Thomas Carlyle : table talk.

  • Thomas Carlyle
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thomas Carlyle : table talk. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    D V or indirectly connected with Tobacco, and jestingly “ alluding to my unprosperous career, I said that my **life had begun in smoke and seemed destined to end in smoke. The most pathetic, the most pictorial harangue on Tobacco was evoked by my words from Carlyle’s lips. He lauded Tobacco as one of the divinest benefits that had ever come to the human race, arriving as compensation and consola¬ tion at a time, too, when social, political, religious anarchy, and every imaginable plague made the earth unspeakably miserable. Carlyle declared that he could never think of this miraculous blessing from the gods without being overwhelmed by a tenderness for which he could find no adequate expression. He had been a smoker from the age of eleven, Mrs. Carlyle [presumably his mother] used to fill his long clay pipe, light it, take one or two whiffs, then hand the pipe to him. That he “had been a snuffer before being a smoker he informed me in his most humorous fashion:— ‘When I was a very little boy, perhaps not more ‘ than four years old, and before I was admitted to ‘the dignity of trousers, I went to the house of ‘ two old ladies who were fond of snuff. Their ‘box to me was something wonderful. Either as ‘a cruel jest or in utter foolishness, they asked ‘ me to take a pinch—I really not knowing at the ‘time what snuff was. Urged and instructed by ‘ the ladies I took a very big pinch indeed. An ‘ explosion, or rather a succession of explosions ■ followed, and I thought my head was blown off. ‘ Doubtless the old ladies did their best to soothe ‘me by jam or marmalade, or perhaps by the ^‘present of a small coin. But my first experience v ‘ of snuff was one of my first tragedies.’ ” Margaret Fuller, herself no mean talker, saw Carlyle in 1843. She was not a Boswell but a critic. On her first visit to Cheyne Row she found Carlyle in a very sweet humour, full of wit and pathos, without being overbearing or oppressive. He
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