In the last week of June 1824 Thomas Carlyle, on the cusp of a brilliant literary career, bounced up to meet one of the country's reigning men of let… - Kathryn Hughes
" "In the last week of June 1824 Thomas Carlyle, on the cusp of a brilliant literary career, bounced up to meet one of the country's reigning men of letters. You might assume that the twenty-eight-year-old had lots to talk about with the veteran poet and critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge was Britain's chief exponent of German Idealism, a tradition in which young Carlyle was himself fluent: his first book, published the following year, would be a biography of the philosopher Schiller. Yet far from a meeting of minds, this encounter between the literary generations might best be described as a repulsion of bodies. Carlyle was barely able to contain his shock at the ruin of the man who shuffled forward to greet him at 3, . Coleridge, he reported to his brother in an appalled post-mortem the next day, was a 'fat flabby incurvated personage, at once short, rotund and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown timid yet earnest looking eyes'.
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About Kathryn Hughes
(born 1959) is an English biographer, historian, journalist, and professor emerita in the School of Literature, Drama and Writing at the . Her book George Eliot: The Last Victorian was awarded the 1999 for biography. Hughes, an expert on the , has contributed articles to , , , and .
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Additional quotes by Kathryn Hughes
By representing "home" — the place we go to be loved, nurtured and fed — has become a kind of symbolic mother to us all. She is also, of course, the symbolic mother that we feel we ought to be. Right through the last century, brides were given a "Mrs Beeton" on their wedding day as a to help them become the kind of woman that everyone, but especially their own mothers, expected. Young women setting off for married life in India, Australia or Canada were similarly presented with a "Mrs Beeton" by which it was hoped they would carry the mother culture far into places where previously only chaos and savagery — in other words, un-Englishness — had reigned.
So there is a kind of pleasing logic to the fact that the original Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management of 1861 was written to plug a gap where existing maternal relations had broken down. In the mid-19th century, middle-class women were, for the first time in history, more likely than not to be living at some distance from their native communities. Rapid urbanisation and the arrival of the railways meant that married life now involved setting up home sometimes hundreds of miles from the house where you were born. Where once you had been able to pop next door to ask mother's advice on a baby's cough or the best way to stone currants, now there was no one to consult. It was to fill this blind spot that a 21-year-old newly married woman, Isabella Beeton, decided to compile an encyclopaedia of domestic know-how, creating a paper and print version of Mother.
In 1925 a man called Dan Rider was inspecting the pauper wards of in . He was a volunteer visitor, a member of the public charged with checking on the welfare of those unhappy souls who had been deemed insane and sent to what was still known colloquially as the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum. During his tour Rider 'noticed a quiet little man drawing cats': 'Good Lord, man, you draw like .' 'I am Louis Wain,' replied the patient. 'You're not, you know,' I exclaimed. 'But I am,' said the artist, and he was.
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