Jane Welsh Carlyle

Portrait of Jane Carlyle, ca.1852

Jane Welsh Carlyle (born July 14, 1801 in Haddington , Scotland , † April 21, 1866 in London , Hyde Park ) was the wife of the historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle . She gained fame as a Salonnière and through her posthumously published correspondence and diaries. The latter give deep insights into the management of a typical Victorian household. Historian Judith Flanders, for example, repeatedly referred to Jane Carlyle's diaries and letters in her social history of the Victorian household to cite her as a typical example. As a letter writer, she is known for her wit and keen observation; her polished English is often considered to be more elegant than that of her husband, who earned his living by writing.

Life

She was born as Jane Baillie Welsh into a wealthy family. Her father was a doctor. As a teenager she had a long and deep romance with her teacher Edward Irving , who however had to marry his long-time fiancée in 1823. Through Irving she met the writer Thomas Carlyle in 1821 , whom she married in 1826. It is rumored that the wedding night between the two partners was a debacle. The source of the rumor is primarily the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury , with whom Jane Carlyle later became close friends and whom she confided in.

The marriage was rich in mutual intellectual inspiration, but also in intense tension; Carlyle often neglected his beloved wife in favor of his career. By Samuel Butler is the utterance handed down that it had let marry God in his goodness the Carlyle each other, so that only two instead of four people were unhappy . Thomas Carlyle praised in a letter to her: Your beautiful face - and your wicked tongue .

The Carlyles' household was frequented by numerous celebrities of the time, including Charles Dickens , William Makepeace Thackeray , Giuseppe Mazzini , Erasmus Alvey Darwin (1804–1881, brother of Charles Darwin ) and Frédéric Chopin . She took an active part in the work of her husband, from whom she learned German . She translated the folk tales of the Germans by Johann Karl August Musäus into English. She also corresponded with family and friends at a high level.

It was only after her death that Carlyle recognized his own failures towards his wife while reading her diary, and published correspondence, diaries and his own memories of her.

way of life

The Carlyles' marriage was childless. They lived from 1834 until Jane Carlyle's death in 1866 in one of the typical row houses of the middle class on Cheyne Walk in the London borough of Chelsea and usually employed no more than a maid there. The search for a suitable maid played a major role in Jane Carlyle's life again and again: in the 32 years that she lived on Cheyne Walk, the couple employed 34 different maids, not counting the people she hired as temporary workers she was looking for a new maid. The maid slept in the kitchen, and when the couple moved to Cheyne Walk in 1834, Jane Carlyle noted that her house was the only one of all her friends that was bed bug free. Until 1843 she managed to keep her house free of bed bugs, but then bed bugs were found in her maid's bed, which was standing in the kitchen:

“I emptied some twenty buckets of water on the kitchen floor to drown those who were trying to save themselves. After killing all [bed bugs] we could find, we tossed each part of the bed into a bathtub of water and carried them out into the garden, where we left them for two days ... then I treated everything with disinfectant , washed all the curtains and had them put away first .. "

The radical measures were successful and the bed bugs seemed to have been eliminated. Ten years later the same problem arose, whereupon Jane Carlyle sold the wooden bed and bought an iron one for the maid. A few years later, her husband, who was sleeping in another room according to the Victorian ideal, complained that he had also been bitten by bed bugs at night:

“Although living in an outside world full of vermin, I had completely freed myself of the worry of them appearing in my own house, having managed to keep [my house] free of such atrocities for so many years. But the simplest course of action was certainly to examine his bed carefully [...] instead of discussing the baselessness of such a suspicion with him. Feeling a little hurt, I took apart his blankets and pillows. But then suddenly I had to pause: I saw something the size of a pinhead and a cold shiver ran over me. As sure as I was alive, this was a young bed bug! And .... as small as this bug was, it had to have parents - maybe even grandfathers and grandmothers ... "

Their lives followed the norm of Victorian customs in one respect: the couple slept in separate bedrooms. The couple's financial resources were initially limited. That changed somewhat when Thomas Carlyle published his History of the French Revolution in 1837.

Jane Carlyle's lifestyle contradicts the fiction that a middle-class bourgeoisie did no or very little housework because of the servants she employed. Jane Carlyle usually worked with her maid. Her day's work began by preparing breakfast and cleaning the reception room, the most public space in a Victorian household. Jane Carlyle also carried out heavy physical work herself, such as cleaning the stove and making her own bed. Unlike today, the latter was a time-consuming step: At that time, mattresses were made exclusively from organic material and it was common to use more than one mattress: Straw mattresses were also still used in wealthy households: they lay under the actual mattress, which was off Horsehair or cowhair were made. These mattresses had to be turned and shaken up every day, otherwise the organic material would become matted and clumped together. Making a bed accordingly meant taking apart all of the bedding and reassembling it. There are precise studies from the first half of the 20th century that estimate the time required for a fully made bed to be 30 minutes per bed. Despite her willingness to carry out work that, according to the social norms of the time, was not compatible with the lifestyle of a lady, Jane Carlyle dismissed her maid in 1852 because she was so deaf that she could not hear the bell ringing. Opening the door yourself as the hostess was unthinkable at the time.

At the beginning of their marriage, Jane Carlyle also made her husband's stockings and shirts herself, but ended this practice when the couple was financially better after the first successes of Thomas Carlyle. Jane Carlyle then limited herself to mending the laundry in her household.

Leading intellectuals have always been guests at Jane and Thomas Carlyle's house. In the 1850s, invitations were usually issued by the couple at 7 p.m. and were only an invitation to tea. The Carlyles were among those households that ate dinner, the main meal of the day, very early in the afternoon. While this became increasingly out of fashion in the 1850s, it did allow the Carlyles, with their limited number of servants, to host a larger group of people without incurring too much financial commitment.

literature

• Judith Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . Harper Perennial. London 2003. ISBN 0-00-713189-5 .
• Antonius Lux (ed.): Great women of world history. A thousand biographies in words and pictures . Sebastian Lux Verlag , Munich 1963, p. 95.
• Carlyle Letters Online , collected letters from Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle

Single receipts

1. ^ Judith Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . Harper Perennial. London 2003. ISBN 0-00-713189-5 .
2. ↑ John Sutherland and Stephen Fender: Love, Sex, Dath & Words: Surprising Tales from a Year in Literature. Icon Books, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-84831-269-2 . P. 442.
3. ↑ John Sutherland and Stephen Fender: Love, Sex, Dath & Words: Surprising Tales from a Year in Literature. Icon Books, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-84831-269-2 . P. 150
4. ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed, p. 96.
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 13.
6. ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed, p. 2.
7. ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed, p. 385.
8. ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed, p. 207.
9. ↑ Ben Highmore: The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House . Profile Books London 2014, ISBN 978-1-84765-346-8 . P. 171.
10. ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed, p. 208.
11. ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed, p. 263.
12. ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed, p. 231.