The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle

At the opening of volume 33, which covers letters written between August 1857 and June 1858, Jane Welsh Carlyle is in Scotland visiting relatives and Thomas Carlyle is at home in Chelsea, working daily under an awning in the backyard and struggling with the proofs of the first two volumes of History of Frederick the Great as well as with research for future volumes. Thomas was disturbed both by the Panic of 1857 and by news of the Indian Mutiny and the behavior of British troops in that part of the empire. He was fiercely critical of the politicians and civil servants who trumpeted the merits of “progress,” “democracy,” and “civilization” while governing India with often brutal and repressive policies. Meanwhile, Jane was reading an early work by a new writer named George Eliot, to whom she wrote a fan letter that began “Dear Sir,” unaware that Eliot was in fact Mary Ann Evans, whom they had entertained in their home. In May, Thomas observed a gang of navvies, or day laborers, with picks and shovels, digging a foundation and uncovering ancient, gigantic bones. At the suggestion of paleontologist Richard Owen, the bones of the extinct Pliocene mammals-including a whale-were sold to a dealer to be ground into powder. During the same month, the separation of Charles Dickens and his wife, the former Catherine Hogarth, was the subject of many a conversation.