Mainly Puddling: Thomas Carlyle’s Excesses
Stefan Collini, 14 December 2023
By 1875 the eighty-year-old Thomas Carlyle was ready to die. In fact, he was rather looking forward to death, at least officially, more than once referring to it as ‘release’. To judge by the sixty letters to his brother that Carlyle wrote (or, rather, dictated, his own hand having become too unsteady) between December 1875 and March 1879, there was much to be released from....