Froude's Life of Carlyle

"I’m afraid it is, but I want to recommend specifically is the John Clubbe abridgment, which comes in one volume. It’s still 600 pages or so, but much shorter than the original, which is in four volumes. Froude, being a good Victorian, thinks nothing of dropping 30 pages of Thomas Carlyle’s notebooks in to the text. Some readers might still want that, but the Clubbe abridgement is very good and just gives you the biography without the huge extracts. You’ll need to find this second hand, I think. But it’s one of the great biographies, to be reckoned with Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson . It had a huge effect, created a kind of crisis in Victorian London. Because, I should say before we go on, that Carlyle was a brilliant thinker but he descended into a terrible right-wing racism and became a very, very unsavoury character who opposed the abolition of slavery and held all sorts of dreadful positions. This caused people to shun him, and he was also a bad husband. That was the revelation of the Froude biography: a great man can be a terrible husband. Victorian London had a dizzying few weeks; this book had a wonderful effect on people, in the way a great novel or play might sometimes cause a society to look at itself and ask: is that really what we’re like? But Froude, aside from that, is just such an entertaining writer. He’s so fluid. Clearly he has the requisite admiration of Carlyle, but whenever these questions of whether Carlyle was bad come up, he will move like a pendulum between ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ and constantly descend into the particulars. Carlyle gave us the ‘Great Man’ theory of history, and Froude gave us the life of the man who gave us the Great Man theory. It’s constantly vexed as to the question of his greatness, which is a wonderful thing to have achieved. It’s so compelling. The 19th century was the great age of the novel, and there’s a lot of very good writing in here, as there are in other books of the era like The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell. The opening lines of Froude’s Life of Carlyle are: The River Annan, rising above Moffat in Hartfell, descends from the mountains through a valley, gradually widening and spreading out as the fells are left behind, into the rich and well-cultivated district known as Annandale. You wouldn’t know if it were from a novel or not We think we invented creative nonfiction, narrative nonfiction. But that’s just a form of forgetfulness. The Victorians were very good at this."