ABSTRACT
More than twenty years after the Froude-Carlyle controversy first broke, and just as public opinion seemed inclined to let the matter drop, Froude’s name was once again in the news. In 1903 Carlyle’s nephew Alexander and Sir James Crichton-Browne, two of the Sage’s most indefatigable self-
appointed defenders, had prefaced their New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle with a vitriolic bout of anti-Froudism. Stung by these renewed attacks on their late father, Froude’s heirs Margaret and Ashley were provoked into publishing My Relations with Carlyle, the manuscript apologia he had penned in 1887. The pamphlet effectively rekindled the scandal about the Carlyle household by broadcasting in public what had, according to their father, long been rumoured in private: the possibility that Carlyle had been sexually-rather than, as Froude’s ‘authorized’ biography had implied, merely temperamentally-inadequate to the demands of marriage.
