Jane Carlyle survived a miserable marriage by satirizing it
spectator.co.uk
spectator.co.uk
This has been commented on many times but never ceases to amaze me: The sheer bulk of correspondence, journals, and other writing educated people kept in earlier times.
I'm sure Jane Carlyle was exceptional, but still, one gets this impression from most educated people from the time.
It would be interesting to see how much media of each type was available at different time periods.
Imagine a world with no recorded anything except what's written on paper. Music? Someone near you has to be playing/singing it, or you won't get to hear it, which means a much higher demand for people who can play music somewhat well and more participation in music-making on average. Movies? TV? Ha. You mean theater or home recitation of verse or drama.
Just try to go a year without recorded audio-visual entertainment, video games, or instant on-demand up-to-the-minute news, even without the benefit of a large passive income and with having to work for a living (unlike many of the notable 19th century intellectuals). I bet your activities in that time will look a hell of a lot more "cultured" and self-improving than usual. You might take up or get better with an instrument, build more things, see more live performances, brush up on your math skills, read more, get really good at cooking, draw (more), spend more time outdoors, play more sports and be more physically active in general, et c. If you live with others doing the same thing, after a month of evenings together reading e.g. Wordsworth or Homer or Milton aloud might start to seem like a really great idea. Broaden the circle of people doing this and maybe putting on a little small-cast performance of some Shakespeare begins to appeal. And so on.
[EDIT] I should add no cars, no airplanes, trains common only from the mid-19th century. Way more walking and horse-riding or carriage use (for the rich) and a far smaller area in which one existed on a typical day, even for the wealthy (relative to modern wealthy people, at any rate).
Well educated people these days are likely more well-read due to more resources, more history and more expectations. We stand on the shoulders of giants but still stand above them.
"Drawing from the 600,000 texts and Facebook messages..."
But we both know it's not the same. One of the reasons I try to write emails to my friends in a very letter-like fashion is because it provides a much more neat (And re-readable) experience. Highly recommended, even if you see the person all the time.
It's fascinating to learn that a couple so verbal never (successfully) communicated this unhappiness. I had assumed from the introduction that these were people who did not care about one another's wellbeing, but Thomas at least was seemingly unaware of the problem.
Nietzsche and Ayn Rand had difficult personal lives too, one notes.
Carlyle's philosophical/sociological commentary is on occasion cited by neo-reactionary types, but I'm not convinced he would have been terribly fond of them. Carlyle did have antidemocratic sentiments, but so do a lot of people nowadays - witness the criticism of the Brexit vote, or even the possibility of the election of Trump. But it's not that he thought aristocrats or kings were necessarily better. Carlyle was a critic of both sides, and never really formulated an idea of how-the-world-should be. You see some of this in Emerson's Carlyle essay:
If a Tory takes heart at his hatred of stump-oratory and model republics, he replies, "Yes, the idea of a pig-headed soldier who will obey orders, and fire on his own father at the command of his officer, is a great comfort to the aristocratic mind." It is not so much that Carlyle cares for this or that dogma, as that he likes genuineness (the source of all strength) in his companions.
Carlyle was a great critic, a tearer-down of systems, and he had a lot of insightful criticisms about his society and the direction it was heading. He isn't always sympathetic(for example, his views on slavery were repugnant then and even moreso now), but he's usually interesting. I think, to the extent he's a reactionary, it's mostly a case of "there are some good things about the old days, and we're throwing them away in the blind pursuit of the new"-type, rather than "older is always better".
My point is more like, the misanthropic aspects of a figure show through in both their philosophy and their personal life. There's definitely other examples- look at Lovecraft. I just think it's an interesting pattern.