To Goodykin, from a Genius

THOMAS CARLYLE: LETTERS TO HIS WIFE (414 pp.)--Edited by Trudy Bliss-Harvard University ($5).

"My own dearest little Goody," "Best little Goodykin," "Dearest of all Jeannies," "Lovely Princess," "Lovekin." This is no moonstruck sophomore toasting epistolary marshmallows for his sweetie, but one of the finer minds of the 19th century, Thomas Carlyle, addressing his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle. During some 40 years of turbulent married life, Carlyle gradually diluted these honeyed words with wormwood. As Editor Trudy Bliss's generous sampling of Carlyle's domestic correspondence makes plain, he used confectionery phrases to sugarcoat endless pills packed with personal neuroses.

Trigger-nerved, bilious, plagued with insomnia, Carlyle found a captivated as well as a captive audience in wife Jane, who shared all of his symptoms and capped them with migraine headaches of her own. Many a letter finds Carlyle with his ear cupped to the inner symphony of psychosomatic complaints: "Alas, alas, I am losing my eyesight (sad symptom of bile) by stooping over this flat table." In the country, a cow lowing in pasture could ruin his night's sleep. London was all "noise, unwholesomeness, dirt and fret." In Germany, all coffee resembled a "physic." Paris proved a "jump into the red-sea of mud," where "I have had a horrible time of it."

Knaves & Skeletons. If places crinkled Carlyle's nose, so did most people, famed or humble. Publishers were "consummate knaves," and his own "a blockhead." He found Charles Lamb "a miserable, drink-besotted, spindle-shanked skeleton of a body, whose 'humour' as it is called, seemed to me neither more nor less than a fibre of genius shining thro' positive delirium and crackbrainedness." Robert Browning was "loudish and talkative beyond need." Even Emerson, who boosted Carlyle's American reputation and mailed him his U.S. royalties, irked the grumpy Scot with his perennial good temper and "unsubduable placidity."

Avid for news himself, he was quick to chide when replies were tardy. ("No letter, Goodykin, none today yet?") He came so close to treating his talented wife like an aimless birdbrain that Jane once chided him for writing "as if I were some nice child, writing ... to its Godpapa." But occasionally, Carlyle came close to sharing an idea with his "wee wifiekin," as when he was moved by the human and physical blight of the Industrial Revolution on a South Wales town: "The town might be ... one of the prettiest places in the world, and it is one of the sootiest, squalidest and ugliest ... It is like a vision of Hell, and will never leave me, that of those poor creatures broiling, all in sweat and dirt, amid their furnaces, pits and rolling mills."

20,000 Cockneys. Ever the perfectionist, he once borrowed a chisel to set right a grammatical error on his grandfather-in-law's tombstone. But he found it harder to meet the recurrent agony of writing: "A hundred pages more, and this cursed book is flung out from me." Some days he had "the strength of 20,000 cockneys"; on others he was "sunk as in tropical oppression" with a "base, underhand desire to lie down in everlasting leaden sleep." Sometimes the limp writing hand he held out for Jane Carlyle to pat was only slapped, and Carlyle would whimper, "You are not good to me just now." But more often she fought the literary battle out at his side, freely giving the encouragement he needed.

A week after her death, Carlyle paid his last tribute to Goodykin and the hard life he led her: "She . . . fought and toiled for me valiantly at all moments up to that last, how loyally, lovingly and bravely, and through what sore paths and difficulties is now known only to God and one living mortal."

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