A Question of Privacy

Anthony La Vopa
Department of History
North Carolina State University

Readings

The readings listed just below are necessary for understanding this case. The underlined references are located on this website and you simply need to click on them for a new window to open with the text.

	James Anthony Froude, My Relations with Carlyle (London, 1903), pp. 1-41.
	Ian Hamilton, “Froude’s Carlyle, Carlyle’s Froude,” in Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame. Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography from Shakespeare to Plath (Boston and London, 1992): 158-76.
	Charles Eliot Norton, “James Russell Lowell,” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 86 (May, 1983).
	Charles Eliot Norton to Mrs. A. Carlyle, July 5, 1882 (excerpt), in Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, ed. Sara Norton and M.A. DeWolf Howe, vol. 2 (Boston and New York, 1913), pp. 135-37. x
	“Preface” to Letters of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Charles Eliot Norton, vol. 1 (1886), pp. v-xii.

The Story

It is “the business of the biographer,” Samuel Johnson wrote in his Rambler essay (see Case 1), to pass over “incidents” of “vulgar greatness” and “lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minutest details of daily life” (p. 321). Notice that Johnson did not say “intimate” details; his point was simply that modern biography had to descend from the public heights of the Great to the lives of ordinary people. I suspect that, if he could survey the biographical literature of our own day, he would come away in horror. It has become the common practice of biographers to “tell all” about their subjects – their sexual proclivities, their masturbatory techniques, their extra-marital affairs, their ill-treatment of their children, their bouts with clinical depression, their alcoholism, cocaine-sniffing, and on and on. The public gaze seems to recognize no barriers.

The case focuses on a striking marker of this aspect of the development of modern biography. I'll limit us now to a bare outline of the story, which is related in greater detail in Ian Hamilton’s “Froude’s Carlyle, Carlyle’s Froude.” One of its principal characters is Thomas Carlyle, who by the time the story begins was revered in many circles in Victorian Britain as the Prophet of his Age, the Seer whose unflinching prose had made his contemporaries confront the moral failings from which they were otherwise so adept at averting their eyes. In 1866, when he was seventy-one, Carlyle’s wife Jane Welsh Carlyle died. In his grief he read diaries and notebooks she had left behind. They revealed what should have been long obvious to him: that the marriage had made his wife increasingly unhappy and bitter, and that she felt he had wronged her grievously. These impressions were confirmed as he read letters she had written to friends. In 1871 Carlyle, in an anguish of remorse, entrusted to his friend and disciple James Anthony Froude a memoir he had written of his wife as well as some of her private papers. Two years later he gave Froude another mass of material.

To simplify a very complicated situation, Carlyle seems to have left Froude to decide what to do with this material. Following Carlyle’s death in 1881, Froude published an edited version of the memoir (in Reminiscences, 1881); a four-volume biography of Carlyle (1882-84); and an edition of Letters and Memorials (1883). These publications left no doubt that the Carlyle marriage had been unhappy, though Froude had withheld certain information that may be critical to understanding why it was unhappy. In 1887 Froude, under attack for what many considered his inexcusable betrayal of trust and resort to sensationalism, and facing critics who impugned his credibility, wrote a self-defense titled My Relations with Carlyle. He bequeathed the manuscript to his children with instructions to publish it only if the attacks continued. In 1903, nine years after his death, they did publish it. It included three dark “secrets” about the Carlyle marriage that Froude had not revealed to that point.

If all this had happened last year, it might have sent a ripple across the public surface of our culture, but only a very small one. Revelations like Froude’s are a dime a dozen. The problem is not that they provoke public outrage, but that they may go unnoticed by a public thoroughly jaded by limitless publicity. There is a logic to the lack of limits, though it is often left unspoken. I’ve tried to paraphrase its key elements:

	The Marketplace Argument: Any information that can be marketed should be marketed. In a market culture like ours, it’s that simple, and the would-be moral policemen among us just have to accept that. The point is not that “taste rules,” but that demand rules, however tasteless it may seem to some.
	The Political Argument: We live in an “open society,” and thank goodness we do. It’s openness that distinguishes our political culture from authoritarian cultures, where governments, like parents dealing with their children, decide what people should and should not know. If you start going down that route, you’ll end in deadening paternalism.
	The “It Comes with the Territory” Argument (which is a subset of the Political Argument): Ordinary people who lead private lives may have certain rights to privacy, but public figures – politicians, novelists, biographers, and so on - do not. Ultimately they are telling us – the public – that we should endow them with public authority because we can trust in their integrity. If there is any information that might bear light on the claim to integrity, we need to know it. That’s the price you pay for being a public figure.
	The Scholarly Argument (perhaps another subset of the Political Argument): The study of literature is a vital way to ponder the meaning of the human condition. Hence, concerns about privacy should not prevent us from learning all we can about an author and making it accessible as published material, so that the community of scholars can advance our understanding of the relationship between the life and the writing. Once the material is available, let each scholar decide for herself what is and is not relevant. Precisely because she is a scholar, we expect her – though we can’t require her - to bring good taste to her use of intimate detail.

