Carlyle House: View of Garden and House, by Jessie Macgregor (1847-1919). September 1914 (inscribed). Watercolour drawing. Source: Macgregor, facing p. 260.
Carlyle's back garden seems like a typical enough strip of land, with nothing particularly distinctive about it. But Macgregor has made a pleasant pictorial essay of it, and her text situates the couple, with their different characters, firmly within it. When the Carlyles moved into the house on Cheyne Row, they did try to make the garden their own. "Slips of jessamine and gooseberry bushes, brought from Scotland, were planted. Mrs. Carlyle tended two tiny leaves plucked from her father's grave, which, 'after twelve months in the garden at Chelsea declared itself a gooseberry bush!'" (261). Sadly, the bush only produced three gooseberries, which never ripened properly, but the ivy, also brought from Scotland, established itself well and still grows up the wall. While Mrs Carlyle tried to ornament the garden, her husband found it a soothing refuge from the hustle and bustle of the city. In August 1857, for instance,
unable to sleep, and Mrs. Carlyle away, he descended, at 3 a.m., to the garden, "and smoked a cigar on a stool." The same soft mood again inspired him as on [an] earlier occasion: "Have not seen so lovely, sad and grand a summer weather scene, for twenty years back. Trees stood all as if cast in bronze, not an aspen-leaf stirring; sky was a silver mirror, getting yellowish in the north-east, and one big star, star of the morning, visible in the increasing light." [262]
Despite its prominence, the buttressed and ivy-clad side wall, with its old weathered brick, is only part of Macgregor's picture. The flagged area, just outside the house, is another, less obvious one. It gives "a certain old-fashioned touch to the garden," Macgregor explains. One must cross these flagstones, she continues,
to pass from the lobby door to the bit of turf doing duty for a lawn. Their presence there in lieu of gravel or flower-bed, explains why Carlyle sometimes referred to the plot of ground as the "back area," or "back yard," and occasionally apologetically, as "the garden so-called." They help to give the "old black house," as he termed it, though the bricks are rather grey than brown or black, that pleasant air of Georgian or Queen Anne distinction, which clings to it, and an interest even independent of the claim of Carlylian associations. [263]
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Bibliography
MacGregor, Jessie. Gardens of Celebrities and celebrated gardens in and around London. London: Hutchinson, 1918. Internet Archive. Contributed by the University of British Columbia Library. Web. 21 March 2022.
Created 22 March 2022