Thomas & Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage

They were the most remarkable couple in London: the great sage Carlyle, with his vehement prophecies, and his witty, sardonic wife Jane. It was a strong, close, mutually admiring yet often mutually antagonistic partnership, fascinating to all who observed it. The Carlyles lived at the heart of English life in mid-Victorian London, but both were outsiders. They were a largely self-educated Scottish pair who took a caustic look at the society they so influenced - Carlyle through his copious writings, and both through their network of acquaintances and correspondents. The letters they wrote, both to each other and to others, make theirs the best-documented marriage of the nineteenth century and give us an unequalled portrait of a notoriously unhappy marriage.