Many of Froude’s contemporaries objected to his publications about the Carlyles precisely because they did not accept any of this logic. That is all the more striking in view of the fact that, by our standards, his treatment of sensitive material was anything but sensationalist. Even in My Relations with Carlyle, we’re likely to be struck by the circumspection and the tact with which he revealed the final secrets. What bothered people was not simply that Froude was asking them to accept that, behind his public image, the Prophet had had his share (and perhaps more than his share) of human faults. Charles Eliot Norton, one of Froude’s fiercest and most dogged critics, put the matter simply: Froude had violated privacies that were “sacred.” There was an “inner circle of intimacy” from which the public gaze should always be barred.

From our perspective this response can easily be dismissed as one more example of the Victorians’ silly scruples and inhibitions. Fortunately, you may want to assume, we live in a more progressive age, with more enlightened views of publicity and privacy. But you should begin these exercises by putting that assumption on hold or, better, by entertaining the possibility that it is smug, self-satisfied, and morally lazy. Whether you reject Holmes’s position or agree with it, you should have good reasons for doing so.

Hence the following questions, which modern biography inevitably poses. They may not have clear and simple answers, and that’s part of the point. We’ll proceed inductively, from the particulars of the case to more general consideration of the issues at stake.

Exercise 1: Though it pains me to write this, I would like you now to think ethically rather than historically. You shouldn’t try to approach the questions below as a Victorian would have approached them. On the other hand, you shouldn’t apply uncritically our current assumptions about the public and the private. Simply ask yourself: is there a right thing to do in such matters? Is there a principle – an ethical rule – to be applied regardless of the context and the circumstances? Or, if context and circumstances matter, how do they matter?

Should Carlyle have read his wife’s diaries, letters to friends, and other private materials? (The larger issue here, of course, is a tough one. Are there areas of each other’s “privacy” that spouses ought not to intrude on?) If he did read them (and we know, of course, that he did), should he have prevented their being seen by anyone else? Was his remorse a valid reason to do what he did? Did it matter that Jane Carlyle was dead?
Should Jane Carlyle’s friends have given Carlyle her letters to them in response to his requests? Was this a violation of her trust? Was it a responsibility they could not avoid?
Should Froude have accepted the material on Carlyle’s terms (or lack of such)? If not, what conditions should he have laid down for accepting them?
Should Froude have refrained from publishing anything about the state of the Carlyles’ marriage?
Was it right for Froude to include an “edited” version of Carlyle’s memoir of Jane in the Reminiscences (1881)? Did it matter that by then both Jane Carlyle and Thomas Carlyle were dead?
Should Froude have bequeathed to his children My Relations with Carlyle with the understanding that it might someday be published? What purpose did it serve to “go public” with the “secrets” of the Carlyle marriage that Froude made explicit in that text?
In the preface to his edition of Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle, Charles Eliot Norton explained that, having read the letters between Thomas and Jane with “extreme reluctance,” he had omitted letters and portions of letters that had “any specifically private character”; and that he had used the book’s Appendix “to set right some of the facts misrepresented by Mr. Froude” (still not revealing private material). Did Norton apply his own principles consistently in this case? Was this a fair way to challenge publicly what Froude had written about the marriage? Was Norton being fair to the public?

Exercise 2: Now do a close reading of Froude's My Relations with Carlyle. Keep in mind that by the time he wrote it the controversy about his uses of the Carlyle materials had been raging for about six years and he had faced a sustained campaign to deny him integrity and credibility as an author. What is the logic of his self-defense? Does he also defend Carlyle’s actions, or does he condemn him?

Exercise 3: Having worked through the above questions, try to come out from the detail and formulate a general principle about where (if anywhere) the limits to public scrutiny ought to lie. Do you agree with Froude’s conclusion (My Relations with Carlyle, p. 40) that “the only ‘Life’ of a man which is not worse than useless is a 'Life’ which tells all the truth so far as the biographer knows it”?

Further Reading:

	Rochelle Gurstein, The Repeal of Reticence. A History of America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art (New York, 1996). A provocative and historically informative defense of the “reticent sensibility” represented by Charles Eliot Norton.
	Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle. A Biography (Ithaca, NY, 1983).
	Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives. Five Victorian Marriages (New York, 1984). Includes a trenchant analysis of the Carlyle marriage.

~
top of
page