Town Mouse

This mouse lives in a terrace of threebedroom Victorian houses, one of the many thousands in London.

They are reminiscent of the house in the fabled 1970s Mr Benn TV series. Walls are thin and the raised voices of neighbours can occasionally be heard, but on the whole it is a quiet spot.

I realised just how quiet when reading The Carlyles at Home by Thea Holme, a delightful book based on Thomas Carlyle’s wife Jane’s hilarious letters. The book details the everyday life of the celebrated literary couple who, from 1834 till 1866, rented a lovely terraced house in Great Cheyne Row in Chelsea, near the river.

What strikes the reader is the nonstop noise that the studious Mr Carlyle had to deal with. Anyone who has worked at home will know how difficult it can be to concentrate, with the myriad distractions of family and deliveries. But Carlyle appeared to have an abnormal sensitivity to noise, and Victorian London produced a lot of it. Modern London seems a paradise of peace by comparison.

Jane Carlyle was struck by the din of the city on the day they moved in, writing in a letter, ‘Is it not strange that I should have an everlasting sound in my ears, of men, women, children, omnibuses, carriages … steeple bells, doorbells, gentleman-raps, twopenny post raps, footmen-showers-of-raps… ?’

And things were to get a lot worse. As Carlyle sat down to write his book on the French Revolution, he was harassed by a panoply of enemies to literary progress.

There was a parrot craze at the time and their squawking became a major problem. In 1839, a new family moved in next door and Jane noticed to her horror that they brought with them ‘a pianoforte, a lap-dog and a parrot’. The parrot was placed in the garden and screeched all day long. Carlyle said he could ‘neither think nor live’. Jane wrote that ‘It was absolutely necessary that he should do both’ and composed a note of complaint to the neighbours. The parrot was placed indoors, giving Carlyle respite.

But that was just the beginning. The Carlyles waged a constant war against roosters, which were kept by many neighbours. Jane would typically call on a bird’s owner and ask for the cock to be kept in at night, as her husband had a nervous condition, ‘efforts that I still shudder at the recollection of’, she said.

One set of neighbours, though, refused to lock up their cocks and made things worse by adding a macaw, called Sara, to their collection of noisy birds. The cocks crowed at night and Sara shrieked by day. Carlyle had to flee London and the couple started fantasising about renting the neighbours’ house themselves and leaving it empty. In the end, Jane got the neighbours to sign an agreement, ‘never to keep, or allow to be kept, fowls, or macaw, or other nuisance on the premises’.

Pianos were Carlyle’s other foe. A Miss Lambert next door took lessons, and practised her scales in the morning. As her room immediately abutted Carlyle’s study, this drove him crazy, particularly as he was getting frustrated by the lack of progress on his book about Oliver Cromwell. One day, said Jane, he ‘took up the poker, and with the head of it gave two startling blows on the wall, exactly opposite where he fancied the young Lady seated’.

He thundered, ‘No life of Cromwell or any other book could be written alongside of that damnable noise.’

When the noise became intolerable, the father was summoned. He explained that there two in fact two Miss Lamberts who were learning to play. He apologised profusely and the daughters promised to practise only after 2pm.

Meanwhile, the cock problem had returned. Carlyle wrote to the offending neighbours. ‘On your premises is a Cock … if you would have the goodness to remove that small animal or in any way render him inaudible from midnight to breakfast time, such a charity would work a notable relief to certain persons here.’

But the cocks of the neighbourhood kept on crowing and the Miss Lamberts later forgot what Carlyle had called ‘the two o’clock system’.

In addition, organ-grinders played under his window and had to be paid to go away. Carlyle decided that his only hope was to have a noiseproof study built in the attic: ‘one big apartment … with thin double walls … into which no sound can come; and all the cocks in nature may crow round it, without my hearing a whisper of them!’

It was a beautiful idea. The builders arrived and estimated a build time of six weeks. Four months later, they were still there, making a terrible racket, but Carlyle did triumphantly move into the soundproof room after Christmas in 1853, ready to work on his biography of Frederick the Great, with which he’d been struggling.

Very sadly, he was to be disappointed. The noise of the cocks somehow still penetrated this sanctum, and the ceiling let in a whole new range of sounds – river hooters, railway whistles and church bells. ‘I fear my new room is irredeemably somewhat of a failure,’ he wrote.

Jane put it rather more wittily when she commented, ‘The silent room is the noisiest in the house.’

You can visit the Carlyles’ house today: www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ carlyles-house

Tom Hodgkinson is editor of the Idler (www.idler.co.uk)