
Jane Carlyle survived a miserable marriage by satirizing it - pepys
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/03/how-jane-carlyle-survived-a-miserable-marriage/#
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badcede
‘It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another,’ he
quipped, ‘and so make only two people miserable and not four.’

~~~
paulddraper
(said by a third party, Samuel Butler)

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Jun8
"Drawing from the 44 volumes of their letters and journals..."

This has been commented on many times but never ceases to amaze me: The sheer
bulk of correspondence, journals, and other writing educated people kept in
earlier times.

~~~
Amezarak
I'm always shocked by how well-read they were. Teenage Jane Carlyle could have
passed as a classics professor at an elite university in our time. One
anecdote that stands out in Carlyle's Memoirs is that she had learned Latin
well enough to understand and recite the Aeneid; as a game at nine years old,
she recited Dido's speech from memory while burning a doll on a makeshift
pyre.

I'm sure Jane Carlyle was exceptional, but still, one gets this impression
from most educated people from the time.

~~~
kbenson
I imagine a good amount (but by no means all) of what we would consider "well
read" was having the leisure time to read for pleasure. The contemporary
version might be someone well versed in Lord of the Rings, or Star Trek, or
Friends, or Firefly, or Gilmore Girls, or the works of Stephen King. To those
that have aligned interests, or aspire to, knowledge of these topics may not
quite signal "well read", but they will signal shared knowledge and interests,
and a starting point for conversation. I think a big difference between now
and then is that now there _is so much more_ to consume. Go back 500 years,
and you likely had to be a lord or in a monastery to have much to read (in the
west), and the preponderance of that material was likely faith based in some
respect (whether originally so or not).

It would be interesting to see how much media of each type was available at
different time periods.

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pcunite
Stop, right now (okay when you can) and go read the "Five Love Languages".
You'll have a much better marriage for it.

~~~
Bartweiss
Certainly this is an interesting note: "the crippling remorse he will feel
following her death in 1866, when he discovers, from her writing, how unhappy
she had been".

It's fascinating to learn that a couple so verbal never (successfully)
communicated this unhappiness. I had assumed from the introduction that these
were people who did not care about one another's wellbeing, but Thomas at
least was seemingly unaware of the problem.

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Apocryphon
The wife of Thomas Carlyle... the early sociologist who is now revered by
neoreactionary bloggers of the Dark Enlightenment... the movement that both
presaged, and can be considered the intellectual counterpart of, the alt-
right?

Nietzsche and Ayn Rand had difficult personal lives too, one notes.

~~~
Amezarak
I think it's unfair to paint Carlyle with too broad a brush. _The French
Revolution_ is a really, really fantastic work. It's a little sad, to me, that
Carlyle's contemporaries considered him one of the, if not _the_ , greatest
writers of the century - even though almost all of them radically disagreed
with him - and now he's fallen into relative obscurity because of his
political opinions.

Carlyle's philosophical/sociological commentary is on occasion cited by neo-
reactionary types, but I'm not convinced he would have been terribly fond of
them. Carlyle _did_ have antidemocratic sentiments, but so do a lot of people
nowadays - witness the criticism of the Brexit vote, or even the _possibility_
of the election of Trump. But it's not that he thought aristocrats or kings
were necessarily better. Carlyle was a critic of both sides, and never really
formulated an idea of how-the-world-should be. You see some of this in
Emerson's _Carlyle_ essay:

[http://www.rwe.org/carlyle/](http://www.rwe.org/carlyle/)

 _If a Tory takes heart at his hatred of stump-oratory and model republics, he
replies, "Yes, the idea of a pig-headed soldier who will obey orders, and fire
on his own father at the command of his officer, is a great comfort to the
aristocratic mind." It is not so much that Carlyle cares for this or that
dogma, as that he likes genuineness (the source of all strength) in his
companions._

Carlyle was a great _critic_ , a tearer-down of systems, and he had a lot of
insightful criticisms about his society and the direction it was heading. He
isn't always sympathetic(for example, his views on slavery were repugnant then
and even moreso now), but he's usually _interesting_. I think, to the extent
he's a reactionary, it's mostly a case of "there are _some_ good things about
the old days, and we're throwing them away in the blind pursuit of the
new"-type, rather than "older is always better".

~~~
Apocryphon
Perhaps the neoreactionaries like his attitude- an anti-democracy gadfly! so
pithy!- and some of his works more than who the man was in total. I could see
archconservatives idolizing Chesterton for the same reasons.

