On this day in 1826, Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh married. Acquaintances knew them both to be difficult personalities -- George Eliot's husband quipped that it was a marriage made in heaven, as it would make two people miserable instead of four -- but no one was prepared for the portrait of a marriage that eventually emerged. When both were dead, the Carlyles became one of the most discussed couples of literary Victorian England; as an issue in the ethics of biography writing, most recently described in Ian Hamilton's Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography, their relationship took on the status of a parable ... FULL STORY »
