Kathy Chamberlain writes for The National.

ALTHOUGH Jane Welsh Carlyle spent the second half of her life in London, she remained Scottish to the core. That strong identity and the perspective it gave her on English society are perhaps as responsible as anything for the sharpness and clarity of her letters, helping to make them among the best in the English language.

Her contemporaries often remarked that she and her husband, historian Thomas Carlyle, had kept their pronounced Scottish accents, and their letters contain in a natural manner an abundance of dialect words, such as clashy, glar, flary, wae, and vaixed. Best-laid plans are often dadded a’ abreed, or shaken all to pieces.

A Scottish proverb has often been invoked to explain their marriage, though it’s a vast oversimplification of that complex relationship: Ill to hae but waur to want. Unpleasant to be with, but worse to be without! Until late in the 19th century, so Moray McLaren noted in his Stevenson and Edinburgh, the ladies of Scotland were allowed “a forthrightness, a downrightness of speech” that was strongly discouraged in their English counterparts.

That included swearing, and Jane Carlyle was known upon occasion to utter a “Great god” or a “Christ almighty,” without bringing down any lightning strikes upon their house on Cheyne Row in Chelsea. Humour could be of the wildly exaggerated kind, said to be Scottish. Thomas was especially known for that. He would, for instance, berate Alfred Tennyson for writing poetry when he should have kept to the far more manful prose. Shakespeare, too, should have stuck to prose! Jane enjoyed exaggerative humor also and employed the mock epic form to portray housework.

The National:

When training a recalcitrant new maid, she wrote a friend, “In fact ever since she came the house has been like a sort of battle of Waterloo—and when I lie down at night it is with something of the same feeling Napoleon must have had when he went to sleep (I forget where) under the fire of the Enemy’s cannon!” That slightly greater freedom to be unconventional provided Jane Carlyle with a sense of separateness from English conventions of gentility. These were strongly reinforced by dictatorial conduct books like Wives of England by Sarah Stickney Ellis, which instructed brides on how to become wives in a patriarchal society. Jane Carlyle and her novelist friend Geraldine Jewsbury referred to such rule books, critically, as “the Mrs Ellis code.”

The sense of separateness sharpened Jane Carlyle’s point of view from which to observe London society—her letters are as full of astute observations as a Jane Austen novel—yet also caused her to worry about respectability. Nearly all middle-class British women of the Victorian era were concerned about maintaining a reputation for propriety. If they didn’t, they paid a high price, often being shunned socially by other women.

In the Fraser v. Bagley case of 1844, a woman named in the trial was nearly brought to the brink of divorce for such indiscretions as calling a longtime male friend of the family “my dear” and asking him, when he had his feet propped upon the arm of her sofa, to ring for her maid. (A servant had testified to the court about the supposed impropriety.) Hearing of that, Jane Carlyle exclaimed, as a Scotswoman possibly unaware of all the ins and outs of the code, “Merciful Heaven – what criminalities have I walked over the top of without knowing it!”

JANE Carlyle, however, appreciated her London life. Friends sometimes asked why the Carlyles hadn’t thought of moving back to Scotland, perhaps to Edinburgh. In April 1861, Jane wrote to the novelist Margaret Oliphant, who shared an East Lothian background, that even a few days in Edinburgh made her “feel poorly.” She explained: “Not because of its dulness [sic]. It is ‘meant to be dull’ (as are the Royal dinner parties) . . . . I could stand the dulness . . . but I can’t stand its narrowness, its paltriness, its prejudicedness, its self-conceit, and above all its religious cant. All that makes me excessively poorly! and I never feel so well disposed towards London, so thankful for the real comfort and furtherance of being well let alone.”

Jane’s reason for that outburst: her three dogmatic religious Edinburgh aunts who liked to proselytize. But Jane Carlyle’s values were Scottish. She had a Scotswoman’s brisk respect for housework. Margaret Oliphant found it ridiculous that Thomas Carlyle’s first biographer believed that Jane, after growing up in a gracious Haddington home, had been turned into some sort of domestic slave.

Because both Carlyles — although Jane might complain on occasion of ruining her hands by having to nail down the stair carpets—considered housework honourable work. Being naturally thrifty and appreciating items of quality, they chose to purchase from Scotland many household products, like food, clothing, whisky, and clay pipes. Thomas’s family members in Dumfriesshire, farmers and stonemasons, would pack them up and send them to Chelsea.

A highlight for Jane Carlyle was a trip she made back to her hometown Haddington in 1849, after many years away. She wrote a moving memoir essay called “Much Ado about Nothing,” wherein she extolled the value of a community of people from various walks of life who recognized, appreciated, respected, and thought about each other. With an acute sense of nostalgia, and realizing much had changed, she nevertheless rediscovered a way of life she had lost sight of while living in London.

Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World, by Kathy Chamberlain is published by Duckworth Overlook, priced £25