A certain John Pye, a Chelsea engraver, afterwards interviewed the owner of No. 119, and learned from him that Turner and Mrs. Booth had, some four or five years before, called and taken the house of him, paying their rent in advance because they objected to giving any names or references. Pye also saw Mrs. Booth, and says she was a woman of fifty, illiterate, but “good-looking and kindly-mannered.” Turner had used to call her “old ’un,” she said, and she called him “dear”; and she explained that she had first got acquainted with him when, more than twenty years ago, “he became her lodger near the Custom House at Margate.” So small was the shabby little house in Cheyne Walk that the undertakers were unable to carry the coffin up the narrow staircase, and had to carry the body down to it. Nowadays, the house has been enlarged; it and the house next door have been thrown into one, otherwise it has undergone little change since Turner knew it.
Whilst Turner was thus passing out of life in Cheyne Walk, Carlyle was dwelling near by at No. 24 (then No. 5) Cheyne Row, and had been resident there for seventeen years. On first coming to London in 1830, he and his wife lodged at 33 Ampton Street, Gray’s Inn Road. They spent, he says, “an interesting, cheery, and, in spite of poor arrangements, really pleasant winter” there; they had a “clean and decent pair of rooms,” and their landlord’s family consisted of “quiet, decent people.” He wrote his essay on Dr. Johnson whilst he was here, and was making a fruitless search for a publisher who would accept Sartor Resartus, which he had recently completed. Jeffrey called there several times to pass an afternoon with him, and John Stuart Mill was one other of the many visitors who found their way to the drab, unlovely, rather shabby street to chat with the dour, middle-aged Scotch philosopher, who was only just beginning to be heard of.
He fixed on the Cheyne Row house in 1834, and, except for occasional holidays, never left it until his death forty-seven years afterwards. As soon as he was settled here Carlyle wrote to Sir William Hamilton, giving him his new address: “Our upholsterers, with all their rubbish and clippings, are at length swept handsomely out of doors. I have got my little book-press set up, my table fixed firm in its place, and sit here awaiting what Time and I, in our questionable wrestle, shall make out between us.” In another letter of about the same date he writes of it: “The street is flag-paved, sunk-storied, iron-railed, all old-fashioned and tightly done up, looks out on a rank of sturdy old pollarded (that is, beheaded) lime trees standing there like giants in tawtie wigs (for the new boughs are still young); beyond this a high brick wall; backwards a garden, the size of our back one at Comely Bank, with trees, &c., in bad culture; beyond this green hayfields and tree avenues, once a bishop’s pleasure grounds, an unpicturesque but rather cheerful outlook. The house itself is eminent, antique, wainscoted to the very ceiling, and has been all new painted and repaired; broadish stair, with massive balustrade (in the old style), corniced and as thick as one’s thigh; floors thick as rock, wood of them here and there worm-eaten, yet capable of cleanliness, and still with thrice the strength of a modern floor. Chelsea is a singular heterogeneous kind of spot, very dirty and confused in some places, quite beautiful in others, abounding in antiquities and the traces of great men—Sir Thomas More, Steele, Smollett, &c. Our Row, which for the last three doors or so is a street and none of the noblest, runs out upon a Parade (perhaps they call it) running along the shore of the river, a broad highway with huge shady trees, boats lying moored, and a smell of shipping and tar.”
A note in Allingham’s Diary (1860) offers you a very clear little picture of Carlyle’s garden here, as he saw it: “In Carlyle’s garden, some twenty yards by six; ivy at the end. Three or four lilac bushes; an ash stands on your left; a little copper beech on your right gives just an umbrella to sit under when the sun is hot; a vine or two on one wall, neighboured by a jasmine—one pear tree.”
CARLYLE. AMPTON STREET.
In this Cheyne Row house Carlyle wrote all his books, except Sartor and some of the miscellaneous essays; here he entertained, not always very willingly or very graciously, most of the great men of his day; quarrelled with his neighbours furiously over the crowing of their cocks; was pestered by uninvited, admiring callers from all over the world; and had his room on the top floor furnished with double-windows that were supposed to render it sound-proof, but did not. Charles Boner, visiting 24 Cheyne Row in 1862, disturbed Carlyle as he sat in his dressing-gown and slippers correcting the proofs of his Frederick the Great, whilst Mrs. Carlyle remained in attendance, seated on a sofa by the fire.
In 1866 Mrs. Carlyle died suddenly of heart failure, and left him burdened with remorse that he had not been kinder to her and made her life happier; and after two years of lonely living without her, he writes: “I am very idle here, very solitary, which I find to be oftenest less miserable to me than the common society that offers. Except Froude almost alone, whom I see once a week, there is hardly anybody whose talk, always polite, clear, sharp, and sincere, does me any considerable good.... I am too weak, too languid, too sad of heart, too unfit for any work, in fact, to care sufficiently for any object left me in the world to think of grappling round it and coercing it by work. A most sorry dog-kennel it oftenest all seems to me, and wise words, if one ever had them, to be only thrown away on it. Basta-basta, I for most part say of it, and look with longings towards the still country where at last we and our loved ones shall be together again.”
You will get no better or more intimate glimpses into Carlyle’s home life than Allingham gives in his Diary. Sometimes they are merely casual and scrappy notes, at others fairly full records of his walks and talks with him, such as this: “1873, April 28.—At Carlyle’s house about three. He spent about fifteen minutes in trying to clear the stem of a long clay pipe with a brass wire, and in the end did not succeed. The pipe was new, but somehow obstructed. At last he sent for another one and smoked, and we got out at last. (I never saw him smoke in public.) He said Emerson had called on him on Sunday, and he meant to visit E. to-day at his lodging in Down Street. We walked to Hyde Park by Queen’s Gate, and westward along the broad walk, next to the ride, with the Serpentine a field distant on the left hand. This was a favourite route of his. I was well content to have the expectation of seeing Emerson again, and, moreover, Emerson and Carlyle together. We spoke of Masson’s Life of Milton, a volume of which was on C.’s table. He said Masson’s praise of Milton was exaggerated. ‘Milton had a gift in poetry—of a particular kind. Paradise Lost is absurd; I never could take to it all—though now and again clouds of splendour rolled in upon the scene.’... At Hyde Park Corner, C. stopped and looked at the clock. ‘You are going to Down Street, sir?’ ‘No, it’s too late.’ ‘The place is close at hand.’ ‘No, no, it’s half-past five.’ So he headed for Knightsbridge, and soon after I helped him into a Chelsea omnibus, banning internally the clay pipe (value a halfpenny farthing) through which this chance (perhaps the last, for Emerson is going away soon) was lost.”