Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
Edin., studies for Church but gives it up, tries law, then tutor, takes to literature and writes for encyclopædias and magazines, and translates, m. 1826 Jane Welsh, settles in Edin., writes essays in Edinburgh Review, goes to Craigenputtock 1828, writes Sartor and corresponds with Goethe, Sartor appears in Fraser's Magazine 1833-4, settles in London 1834, pub.
They felt, too, that Carlyle was too much absorbed with his own thought to be trusted with the charge of a high-spirited woman. However, the decision had been made, and the newly married couple went to Craigenputtock, with wagons that carried their household goods and those of Carlyle's brother, Alexander, who lived in a cottage near by.
If he had been a woman, living at Craigenputtock with a dyspeptic husband, sixteen miles from a baker, and he a bad one, all these qualities would have come out more fitly in a good loaf of bread!"
Thoreau went to Walden; Carlyle to Craigenputtock; Brahms at any rate retired from public musical life. They worked out their own salvation. Wagner felt he must do the same; as we know, he did the same: hence many of those terrible volumes of prose-writings. His mental condition is indicated in another few sentences from the letter quoted above
But money coming in slowly, Carlyle found he could no longer afford to live in Edinburgh. So after a year and a half of cheerful, social life, surrounded by many cultured friends, he and his wife moved to Craigenputtock, a lonely house fourteen miles from Dumfries, which belonged to Mrs. Carlyle. Here was solitude indeed. The air was so quiet that the very sheep could be heard nibbling.
In 1834, after six years at Craigenputtock, the Carlyles moved to London, and took up their home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, a far from fashionable retreat, but one in which the comforts of life could be more readily secured. It was there that Thomas Carlyle wrote what must seem to us the most vivid of all his books, the History of the French Revolution.
The book is full of humor and wisdom, of stray lightenings, and deep growlings. There are glimpses of "a story" to be caught to. It is perhaps the most Carlylean book Carlyle ever wrote. But let it lie yet awhile on your bookshelf unread. At the end of six years or so Carlyle decided that Craigenputtock was of no use to him. He wanted to get the ear of the world, to make the world listen to him.
This passage, of course, refers to his visit to Carlyle, to visit whom Emerson had driven over from Dumfries to Craigenputtock, where Carlyle had been living for the last five years. In this connection it is interesting to read what the man visited had to say about his visitor: "That man," Carlyle said to Lord Houghton, "came to see me.
But it brings out even more clearely than its predecessor the essential qualities of Carlyle. In one way this was easier. The period of fruitless struggle was almost over when Carlyle left Craigenputtock in 1834. After the appearance of The French Revolution in 1838 he was famous, and every one who read anything read that book. Southey read it six times.
His son saw him last in August 1831, when, referring to his Craigenputtock solitude, he said: "Man, it's surely a pity that thou shouldst sit yonder with nothing but the eye of Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a gift to speak."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking