PART III.—1822–1828 (continued 2)

356Both projects having failed, and the certainty having come that he must depend still on his earnings by literature, his resolution was taken. Away in his native Dumfriesshire, but in a much more wild and solitary part of it than his previous residences of Mainhill, Hoddam Hill, and Scotsbrig, was his wife’s little property of Craigenputtock, worth from £200 to £250 a year. It was not in his wife’s possession as yet,—her mother, Mrs. Welsh, having a life-interest in it; but, besides the farmhouse upon it, occupied by the 357farmer who rented it, there was another and superior house, the humble mansion-house of the property, with sufficient appurtenances of garden, stabling, etc. Why not remove thither? One could live there at half the cost of living in Edinburgh, and yet have excellent milk, poultry, eggs, etc., of one’s own, a horse to ride on, and healthy moors to scamper over! Jeffrey and others thought Carlyle mad in making such a proposal; but late in May 1828, as we have seen, it was carried into effect.

Here, then, in Carlyle’s thirty-third year, his Edinburgh life properly ends, and there begins that extraordinary Craigenputtock period of six years, the literary products of which were five more articles for the Edinburgh Review, six more for the Foreign Review, three articles for the Foreign Quarterly Review, one for the Westminster Review, about a score of contributions of various lengths to Fraser’s Magazine, several little papers elsewhere, and, above all, the Sartor Resartus. There were, indeed, two considerable breaks in the six years of Craigenputtock hermitship. One was that second visit to London, from August 1831 to April 1832, in which he heard of his father’s death, and in which, while endeavouring to get his Sartor Resartus published in book-form, he added Leigh Hunt, young John Stuart Mill, and others, to the number of his London acquaintances. The other was in the winter of 1832–33, when he and his wife were again in Edinburgh for some months, renewing old ties. That winter in Edinburgh, however,—just after the death of Scott, and some months after 358the death of Goethe,—furnishes nothing essentially new in the way of incident. Then, in the summer of 1834, when Carlyle was in his thirty-ninth year, and his Sartor Resartus was appearing at last by instalments in Fraser’s Magazine, there was the great final migration to London, beginning the forty-six years of Carlyle’s life that were to be associated for ever with No. 5 (now No. 24) Cheyne Row, Chelsea. During those forty-six years there were, of course, frequent trips to Scotland, with chance returns for a few days to Edinburgh. Most memorable of all was the visit to Edinburgh in April 1866, for his installation in the Rectorship of Edinburgh University. Of that visit, perhaps the crowning glory of his old age, and reconnecting him so conspicuously with Edinburgh at the last, but saddened for him so fatally by the death of his wife in his absence, I have not a few intimate recollections; as also of those later, almost furtive, visits now and again in his declining autumns, to his eightieth year and beyond, when his real purpose was pilgrimage to his wife’s grave in Haddington Church, and he would saunter, or almost shuffle, through the Edinburgh streets as a bowed-down alien, disconsolate at heart, and evading recognition. Any such recollections may be reserved. All that is properly the Edinburgh Life of Carlyle has been described here.

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