*Ø* Blogmanac March 6, 1835 | Mill and Carlyle: friendship only singed, not burned
"One of the grimmest episodes in the history of combustion"
Mill's maid burned Carlyle's French Revolution history manuscript
1835 In the evening, English philosopher and former child prodigy John Stuart Mill knocked at the door of his friend, the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle.
Mill had fostered Carlyle’s interest in the French Revolution, so Carlyle had asked his friend if he would read the manuscript of his first volume of a history that he had written on the subject.
Ashen-faced, Mill had the unpleasant duty of telling his friend that his, Mill’s, maid had mistaken for the manuscript (the only copy in those quill-pen days) for garbage, and had lit the fire with it. All that remained of the historian’s hard labours were several burned pages. Thirty-nine-year-old Carlyle had laboured for five months without income to produce the volume:
“Had Carlyle stooped to journalism and adapted himself to the every day routine of the professional man of letters – The Times, for instance, was thrown open to him – he might rapidly have won an assured position for himself. Instead, he buried himself in French history, laboured unremittingly at his French Revolution, while months passed when not a penny came into the domestic exchequer.”
Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907 - 21), Vol. XIII
Carlyle’s journal for the following day, March 7, 1835, tells the tragic story more poignantly than I can:
"Last night at tea, Mill’s tap was heard at the door. He entered pale, unable to speak; gasped out to my wife to go down and speak with Mrs Taylor whom Mill later married; and came forward (led by my hand, and astonished looks) the very picture of desperation.
"After various inarticulate utterances to merely the same effect, he informs me that my First Volume (left out by him in too careless a manner, after or while reading it) was, except four or five bits of leaves, irrevocably ANNIHILATED!
“I remember and can still remember less of it than of anything I ever wrote with such toil. It is gone, the whole world and myself backed by it could not bring that back: nay the old spirit too is fled.
“I find it took five months of steadfast, occasionally excessive, and always sickly and painful toil ...
“Mill very injudiciously stayed with us till late; and I had to make an effort and speak, as if indifferent, about other common matters: he left us however in a relapsed state.”
Mill offered a sum of two hundred pounds in compensation, which his gentlemanly friend at first declined. Carlyle changed his mind and later told Mill that he would take the money after all. He used it to buy paper, and by January, 1837 he had recreated his masterpiece. It was different, but perhaps better: Wikipedia’s article on Carlyle notes: “The resulting second version was filled with a passionate intensity, hitherto unknown in historical writing.”
George Eliot wrote, “No novelist has made his creations live for us more thoroughly than Carlyle has made Mirabeau and the men of the French Revolution … What depth of appreciation, what reverence for the great and godlike under every sort of earthy mummery!”
The French Revolution was published in three volumes (Ralph Waldo Emerson helped him publish it in America), and received great critical acclaim. Mill, of course, among the enthusiastic reviewers. Fortunately for Carlyle, eldest of nine children of a poor stone mason, sales were good and he was able to continue working at home on his writing projects.
Kindness to Mill
As more evidence of the fine character of the Scottish historian, the following letter which Carlyle wrote the very next day to cheer Mill up, says it all:
7th March 1835, Chelsea
My Dear Mill,
How are you? You left me last night with a look which I shall not soon forget. Is there anything that I could do or suffer or say to alleviate you? For I feel that your sorrow must be far sharper than mine; yours bound to be a passive one. How true is this of Richgter: "All Evil is like a Nightmare; the instant you begin to stir under it, it is gone."
I have ordered a Biographie Universelle this morning; - and a better sort of paper. Thus, far from giving up the game, you see, I am risking another £10 on it. Courage, my friend!
Carlyle
He also wrote the day after the calamity to Sir James Fraser: “I can be angry with no one; for they that were concerned in it have a far deeper sorrow than mine: it is purely the hand of Providence; and, by the blessing of Providence, I must struggle to take it as such.” He did not mention Mill’s name to Fraser.
Writer Cullen Murphy has rightly called it “One of the grimmest episodes in the annals of combustion.”
