The grumpy sage and the cunning gypsy

The sacrament of marriage has an unpredictable effect on those who submit to it. Some couples continue to be preeminently themselves. Others are forged by marriage into a new and distinctive entity: a conjoined whole with an emphasis sometimes startlingly different from the qualities of the two individuals involved. The names of Baucis and Philemon come to mind in this context; Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, perhaps; Posh and Becks, certainly, and then, Thomas and Jane Carlyle.

The Carlyles in their day were what we would now call a Power Couple: he the rebarbative sage of Ecclefechan, she the sprightly belle of Haddington, propelled by a gusty combination of irritable rhetoric, overpowering self-belief and acute indigestion from bucolic isolation on the bleak Scottish farmstead of Craigenputtock, where they spent the early years of their married life, to glory and power in the metropolis, whose faintly disgusting fascinations they were able to observe from a self-conscious distance, by setting up home at the then distinctly seedy address of 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea.

If it was Carlyle's difficult genius that brought the couple fame, it was their marriage that made them into celebrities, a fact acknowledged in the title of Rosemary Ashton's biographical study, Portrait of a Marriage.

Peter Quennell, in his biography of the Carlyles' friend Ruskin (who was cherished by Jane Carlyle, in particular, because he gave her strawberries and cream at a party on her birthday, while Carlyle contrived never to remember it at all), observes that the great Victorian soothsayers had a peculiar talent for making themselves and all around them wretched. Carlyle's remarkable gift of penetrating psychological insight, so brilliantly displayed in his writing, "did not," writes Quennell, "extend to the character and development of the gifted, unhappy woman who shared his life in Cheyne Row. When, after her death, he read her private papers, he was astonished by the revelation they afforded of his wife's interior shipwreck".

We, with the benefit of hindsight, may wonder that neither of the brilliant parties to this marriage felt any foreboding of shipwreck during their protracted courtship sufficient to persuade them to call the whole thing off. The omens were mixed from the start. Carlyle had distinctive views on marriage: "I must not and I cannot live in a house of which I am not head. I should be miserable myself and make all about me miserable," he wrote to his fiancèe. "It is the nature of a woman to cling to the man for support and direction; to conquer him not by her force but by her weakness, and perhaps (the cunning gypsy!) after all to command him by obeying him."

Apparently undeterred, the cunning gypsy went ahead and married him, quietly, on 17 October 1826, later writing to her cousin that "In virtue of his being the least unlikeable man in the place, I let him dance attendance ... till I came to need him."

Need glues together all kinds of uncomfortable attachments, and it kept the Carlyles together, through thunderous bouts of physical and emotional dyspepsia (both Carlyle and his wife were martyrs to the state of his insides) until Jane Carlyle's sudden death in 1866. Rosemary Ashton, who is professor of English at University College London, and the biographer of GH Lewes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Eliot, chronicles the turbulence, frequent separation and passionate wretchedness of their alliance with scholarly exactness and a preference for fact over psychological enquiry or the lively gossip which was Jane Carlyle's particular talent. This leaves Ashton, despite the heroic length of her essay, shut firmly outside the Carlyle boudoir.

"What were their feelings for one another," she wonders in her Epilogue. "Did they have a sexual relationship? Was Carlyle ever physically violent? How far did his domestic tyranny go? How addicted was Jane to morphine ... Did she ever contemplate leaving Carlyle?" - questions to which the exasperated reader, having-just completed 450 pages of her musings on these subjects, may feel inclined to snap in reply, "I don't know, love. You tell me."

Ashton's magisterial conclusion, "And yet, as is their right, they retain their joint and individual mystery," is a model of biographical restraint.

Yet readers who recall the energetic brilliance with which both Carlyles exposed the workings of their souls may feel that even Ashton's own subjects might have preferred a little less scholarly sobriety and a little more dash in her portrait of them.