The Carlyles at Home

216pp
ISBN 9781903155226

This book about Thomas and Jane Carlyle’s life together at 5 (now 24) Cheyne Row, Chelsea was written in the 1960s by a former actress who was then living there as co-custodian of the house with her husband. The Carlyles at Home evokes everyday life from the day the Carlyles moved in, in 1834, until Jane’s death in 1866. Each of the eleven chapters describes different aspects of the house, whether it is yet another builders’ drama or a maid giving birth in the china closet while ‘Mr Carlyle was taking tea in the dining-room with Miss Jewsbury talking to him!!! Just a thin small door between!’

The door is seen, open, on the endpapers reproducing ‘A Chelsea Interior’, painted to be ‘amazingly interesting to Posterity a hundred years hence’. The New Statesman called this ‘a delightful reissue’, the Scotsman ‘a small, intimate book which deals neatly and sympathetically with the Carlyles’ life in Chelsea’ and the Sunday Telegraph Magazine published a four page article by Maureen Cleave about the house and this ‘delightful’ book. The Carlyles at Home, said the Independent on Sunday, is ‘replete with incident, whether in the form of difficult, demanding neighbours, sullen maids, itinerant geniuses or constant artistic and financial worries.’

Endpaper

‘A Chelsea Interior’, Robert Tait 1857 © The National Trust