critic Thomas Carlyle, posthumously published in 1881, which contains two lengthy memoirs of the author's wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, and friend Edward Irving, together with shorter essays on his father and some of the literary friends of his youth. The book's emphasis primarily rests on Carlyle's relationship with the subjects. The book was begun in 1832 but mainly written in the year following Jane Carlyle's death, in April 1866. Many of its first readers were shocked by the impression it gave of a harsh, gloomy, censorious personality and of a man racked by remorse over his failings as a husband; it did Carlyle's reputation as the sage and prophet of the Victorian era lasting harm. Nevertheless, it is characterized by great vividness and accuracy of detail, and by a comparatively direct, conversational style, and has been called an autobiographical masterpiece.

Contents

Contents

The order of contents here is that of the 1997 edition.

Description

Jane Welsh Carlyle, who was commemorated in her husband's Reminiscences, wrote her own memoirs but burned the manuscript before her death. Portrait of Jane Welsh Carlyle.jpg
Jane Welsh Carlyle, who was commemorated in her husband's Reminiscences, wrote her own memoirs but burned the manuscript before her death.

Carlyle was famous for the brilliance of his conversation, which often turned on his memories of his past life in Scotland, and the Reminiscences have been called "a crystallization of many such nights' talk", [2] presented in a more personal, unliterary style than he usually adopted. [3] One reviewer felt himself to be overhearing a soliloquy. [4] The essays bearing the names of Jane Carlyle, Irving and Jeffrey concentrate not so much on the title-figures themselves as on Carlyle's relationship with them, and to that extent are exercises in autobiography such as Emerson had proposed he write (see below), whereas the later ones are more strictly biographical. All are remarkable for the detail and immediacy with which they present events that had happened up to 50 years previously. [5] They demonstrate Carlyle's extraordinary powers of memory, the accuracy of which is borne out by the evidence of his and his wife's contemporaneous letters. [6] The Reminiscences have in recent years been called "an autobiographical masterpiece equal to any writing of its kind in the century". [7]

Composition

On 23 January 1832, while Carlyle was in London, he learned that his father James Carlyle had died at the family home in Dumfriesshire two days previously. Stunned by this news, and unable to attend the funeral, his mind was forcibly turned to his earliest memories, inducing him to write a reminiscence of his father and of his own childhood. Separating himself from everyone except his wife Jane to concentrate on this task, he completed it on 29 January. [8] [9]

More than 30 years later, in April 1866, Jane herself died. Carlyle's friend Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested that this would be a good time for Carlyle to write an autobiography, but this idea repelled him. [10] Carlyle went through his wife's letters, admiring their literary excellence and wit, and shocked and guilt-stricken at the depth of sadness, partly caused by his own insensitivity and neglect of her, they revealed. On receiving a notebook from Geraldine Jewsbury containing biographical anecdotes of her friend Jane, Thomas sent her a letter criticising the notebook's factual inaccuracy. He began correcting the errors, and this work was the beginning of the Reminiscence of Jane Welsh Carlyle, a work in which he expressed his overwhelming grief and remorse, and presented an idealized picture of his wife as a saint who had sacrificed her own happiness for the sake of his literary career. [11] This work occupied him through the summer of 1866. [5]

He began a reminiscence of the clergyman Edward Irving in autumn 1866, then another of the lawyer and editor Francis Jeffrey, both of them close friends of himself and of Jane. They were completed in January 1867, by which time he was staying in Menton on the French Riviera. [12] [13] On 28 January 1867 he began another chapter which he called "Reminiscences of Sundry", but despite the title he only dealt with two of his old literary acquaintances, Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, before, on 8 March 1867, still at Menton, laying down his pen with the words "Why should I continue these melancholy jottings in which I have no interest; in which the one Figure that could interest me is almost wanting! I will cease." [14] Finally, two more short pieces, on the lawyer and critic "Christopher North" (pseudonym of John Wilson) and the philosopher Sir William Hamilton, were completed on 26 March 1868 and 19 February 1868 respectively. [15]

Publication

The statue of Carlyle on Chelsea Embankment, sculpted by Joseph Edgar Boehm The shadow cast on Carlyle's reputation by the publication of the Reminiscences almost stalled the campaign to raise this monument. Statue of Thomas Carlyle, Chelsea (02).jpg
The statue of Carlyle on Chelsea Embankment, sculpted by Joseph Edgar Boehm The shadow cast on Carlyle's reputation by the publication of the Reminiscences almost stalled the campaign to raise this monument.

