The Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle And Jane Welsh

1908. In Two Volumes. With numerous illustrations. This volume contains the correspondence between Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish-born British historian and essayist who was a leading figure in the Victorian era and Jane Welsh before they married. Theirs was not an easy courtship. In 1823, she wrote to him: Your Friend I will be, your truest most devoted friend, while I breathe the breath of life; but your wife! never never! Not though you were as rich as Croesus, as honored and renowned as you yet shall be. Carlyle replied two days later: You love me as a sister, and will not wed: I love you in all possible senses of the world, and will not wed, any more than you. Does this reassure you? Alfred Lord Tennyson once defended their marriage, saying that By any other arrangement, four people would have been unhappy instead of two.