This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date when you're there.
"One of the grimmest episodes in the history of combustion"
Mill's maid burned Carlyle's French Revolution history manuscript
1835 In the evening, English philosopher and former child prodigy John Stuart Mill knocked at the door of his friend, the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle.
Mill had fostered Carlyle’s interest in the French Revolution, so Carlyle had asked his friend if he would read the manuscript of his first volume of a history that he had written on the subject.
Ashen-faced, Mill had the unpleasant duty of telling his friend that his, Mill’s, maid had mistaken for the manuscript (the only copy in those quill-pen days) for garbage, and had lit the fire with it. All that remained of the historian’s hard labours were several burned pages. Thirty-nine-year-old Carlyle had laboured for five months without income to produce the volume:
“Had Carlyle stooped to journalism and adapted himself to the every day routine of the professional man of letters – The Times, for instance, was thrown open to him – he might rapidly have won an assured position for himself. Instead, he buried himself in French history, laboured unremittingly at his French Revolution, while months passed when not a penny came into the domestic exchequer.”
Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907 - 21), Vol. XIII
Carlyle’s journal for the following day, March 7, 1835, tells the tragic story more poignantly than I can:
"Last night at tea, Mill’s tap was heard at the door. He entered pale, unable to speak; gasped out to my wife to go down and speak with Mrs Taylor whom Mill later married; and came forward (led by my hand, and astonished looks) the very picture of desperation.
"After various inarticulate utterances to merely the same effect, he informs me that my First Volume (left out by him in too careless a manner, after or while reading it) was, except four or five bits of leaves, irrevocably ANNIHILATED!
“I remember and can still remember less of it than of anything I ever wrote with such toil. It is gone, the whole world and myself backed by it could not bring that back: nay the old spirit too is fled.
“I find it took five months of steadfast, occasionally excessive, and always sickly and painful toil ...
“Mill very injudiciously stayed with us till late; and I had to make an effort and speak, as if indifferent, about other common matters: he left us however in a relapsed state.”
Mill offered a sum of two hundred pounds in compensation, which his gentlemanly friend at first declined. Carlyle changed his mind and later told Mill that he would take the money after all. He used it to buy paper, and by January, 1837 he had recreated his masterpiece. It was different, but perhaps better: Wikipedia’s article on Carlyle notes: “The resulting second version was filled with a passionate intensity, hitherto unknown in historical writing.”
George Eliot wrote, “No novelist has made his creations live for us more thoroughly than Carlyle has made Mirabeau and the men of the French Revolution … What depth of appreciation, what reverence for the great and godlike under every sort of earthy mummery!”
The French Revolution was published in three volumes (Ralph Waldo Emerson helped him publish it in America), and received great critical acclaim. Mill, of course, among the enthusiastic reviewers. Fortunately for Carlyle, eldest of nine children of a poor stone mason, sales were good and he was able to continue working at home on his writing projects.
Kindness to Mill
As more evidence of the fine character of the Scottish historian, the following letter which Carlyle wrote the very next day to cheer Mill up, says it all:
7th March 1835, Chelsea
My Dear Mill,
How are you? You left me last night with a look which I shall not soon forget. Is there anything that I could do or suffer or say to alleviate you? For I feel that your sorrow must be far sharper than mine; yours bound to be a passive one. How true is this of Richgter: "All Evil is like a Nightmare; the instant you begin to stir under it, it is gone."
I have ordered a Biographie Universelle this morning; - and a better sort of paper. Thus, far from giving up the game, you see, I am risking another £10 on it. Courage, my friend!
Carlyle
He also wrote the day after the calamity to Sir James Fraser: “I can be angry with no one; for they that were concerned in it have a far deeper sorrow than mine: it is purely the hand of Providence; and, by the blessing of Providence, I must struggle to take it as such.” He did not mention Mill’s name to Fraser.
Writer Cullen Murphy has rightly called it “One of the grimmest episodes in the annals of combustion.”
This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date when you're there.
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