Carlyle explicitly directed that the Reminiscences were never to be published "without fit editing", but he reportedly later revoked this prohibition and gave his friend James Anthony Froude, the historian, permission to publish them should he see fit. [17] [18] [19] As Carlyle's death approached Froude had the work set up in type and wrote an introduction for it; in February 1881, three weeks after Carlyle's funeral, it was published by Longman. [20] Froude's edition was remarkably inaccurate, misreading, altering or re-arranging words, phrases, and even whole sentences. [21] Over 17,000 errors have been detected, albeit mostly minor ones. [22] In the United States Froude's edition was published by both Scribner and Harper, the two publishing houses being in dispute over which owned the US rights. [23] [22] In 1887 the Reminiscences were edited anew by Charles Eliot Norton and published by Macmillan. This edition was greatly superior to Froude's, though still inaccurate by modern standards. Norton's edition was reprinted as part of Everyman's Library in 1932 with the addition, for the first time, of the reminiscence of Christopher North; and again in 1972 by Everyman University Library, with both "Christopher North" and "Sir William Hamilton" being included. Kenneth J Fielding and Ian Campbell's edition, published in 1997 by Oxford University Press in their Oxford World's Classics series, is described as "the most complete and authoritative to date". [24]

The Froude-Carlyle controversy

"Froude besmirching Carlyle", illustration from Punch's Almanac, 31 December 1881 Froude besmirching Carlyle.jpg
"Froude besmirching Carlyle", illustration from Punch's Almanac, 31 December 1881

The publication shortly after Carlyle's death of Froude's edition of the Reminiscences, and also of the first volumes of his biography of Carlyle and his edition of Jane Carlyle's letters, provoked a hostile and lasting critical reaction which became known as the Froude-Carlyle controversy. [17] The "hail-storm of criticism", as Froude described it, was in part directed at himself for his failure to excise passages that might harm Carlyle's reputation, with one letter to The Times comparing his editorial technique to that of a carter dumping a load of bricks. And Carlyle's reputation did indeed suffer considerably. Exception was taken to various contemptuous references to past acquaintances, especially Charles Lamb and Basil Montagu, to the overly laudatory portrait of Carlyle's father, and to the overly critical one of Jeffrey. [25] Most damagingly, readers found in the Reminiscences an unfamiliar Carlyle, morose, harsh, self-pitying and self-indulgent. The book presented, according to the reviewer in The Spectator , "a picture with almost a permanent scowl on it". [26] [16] J. C. Morison, a former disciple of Carlyle, complained in The Fortnightly Review that the Reminiscences showed him "inwardly bankrupt of faith, hope and charity, looking on the world with moody anger and querulous unsatisfied egotism". George Bentley, in Temple Bar , wrote that "probably in English literature there is nowhere to be found written by a man so eminent and so religiously minded, a more unkind, splenetic and scornful book". [27] [28] Several years later The Bookseller characterized the publication of Carlyle's Reminiscences as "the shattering of the idol". [29]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Campbell 1974, p. 139.
  2. ↑ Campbell, Ian (1972). Introduction. Reminiscences. By Carlyle, Thomas. Norton, Charles Eliot (ed.). London: J. M. Dent. p. x. ISBN   9780460008754 . Retrieved 4 December 2012.
  3. ↑ Carlyle 1997, p. xix.
  4. ↑ Dyer 1968, p. 213.
  5. 1 2 Campbell 1974, pp. 139–140.
  6. ↑ Symons, Julian (1952). Thomas Carlyle: The Life and Ideas of a Prophet. London: Gollancz. p. 278. Retrieved 4 December 2021.
  7. ↑ Carlyle 1997, p. xxi.
  8. ↑ Sanders, Charles Richard; Fielding, Kenneth J., eds. (1977). The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Duke-Edinburgh Edition. Volume 6: October 1831–September 1833. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. p. 95. ISBN   0822303701 . Retrieved 4 December 2021.
  9. ↑ Carlyle 1997, pp. xii, 3.
  10. ↑ Kaplan, Fred (1983). Thomas Carlyle: A Biography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. p. 477. ISBN   080141508X . Retrieved 4 December 2021.
  11. ↑ Skabarnicki 2004, p. 389.
  12. ↑ Carlyle 1997, p. 348.
  13. ↑ Skabarnicki 2004, pp. 389–390.
  14. ↑ Carlyle 1997, pp. 386, 409.
  15. ↑ Carlyle 1997, pp. 426, 433.
  16. 1 2 Dyer 1968, p. 212.
  17. 1 2 Kaplan 2008.
  18. ↑ Carlyle 1997, p. x.
  19. ↑ Dyer 1968, p. 215.
  20. ↑ Carlyle 1997, pp. x, xxii.
  21. ↑ Campbell 1974, p. 159.
  22. 1 2 Dyer 1968, p. 217.
  23. ↑ Campbell 1974, p. xxii.
  24. ↑ Skabarnicki 2004, pp. 390–391.
  25. ↑ Dyer 1968, pp. 212, 215–216.
  26. ↑ Heffer, Simon (1995). Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. p. 8. ISBN   9780297815648.
  27. ↑ Seigel, Jules Paul, ed. (1995). Thomas Carlyle: The Critical Heritage. Abingdon: Routledge & Kegan Paul. p. 21. ISBN   0582012724 . Retrieved 5 December 2021.
  28. ↑ B[entley], G[eorge] (May 1881). "Carlyle's Reminiscences". Temple Bar. 62: 23. Retrieved 5 December 2021.
  29. ↑ "Notices of Books". The Bookseller. 356: 666. 2 July 1887. Retrieved 5 December 2021.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Carlyle</span> Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher (1795–1881)

