Carlyle’s writing-table and chair
see page [33]
Carlyle bequeathed his writing-table to Sir James Stephen. “I know,” he wrote in his will, “he will accept it as a distinguished mark of my esteem. He knows that it belonged to my father-in-law and his daughter, and that I have written all my books upon it, except only Schiller, and that for fifty years and upwards that are now passed I have considered it among the most precious of my possessions.”
The ground floor rooms at 5, Cheyne Row
see page [28]
It was into the ground-floor room—at that time spoken of as the “parlour”—that Edward Irving was ushered when he paid his one visit to Cheyne Row, in autumn 1834. “I recollect,” writes Carlyle in the Reminiscences, “how he complimented her (as well he might) on the pretty little room she had made for her husband and self; and, running his eye over her dainty bits of arrangement, ornamentations (all so frugal, simple, full of grace, propriety, and ingenuity as they ever were), said, smiling: ‘You are like an Eve, and make a little Paradise wherever you are.’”
The kitchen at 5, Cheyne Row
see page [32]
No description of Carlyle’s Chelsea home would be complete without mention of the kitchen where Mrs. Carlyle made marmalade “pure as liquid amber, in taste and look almost poetically delicate”; and where, too, she stirred Leigh Hunt’s endlessly admirable morsel of Scotch porridge. Readers of the Letters and Memorials will obtain many glimpses of this apartment and its occupants. The fittings were very old-fashioned, especially the open kitchen-range with its “kettle-crane” and “movable niggards.” The dresser which stood there in 1834 remains against the south wall; the table still stands in the centre, and there is a sink in the corner beside the disconnected pump.
When Carlyle was resting at Dumfries, after the exhaustion of his triumphant Inaugural Address upon his installation as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, he received the announcement of his wife’s sudden death whilst driving in her carriage in Hyde Park on April 21st, 1866. The effect of the calamity upon him was terrible. “There is no spirit in me to write,” he said, “though I try it sometimes.”