The Letters of Francis Jeffrey to Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle

This edition makes available letters from Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850) to Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–66) for the first time. The letters present a compelling personal and intellectual narrative of nineteenth-century Britain.

Francis Jeffrey met Thomas Carlyle in February 1827 and an intense friendship developed. In the republic of letters, the two men could not have been further apart. Jeffrey, editor of the pro-Whig Edinburgh Review clashed with Carlyle, the sage of Victorian Britain. Their exchanges represent the conflict between the inheritance of the Scottish Enlightenment and a newer set of Victorian values. However, their friendship survived years of mutual exasperation. Carlyle later reminisced that Jeffrey ‘seemed bent on converting me from what he called my “German Mysticism” – back merely, as I could conceive, into dead Edinburgh Whiggism, Scepticism and Materialism’.

Jeffrey’s side of the extant correspondence is held at the National Library of Scotland. The body of letters has never been transcribed or published in its entirety and is available here for the first time. The Carlyles’ letters are available in The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (Duke University Press). The Pickering & Chatto edition is intended to complement this edition and is carefully arranged and cross-referenced so that the two resources support each other. It benefits from a general introduction, headnotes, endnotes and an index. It will be essential for those working in Carlyle Studies, Romanticism, Victorian Studies, Scottish Studies, and the History of Publishing.

• Offers a unique insight into the lives and minds of two of the most contentious and influential figures of nineteenth-century Britain
• Maps the transitional period from Romanticism to Victorianism
• The first time this body of letters has been fully transcribed and published
• New editorial material includes an introduction, headnotes, endnotes and an index

Sample pages

• Francis Jeffrey to Thomas Carlyle 1827
• Francis Jeffrey to Thomas Carlyle 1828
• Francis Jeffrey to Thomas Carlyle 1837

Related titles

• Blackwood's Magazine, 1817–1825 : Selections from Maga's Infancy
• Conservatism and the Quarterly Review : A Critical Analysis
• Contributors to the Quarterly Review : A History, 1809–25
• The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain : Mammoth and Megalonyx
• The Language of Whiggism : Liberty and Patriotism, 1802–1830
• Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, Part III : Elizabeth Gaskell, the Carlyles and John Ruskin
• The Unpublished Letters of Thomas Moore

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