Life with a tyrant sage

Jane Carlyle wrote brilliant letters – so why no novel, asks Claudia FitzHerbert

Jane Welsh Carlyle (44 vols to date) cover less than a single year. Who wants to drive over a terrain so teaming with minutiae in a cradleto-grave tank? Chamberlain gets closer by going slower.

In 1843, we find the Carlyles near the middle of their long childless marriage, in a tall dark house in Chelsea where they have lived since 1834. Thomas, the roughhewn peasant from Ecclefechan, is 48 and has published several influential books but not yet outed himself as a reactionary. Jane, 42, the dark-eyed doctor’s daughter from Haddington, has learnt to keep house on a shoestring and to survive – by mocking – the heavy weather which Thomas makes of the writing life.

The tone of her letters is always ironic and her prose has the rhythm of speech. An indefatigable housewife, she told the writer John Sterling that she was “clearly born for the ornamental rather than the useful” when he asked her to critique his verse. “And I think a great deal!” she added to a cousin, after describing a summer of drudgery repairing household linen. When she minded most about her husband’s neglect, she wrote that “C should have had [a] ‘strong-minded woman’ for [a] wife, with a perfectly sound liver, plenty of solid fat, and mirth and good humour world without end – men do best with their opposites. I am too like himself in some things – especially as to the state of our livers. And so we aggravate one another’s tendencies to despair!”

In the early 1840s, she drew parallels between his struggle to find a shape for his thoughts about great men in history and hers to manage the household (one maid, drunk, touched with genius) and the lives of a changing cast of friends in need. Chamberlain makes a distinction between her “epistolary tale of her life on the wing, replete with dialogue and drama” and her more polished set pieces, such as that which describes her husband’s dramatic destruction of several years’ work on Oliver Cromwell, or her successful pretence not to have felt a galvanic jolt at the hands of a mesmerist.

Everything connects in Chamberlain’s ingenious curation of people and themes. Jane’s sceptical explorations of the new craze for mesmerism are shared by the much more suggestible Amely Bolte, a German governess employed – on the Carlyles’ recommendation – by the wife of the Home Secretary. But when Thomas writes an indignant letter to The Times about the Home Secretary having authorised the post office to open the mail of Jane’s friend, Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, that German governess is summarily sacked – in retribution? Jane finds her another