Milnes prevailed on Carlyle, instead of flying to the bleak expanse of Craigenputtock, to accompany him to his father's house at Fryston, in Yorkshire, whence he sent a series of affectionate and graphic letters to Mrs Carlyle. Being so far north, he took a run to Dumfriesshire to see his mother, who had been slightly ailing. He was back in London, however, in May, but not improved in mind or body. It was a hot summer, and the Carlyles went to Scotsbrig, and took a cottage at Newby, close to Annan. By the end of September, Carlyle was back in Cheyne Row. His latest hero still troubled him. 'Ought I,' he asks, 'to write now of Oliver Cromwell?... I cannot yet see clearly.'
Carlyle at one time had a hankering after a Scottish professorship, but the 'door had been shut in his face,' sometimes contemptuously. He was now famous, and the young Edinburgh students, having looked into his lectures on Heroes, began to think that, whatever might be the opinions of the authorities and patrons, they for their part must consider lectures such as these a good exchange for what was provided for them. A 'History Chair' was about to be established. A party of them, represented by a Mr Dunipace, presented a requisition to the Faculty of Advocates to appoint Carlyle. When asked his consent to be nominated, Carlyle replied: 'Accept my kind thanks, you and all your associates, for your zeal to serve me.... Ten years ago such an invitation might perhaps have been decisive of much for me, but it is too late now; too late for many reasons, which I need not trouble you with at present.'
A very severe blow now fell upon Mrs Carlyle, who received news from Templand that her mother had been struck by apoplexy, and was dangerously ill. Although unfit for travelling, she caught the first train from Euston Square to Liverpool, but at her uncle's house there she learnt that all was over. Mrs Carlyle lay ill in Liverpool, unable to stir. After a while she was able to go back to London, where Carlyle joined her in the month of May. It was on his return journey that he paid a visit to Dr Arnold at Rugby, when he had an opportunity, under his host's genial guidance, to explore the field of Naseby.
His sad occupations in Scotland, and the sad thoughts they suggested, made Carlyle disinclined for society. He had a room arranged for him at the top of his house, and there he sate and smoked, and read books on Cromwell, 'the sight of Naseby having brought the subject back out of "the abysses."' Meanwhile he had a pleasant trip to Ostend with Mr Stephen Spring Rice, Commissioner of Customs, of which he wrote vivid descriptions.
On October 25, 1842, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'For many months there has been no writing here. Alas! what was there to write? About myself, nothing; or less, if that was possible. I have not got one word to stand upon paper in regard to Oliver. The beginnings of work are even more formidable than the executing of it.' But another subject was to engross his attention for a little while. The distress of the poor became intense; less in London, however, than in other large towns. 'I declare,' he wrote to his mother early in January 1843, 'I declare I begin to feel as if I should not hold my peace any longer, as if I should perhaps open my mouth in a way that some of them are not expecting—we shall see if this book were done.' On the 20th he wrote: 'I hope it will be a rather useful kind of book.' He could not go on with Cromwell till he had unburdened his soul. 'The look of the world,' he said, 'is really quite oppressive to me. Eleven thousand souls in Paisley alone living on threehalfpence a day, and the governors of the land all busy shooting partridges and passing corn-laws the while! It is a thing no man with a speaking tongue in his head is entitled to be silent about.' The outcome of all his soul-burnings and cogitations was Past and Present, which appeared at the beginning of April. The reviewers set to work, 'wondering, admiring, blaming, chiefly the last.'
