At Home - Bill Bryson [55]
It is impossible to know how the reworked version differed from the original. What can be said is that the volume we now have is one of the most unreadable books ever to attract the esteem of its age. It is written entirely in the present tense in strange, overwrought language that seems always to be tiptoeing around on the brink of incoherence. Here is Carlyle discussing the man behind the guillotine:
And worthy Doctor Guillotin, whom we hoped to behold one other time? If not here, the Doctor should be here, and we see him with the eye of prophecy: for indeed the Parisian Deputies are all a little late. Singular Guillotin, respectable practitioner; doomed by a satiric destiny to the strangest immortal glory that ever kept obscure mortal from the resting-place, the bosom of oblivion!… Unfortunate doctor! For two-and-twenty years, unguillotined, shall hear nothing but guillotine; then dying, shall through long centuries wander, as it were, a disconsolate ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and Lethe; his name like to outlive Caesar’s.
Readers had never encountered such perky intimacy in a book and found it thrilling. Dickens claimed to have read the work five hundred times and credited it as the inspiration behind A Tale of Two Cities. Oscar Wilde venerated Carlyle. “He made history a song for the first time in our language,” he wrote. “He was our English Tacitus.” For half a century, Carlyle was, for literary folk, a god.
He died in 1881. His written histories barely outlived him, but his personal history goes on and on, thanks in very large part to the exceptionally voluminous correspondence that he and his wife left behind—enough to fill thirty volumes of close-printed text. Thomas Carlyle would no doubt be astonished and dismayed today to learn that his histories are largely unread, but that he is known now for the minutiae of his daily life, including decades of petty moans about servants. The irony, of course, is that employing a succession of thankless servants is what gave him and his wife the leisure to write all those letters.
Much of this had always been thus. Like the Carlyles, but nearly two centuries earlier, Samuel Pepys and his wife, Elizabeth, had a seemingly endless string of servants during the nine and a half years in which Pepys wrote his famous diary, and perhaps little wonder since he spent a good deal of his time pawing the females and beating the boys—though, come to that, he beat the girls quite a lot, too. Once he took a broom to a servant named Jane “and basted her till she cried extremely.” Her crime was that she was untidy. Pepys kept a boy whose principal function seems to have been to give him something convenient to hit—“with a cane or a birch or a whip or a rope’s end, or even a salted eel,” as the historian Liza Picard puts it.
Pepys was also a great one for dismissing servants. One was sacked for uttering “some sawcy words,” another for being a gossip. One was given new clothes upon arrival, but ran off that night; when she was caught, Pepys retrieved the clothes and insisted that she be severely whipped. Others were dismissed for drinking or pilfering food. Some almost certainly went because they spurned his amorous fumblings. An amazing number, however, submitted. Pepys’s diary reveals that he had intercourse with