On his return to London, equal to work again, Carlyle found all well. He was gratified to hear that the eighth edition of the French Revolution was almost sold, and that another would be called for, while there were numerous applications from review editors for articles if he would please to supply them. Mill about this time asked him to contribute a paper on Cromwell to the London and Westminster Review. Carlyle agreed, and was preparing to begin when the negotiations were broken off. Mill had gone abroad, leaving a Mr Robertson to manage the Review. Robertson coolly wrote to say that he need not go on with the article, 'for he meant to do Cromwell himself.' Carlyle was wroth, and that incident determined him to 'throw himself seriously into the history of the Commonwealth, and to expose himself no more to cavalier treatment from "able editors."' But for that task he required books. Then it was that the idea of founding a London library occurred to him. Men of position took up the matter warmly, and Carlyle's object was accomplished. 'Let the tens of thousands,' says Mr Froude, 'who, it is to be hoped, "are made better and wiser" by the books collected there, remember that they owe the privilege entirely to Carlyle.'
One of Carlyle's new acquaintances was Monckton Milnes, who asked him to breakfast. Carlyle used to say that if Christ were again on earth Milnes would ask Him to breakfast, and the clubs would all be talking of the 'good things' that Christ had said. He also became familiar with Mr Baring, afterwards Lord Ashburton, and his accomplished wife, who in course of time exercised a disturbing influence over the Carlyle household. It would not tend to edification to dwell upon the domestic misunderstandings at Cheyne Row; besides, are not they to be found detailed at great length in Froude's Life, the Reminiscences, and Letters and Memorials? Although Carlyle was taking life somewhat easy, he was making preparations for his third course of lectures, his subject being the 'Revolutions of Modern Europe.' They did not please the lecturer, but the audiences were as enthusiastic as ever, and he made a clear gain of £200.
About this time Emerson was pressing him to go to Boston on a lecturing tour. But Carlyle thought better of it. More important work awaited him in London. 'All his life,' says Froude, 'he had been meditating on the problem of the working-man's existence in this country at the present epoch.... He had seen the Glasgow riots in 1819. He had heard his father talk of the poor masons, dining silently upon water and water-cresses. His letters are full of reflections on such things, sad or indignant, as the humour might be. He was himself a working-man's son. He had been bred in a peasant home, and all his sympathies were with his own class. He was not a revolutionist; he knew well that violence would be no remedy; that there lay only madness and deeper misery. But the fact remained, portending frightful issues. The Reform Bill was to have mended matters but the Reform Bill had gone by and the poor were none the happier. The power of the State had been shifted from the aristocracy to the mill-owners, and merchants, and shopkeepers. That was all. The handicraftsman remained where he was, or was sinking, rather, into an unowned Arab, to whom "freedom" meant freedom to work if the employer had work to offer him conveniently to himself, or else freedom to starve. The fruit of such a state of society as this was the Sansculottism on which he had been lecturing, and he felt that he must put his thoughts upon it in a permanent form. He had no faith in political remedies, in extended suffrages, recognition of "the rights of man," etc.—absolutely none. That was the road on which the French had gone; and, if tried in England, it would end as it ended with them—in anarchy, and hunger, and fury. The root of the mischief was the forgetfulness on the part of the upper classes, increasing now to flat denial, that they owed any duty to those under them beyond the payment of contract wages at the market price. The Liberal theory, as formulated in Political Economy, was that every one should attend exclusively to his own interests, and that the best of all possible worlds would be the certain result. His own conviction was that the result would be the worst of all possible worlds, a world in which human life, such a life as human beings ought to live, would become impossible.'[19]
He wrote to his brother when his lectures were over: "Guess what immediate project I am on; that of writing an article on the working-classes for the "Quarterly." It is verily so. I offered to do the thing for Mill about a year ago. He durst not. I felt a kind of call and monition of duty to do it, wrote to Lockhart accordingly, was altogether invitingly answered, had a long interview with the man yesterday, found him a person of sense, good-breeding, even kindness, and great consentaneity of opinion with myself on the matter. Am to get books from him to-morrow, and so shall forthwith set about telling the Conservatives a thing or two about the claims, condition, rights, and mights of the working order of men."