Carlyle then undertook several journeys, chiefly in order to visit Cromwellian battlefields, the sight of which made the Oliver enterprise no longer impossible. He found a renovated house on his return, and Mrs Carlyle writing on November 28th, describes him as 'over head and ears in Cromwell,' and 'lost to humanity for the time being.' Six months later, he makes this admission in his journal—'My progress in "Cromwell" is frightful. I am no day absolutely idle, but the confusions that lie in my way require far more fire of energy than I can muster on most days, and I sit not so much working as painfully looking on work.' Four months later, when Cromwell was progressing slowly, Carlyle suffered a severe personal loss by the death of John Sterling. 'Sterling,' says Froude, 'had been his spiritual pupil, his first, and also his noblest and best. Consumption had set its fatal mark upon him.' Carlyle drowned his sorrow in hard work, and in July 1845 the end of Cromwell was coming definitely in sight. In his journal under date August 26th, is to be found this entry: 'I have this moment ended Oliver; hang it! He is ended, thrums and all. I have nothing more to write on the subject, only mountains of wreck to burn. Not (any more) up to the chin in paper clippings and chaotic litter, hatefuller to me than most. I am to have a swept floor now again.' And thus the herculean labours of five years were ended. His desire was to be in Scotland, and he made his way northwards by the usual sea route to Annan and Scotsbrig. He did not remain long away, and upon his return Cromwell was just issuing from the press. It was received with great favour, the sale was rapid, and additional materials came from unexpected quarters. In February 1846 a new edition was needed in order to insert fresh letters of Oliver according to date; a process, Carlyle said 'requiring one's most excellent talent, as of shoe-cobbling, really that kind of talent carried to a high pitch.' When completed, Carlyle presented a copy of it to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, a step he never took before or after with any of his writings,—a compliment which Peel gracefully acknowledged.
Carlyle's plans for the summer of 1846 were, a visit to his mother and a run across to Ireland. Charles Gavan Duffy of the Nation newspaper saw him in London in consequence of what he had written in Chartism about misgovernment in Ireland. He had promised to go over and see what the 'Young Ireland' movement was doing. On the 31st of August he left Scotsbrig, and landed in due course at Belfast, where he was to have been met by John Mitchel and Gavan Duffy and driven to Drogheda. He missed his two friends through a mistake at the post-office, and hurried on by railway to Dublin. He met them at Dundrum, and was there entertained at a large dinner-party. Next day he dined at Mitchel's. His stay was remarkably short. He took steamer at Kingstown, and in the early morning of September 10th 'he was sitting smoking a cigar before the door of his wife's uncle's house in Liverpool till the household should awake and let him in.'
In June 1847 Carlyle relates that they had a flying visit from Jeffrey. 'A much more interesting visitor than Jeffrey was old Dr Chalmers, who came down to us also last week, whom I had not seen before for, I think, five-and-twenty years. It was a pathetic meeting. The good old man is grown white-headed, but is otherwise wonderfully little altered—grave, deliberate, very gentle in his deportment, but with plenty too of soft energy; full of interest still for all serious things, full of real kindliness, and sensible even to honest mirth in a fair measure. He sate with us an hour and a half, went away with our blessings and affections. It is long since I have spoken to so good and really pious-hearted and beautiful old man.' In a week or two Chalmers was suddenly called away. 'I believe,' wrote Carlyle to his mother, 'there is not in all Scotland, or all Europe, any such Christian priest left. It will long be memorable to us, the little visit we had from him.'
Early in 1848, the Jew Bill was before Parliament, and the fate of it doubtful, narrates Mr Froude. Baron Rothschild wrote to ask Carlyle to write a pamphlet in its favour, and intimated that he might name any sum which he liked to ask as payment. Froude enquired how he answered. 'Well,' he said, 'I had to tell him it couldn't be; but I observed, too, that I could not conceive why he and his friends, who were supposed to be looking out for the coming of Shiloh, should be seeking seats in a Gentile legislature.' Froude asked what the Baron said to that. 'Why,' said Carlyle, 'he seemed to think the coming of Shiloh was a dubious business, and that meanwhile, etc., etc.'
On February 9, 1848, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'Chapman's money [Chapman & Hall were his publishers] all paid, lodged now in the Dumfries Bank. New edition of "Sartor" to be wanted soon. My poor books of late have yielded me a certain fluctuating annual income; at all events, I am quite at my ease as to money, and that on such low terms. I often wonder at the luxurious ways of the age. Some £1500, I think, is what has accumulated in the bank. Of fixed income (from Craigenputtock) £150 a year. Perhaps as much from my books may lie fixed amid the huge fluctuation (last year, for instance, it was £800: the year before, £100; the year before that, about £700; this year, again, it is like to be £100; the next perhaps nothing—very fluctuating indeed)—some £300 in all, and that amply suffices me. For my wife is the best of housewives; noble, too, in reference to the property, which is hers, which she has never once in the most distant way seemed to know to be hers. Be this noted and remembered; my thrifty little lady—every inch a lady—ah me! In short, I authentically feel indifferent to money; would not go this way or that to gain more money.'[20]