'So, this is death. Well.' With these words, on this day in 1881, Thomas Carlyle died, at the ripe age of 85 – remarkable longevity for one who seemed never to be in good health. 'Thomas Carlyle is dead at last, by the acknowledgment of all newspapers,' wrote Henry James, kicking off a long, appreciative but by no means uncritical essay on his old friend, 'Some Personal Recollections of Carlyle', published in The Atlantic. Carlyle's reputation today is fragile, partly because he is open to charges of racism and other regrettable attitudes, and partly because he is such a tough, challenging read, such raw red meat, for today's reader – and, as with many Victorians, brevity is not in his gift. Outside the academy, he is still read, I think, by a few enthusiasts – and I am, up to a point, one of them: I'm still reading, and still hugely enjoying, his thrilling, lightning-lit account of The French Revolution, a chapter at a time, before I sleep. Surely no one ever wrote history like Carlyle.
Today is also the anniversary of the birth of Frank Muir (1920), the genial, six-foot-six-inch comedy writer, radio and TV personality (and more), who is currently to be seen in reruns of that splendid BBC panel game Call My Bluff, facing the equally genial, even taller humorist Patrick Campbell (who had a stammer to Frank Muir's lisp). Among Muir's more serious works were an excellent autobiography, A Kentish Lad, and The Frank Muir Book: An Irreverent Companion to Social History, a treasure-house of quotations and odds and ends, which I wrote about here... And that final quotation about Wordsworth's handshake takes us back to Thomas Carlyle.
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