When the annual exodus from London came, the Carlyles went north for a holiday. They returned much refreshed at the end of two months. His presence, moreover, was required in London, as Wilhelm Meister was now to be republished. He set about finishing his article for the "Quarterly," but as he progressed he felt some misgiving as to its ever appearing in that magazine. "I have finished," he wrote on November 8, 1839, "a long review article, thick pamphlet, or little volume, entitled "Chartism." Lockhart has it, for it was partly promised to him; at least the refusal of it was, and that, I conjecture, will be all he will enjoy of it." Lockhart sent it back, 'seemingly not without reluctance,' saying he dared not. Mill was shown the pamphlet and was 'unexpectedly delighted with it.' He was willing to publish it, but Carlyle's wife and brother insisted that the thing was too good for a magazine article. Fraser undertook to print it, and before the close of the year Chartism was in the hands of the public.
The sale was rapid, an edition of a thousand copies being sold immediately. 'Chartism,' Froude narrates, was loudly noticed: "considerable reviewing, but very daft reviewing." Men wondered; how could they choose but wonder, when a writer of evident power stripped bare the social disease, told them that their remedies were quack remedies, and their progress was progress to dissolution? The Liberal journals, finding their "formulas" disbelieved in, clamoured that Carlyle was unorthodox; no Radical, but a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yet what he said was true, and could not be denied to be true. "They approve generally," he said, "but regret very much that I am a Tory. Stranger Tory, in my opinion, has not been fallen in with in these later generations." Again a few weeks later (February 11): "The people are beginning to discover that I am not a Tory. Ah, no! but one of the deepest, though perhaps the quietest, of all the Radicals now extant in the world—a thing productive of small comfort to several persons. They have said, and they will say, and let them say."
His final course of lectures now confronted him, and these he entitled Heroes and Hero Worship. He tells his mother (May 26, 1840): 'The lecturing business went off with sufficient éclat. The course was generally judged, and I rather join therein myself, to be the bad best I have yet given. On the last day—Friday last—I went to speak of Cromwell with a head full of air; you know that wretched physical feeling; I had been concerned with drugs, had awakened at five, etc. It is absolute martyrdom. My tongue would hardly wag at all when I got done. Yet the good people sate breathless, or broke out into all kinds of testimonies of goodwill.... In a word, we got right handsomely through.' That was Carlyle's last appearance as a public lecturer. He was now the observed of all observers in London society; but he was weary of lionising and junketings. 'What,' he notes in his journal on June 15, 1840, 'are lords coming to call on one and fill one's head with whims? They ask you to go among champagne, bright glitter, semi-poisonous excitements which you do not like even for the moment, and you are sick for a week after. As old Tom White said of whisky, "Keep it—Deevil a ever I'se better than when there's no a drop on't i' my weam." So say I of dinner popularity, lords and lionism—Keep it; give it to those that like it.'
Carlyle was much refreshed at this period by visits from Tennyson. Here is what he says of the poet: 'A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free and easy, who swims outwardly and inwardly with great composure in an inarticulate element of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke. Great now and then when he does emerge—a most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man.'
In a note to his brother John on September 11, 1840, he says: 'I have again some notions towards writing a book—let us see what comes of that. It is the one use of living, for me. Enough to-day.' The book he had in view was Cromwell. Journalising on the day after Christmas he laments—'Oliver Cromwell will not prosper with me at all. I began reading about that subject some four months ago. I learn almost nothing by reading, yet cannot as yet heartily begin to write. Nothing on paper yet. I know not where to begin.'
At the end of the year Mrs Carlyle wrote: 'Carlyle is reading voraciously, preparatory to writing a new book. For the rest, he growls away much in the old style. But one gets to feel a certain indifference to his growling; if one did not, it would be the worse for one.' A month or two later, Carlyle writes: 'Think not hardly of me, dear Jeannie. In the mutual misery we often are in, we do not know how dear we are to one another. By the help of Heaven, I shall get a little better, and somewhat of it shall abate. Last night, at dinner, Richard Milnes made them all laugh with a saying of yours. "When the wife has influenza, it is a slight cold—when the man has it, it is, &c., &c."' Writing to Sterling he exclaims, 'I shall verily fly to Craigenputtock again before long. Yet I know what solitude is, and imprisonment among black cattle and peat bogs. The truth is, we are never right as we are. "Oh, the devil burn it"! said the Irish drummer flogging his countryman; "there's no pleasing of you, strike where one will."'