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher from the Scottish Lowlands. A leading writer of the Victorian era, he exerted a profound influence on 19th-century art, literature, and philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Anthony Froude</span> English historian, novelist and biographer (1818–1894)

James Anthony Froude was an English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine. From his upbringing amidst the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, Froude intended to become a clergyman, but doubts about the doctrines of the Anglican church, published in his scandalous 1849 novel The Nemesis of Faith, drove him to abandon his religious career. Froude turned to writing history, becoming one of the best-known historians of his time for his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1801.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Eliot Norton</span> American academic and social reformer

Charles Eliot Norton was an American author, social critic, and Harvard professor of art based in New England. He was a progressive social reformer and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States. He was from the same notable Eliot family as the 20th-century poet T. S. Eliot, who made his career in the United Kingdom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Allingham</span> 19th-century Irish poet and scholar

William Allingham was an Irish poet, diarist and editor. He wrote several volumes of lyric verse, and his poem "The Faeries" was much anthologised. But he is better known for his posthumously published Diary, in which he records his lively encounters with Tennyson, Carlyle and other writers and artists. His wife, Helen Allingham, was a well-known watercolourist and illustrator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Irving</span> Scottish clergyman

Edward Irving was a Scottish clergyman, generally regarded as the main figure behind the foundation of the Catholic Apostolic Church.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Craigenputtock</span> Historic site in Dumfries and Galloway

Craigenputtock is an estate in Scotland where Thomas Carlyle lived from 1828 to 1834. He wrote several of his early works there, including Sartor Resartus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mecklenburgh Square</span> Square in London, UK

Mecklenburgh Square is a Grade II listed square in Bloomsbury, London. The square and its garden were part of the Foundling Estate, a residential development of 1792–1825 on fields surrounding and owned by the Foundling Hospital. The square was named in honour of King George III's queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. It was begun in 1804, but was not completed until 1825.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Welsh Carlyle</span> Scottish writer (1801-1866)

Jane Baillie Carlyle was a Scottish writer and the wife of Thomas Carlyle.

English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world. The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the fifth century, are called Old English. Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English. Despite being set in Scandinavia, it has achieved national epic status in England. However, following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language became less common. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. The English spoken after the Normans came is known as Middle English. This form of English lasted until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a London-based form of English, became widespread. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400), author of The Canterbury Tales, was a significant figure developing the legitimacy of vernacular Middle English at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were still French and Latin. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 also helped to standardise the language, as did the King James Bible (1611), and the Great Vowel Shift.

<i>History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great</i> 1858 biography by Thomas Carlyle

History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great is a biography of Friedrich II of Prussia by Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. It was first published in six volumes from 1858 to 1865.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Anderson (Scottish writer)</span> Scottish miscellaneous writer

William Anderson (1805–1866) was a Scottish miscellaneous writer in the departments of history, biography, and science. He was born at Edinburgh and educated there, and placed in a lawyer's office. As an author he published Poetical Aspirations; Landscape Lyrics; Popular Scottish Biography; Treasury of Nature, Science, and Art and an extensive work widely known as The Scottish Nation. He also assisted for some time in managing Aberdeen Journal, Witness, and Daily Mail newspapers. He died, aged 61.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Ireland (journalist)</span>


Alexander Ireland (1810–1894) was a Scottish journalist, man of letters, and bibliophile, notable as a biographer of Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as a friend of Emerson and other literary celebrities, including Leigh Hunt and Thomas Carlyle, and the geologist and scientific speculator Robert Chambers. His own most popular book was The Book-Lover's Enchiridion, published under a pseudonym in 1882.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catherine Eliza Richardson</span>

Catherine Eliza Richardson was a Scottish author and poet who published a four-volume novel and three collections of verse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Ireland</span>

Anne "Annie" Elizabeth Nicholson Ireland pseud. Mrs Alexander Ireland was an English writer and biographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Statue of Thomas Carlyle</span> Statue in London

A statue of Thomas Carlyle by Joseph Edgar Boehm stands in Chelsea Embankment Gardens in London. Erected in 1881 and unveiled in 1882, it stands close to 24 Cheyne Row where Carlyle lived for the last 47 years of his life. The statue became a Grade II listed building on 15 April 1969.

<i>Thomas Carlyle</i> (Millais) Painting by John Everett Millais

Thomas Carlyle is an unfinished portrait of the Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher of the same name painted by English Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais in 1877.

<i>Oliver Cromwells Letters and Speeches</i> 1845 book by Thomas Carlyle

Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches: with Elucidations is a book by the Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. It "remains one of the most important works of British history published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carlyle–Emerson correspondence</span> Letters written between Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Carlyle–Emerson correspondence is a series of letters written between Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) from 14 May 1834 to 20 June 1873. It has been called "one of the classic documents of nineteenth-century literature."

Thomas Carlyle published numerous works, and many more have been written about him by other authors.

References

Commons-logo.svg Media related to Reminiscences (Carlyle) at Wikimedia Commons

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.