The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offers a window into the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. Since 1970 twenty-eight volumes of the letters have been published, and the collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century. Notable items in this latest volume include Thomas’s flirtatious exchanges with Lady Ashburton, the recent death of his mother, the improvement of his soundproof room, and his struggle to pursue his research for Frederick the Great. Other notable items include Dickens’s dedication of Hard Times to Thomas and Thomas’s support of G. H. Lewes during the scandal over Lewes’s affair with George Eliot. The highlight of the volume is a passionate and humorous letter by Jane, subtitled Budget of a Femme Incomprise, in which she defends the rising cost of running their house.