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Updated: May 1, 2025
He recalled with anguish every moment of their early life at Craigenputtock how she had toiled for him, and waited upon him, and made herself a slave; and how, later, she had given herself up entirely to him, while he had thoughtlessly received the sacrifice, and trampled on it as on a bed of flowers.
His wife yielding, though with a natural repugnance to the extreme seclusion in store for her, and the Jeffreys kindly assisting, they went together in May 1828 to the Hill of the Hawks. Craigenputtock is by no means "the dreariest spot in all the British dominions."
The next seven years of Carlyle's life were spent at the Scotch moorland farm of Craigenputtock, belonging to his wife's mother, which must have contributed to his support. How any brilliant woman, fond of society as Mrs. Carlyle was, could have lived contentedly in that dreary solitude, fifteen miles from any visiting neighbor or town, is a mystery.
About this time he visited Paris and London, where he met Hazlitt, Campbell, Coleridge, and others. Thereafter he returned to Dumfriesshire. In the following year he m. Jane Baillie Welsh, and settled in Edin. In 1828 C. applied unsuccessfully for the Chair of Moral Philosophy in St. Andrews, and the same year he went to Craigenputtock, a small property in Dumfriesshire belonging to Mrs.
She seems to be writing the account while she is silently laughing at the absurd preparation her life had had for the duties of the wife of a poor man. But Mr. T.P. O'Connor, who writes in 1895, is outspoken: "I do not want to speak disrespectfully of poor Carlyle, but in spirit it is somewhat hard to keep one's hand off him, as we reconstruct those scenes in the gaunt house at Craigenputtock.
He has many, many tokens of Goethe's regard, miniatures, medals, and many letters. If you should go to Scotland one day, you would gratify him, yourself, and me, by your visit to Craigenputtock, in the parish of Dunscore, near Dumfries. He told me he had a book which he thought to publish, but was in the purpose of dividing into a series of articles for "Fraser's Magazine."
He long carried in his mind the picture of Carlyle's life at Craigenputtock as the ideal for the sage, but his own choice was far wiser and happier, 'not wholly in the busy world, nor quite beyond it. 'Besides my house, he told Carlyle in 1838, 'I have, I believe, 22,000 dollars, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent.
One of the most striking examples of self-education in literature is Carlyle's seven years, from the age of thirty-two to thirty-nine, passed at Craigenputtock where his native inclination was enforced by his physical surroundings. Craigenputtock, wrote Froude, is "the dreariest spot in all the British dominions.
At all times he and his dark-haired wife had their own sets, and mingled with their own friends. Jane had no means of discovering just whether she would have been happier with Irving; for Irving died while she was still digging potatoes and complaining of her lot at Craigenputtock. However this may be, the Carlyles, man and wife, lived an existence that was full of unhappiness and rancor.
We see nothing of the angry pessimism of his later writings. Those years at Craigenputtock were healthy and wholesome; he labored in hope, and had great intellectual and artistic enjoyment, which reconciled him to solitude, the chief evil with which he had to contend, after dyspepsia. His habits were frugal, but poverty did not stare him in the face, since he had the income of the farm.
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