Thomas Carlyle — Themes and Context

Edinburgh were not of the best, considerably checkered with dubiety, opposition, or even flat disfavour in some quarters; but at least they were far superior to mine, and indeed, I was beginning my four or five most miserable, dark, sick, and heavy-laden years; Irving, after some staggerings aback, his seven or eight healthiest and brightest. He had, I should guess, as one item several good hundreds of money to wait upon. My _peculium_ I don't recollect, but it could not have exceeded L100. I was without friends, experience, or connection in the sphere of human business, was of shy humour, proud enough and to spare, and had begun my long curriculum of _dyspepsia_ which has never ended since!'[1] Carlyle's intention was to study for the Bar, if perchance he could eke out a livelihood by private teaching. He obtained one or two pupils, wrote a stray article or so for the 'Encyclopaedias'; but as he barely managed to pay his way, he speedily gave up his law studies. He was at this time--the winter of 1819--'advancing,' as he phrases it, 'towards huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this my Edinburgh purgatory.' It was about a couple of years thereafter ere Carlyle went through what he has described as his 'spiritual new birth.'

When Carlyle was in diligent search for congenial employment, a certain Captain Basil Hall crossed his path, to whom Edward Irving had given lessons in mathematics. The 'small lion,' as he calls the captain, came to Carlyle, and wished the latter to go out with him 'to Dunglas,' and there do 'lunars' in his name, he looking on and learning of Carlyle 'what would come of its own will.' The said 'lunars' meanwhile were to go to the Admiralty, 'testifying there what a careful studious Captain he was, and help to get him promotion, so the little wretch smilingly told me.' Carlyle adds: 'I remember the figure of him in my dim lodging as a gay, crackling, sniggering spectre, one dusk, endeavouring to seduce me by affability in lieu of liberal wages into this adventure. Wages, I think, were to be smallish ("so poor are we"), but then the great Playfair is coming on visit. "You will see Professor Playfair." I had not the least notion of such an enterprise on these shining terms, and Captain Basil with his great Playfair _in posse_ vanished for me into the shades of dusk for good.'[2] When private teaching would not come Carlyle's way, he timorously aimed towards 'literature.' He had taken to the study of German, and conscious of his own powers in that direction, he applied in vain to more than one London bookseller, proposing a complete translation of Schiller. Irving not only did his utmost to comfort Carlyle in his spiritual wrestlings, but he tried to find him employment. The two friends continued to make pleasant excursions, and in June 1821 Irving brought Carlyle to Haddington, an event which was destined to colour all his subsequent life; for it was then and there he first saw Jane Welsh, a sight, he acknowledged, for ever memorable to him.

'In the ancient County Town of Haddington, July 14, 1801, there was born,' wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1869, 'to a lately wedded pair, not natives of the place but already reckoned among the best class of people there, a little Daughter whom they named _Jane Baillie Welsh_, and whose subsequent and final name (her own common signature for many years) was _Jane Welsh Carlyle_, and now so stands, now that she is mine in death only, on her and her Father's Tombstone in the Abbey Kirk of that Town. July 14th, 1801; I was then in my sixth year, far away in every sense, now near and infinitely concerned, trying doubtfully after some three years' sad cunctation, if there is anything that I can profitably put on record of her altogether bright, beneficent and modest little Life, and Her, as my final task in this world.'[3] The picture was never completed by the master-hand; the 'effort was too distressing'; so all his notes and letters were handed over to a literary executor.