Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum. Kathryn Hughes

       Introduction

      Parts and Holes

      In the last week of June 1824 Thomas Carlyle, on the cusp of a brilliant literary career, bounced up Highgate Hill 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, The Grove. 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’.

      It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast between this damp, spongy apparition and his spare, springy visitor. Carlyle appeared to have been whittled out of the birches of his native Dumfriesshire. His eyes were light and burning, his nose and mouth as decided as granite, and he had doubtless fizzed up North London’s steep incline in double-quick time, only to find this dollop of slop waiting for him at the top. Over the previous thirty years Coleridge had been addicted to opium, which not only slackened the connective tissues of his brilliant mind but turned his body turgid. The sagginess that so offended Carlyle was partly due to the older man’s constipated and swollen gut, the humiliating legacy of his drug dependency. An ancillary snuff habit, meanwhile, had made rivers of his eyes, mouth and nose.

      Sharp Oedipal elbows partly account for the savagery of Carlyle’s attack on Coleridge’s pitiable physique. Over the years the young Scot would frequently be mentioned as the natural successor to ‘the Sage of Highgate’, and the comparison made him furious: he would be his own man, thank you very much – entirely original, self-hewn. And indeed, this sally turned out to be only the first of several extraordinary verbal attacks on Coleridge’s body by the young pretender. Just the following year Carlyle returned to the subject, refining the rhetoric of his disgust so that Coleridge now became ‘a mass of richest spices, putrefied into a dunghill’, which he longed to ‘toss … in a blanket’. It was as if Carlyle hoped that by giving Coleridge a good shake he might redistribute his feculent stuffing into a more uniform shape. At the very least he would get him to sit up straight.

      This disillusionment so early in his career did nothing to dent Carlyle’s conviction that bodies mattered as much as minds when it came to making sense of what had gone before. Thirteen years after that Highgate encounter he was exhorting his readers to remember that ‘the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men … Not abstractions were they, not diagrams and theorems, but men, in buff or other coats and breeches, with colour in their cheeks, with passions in their stomach, and the idioms, features and vitalities of very men.’ It was precisely these ‘vitalities’ that Carlyle worked so hard to bring to his own written accounts of the Past, a past which, according to his famous formulation, was best read by setting the biographies of Great Men end to end. Dante, Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great all crashed through Carlyle’s books so vividly that it seemed as if at any moment they might bound out of the pages, take the reader by the hand and explain just what it felt like to write Hamlet