Today we visited the former home of the historian Thomas Carlyle, and his wife Jane, a modest Victorian house in a Chelsea terrace near the river. The furniture is mostly the Carlyle’s, including the sofa, on which may have rested such illustrious bums as those of Dickens, Tennyson, and Darwin.

Jane Carlyle felt the need to justify such an extravagant purchase to her husband.

I came, saw and bought – a sofa! – It is my own purchase, but you shall share the possession – indeed as soon as you set eyes on it and behold its vastness, its simple greatness, you will perceive that the thought of you was actively at work in my choice….

Her husband replied

… I feel as if an immeasurable everlasting sofa were precisely the thing I wanted even now. O dear, I wish I were there, on the simple greatness of that one, such as it is, and my Goody might be as near me as she liked!

Let me take you around the house. Like most London homes, the kitchen and servant’s rooms were in a basement, with a light well to provide light and ventilation.

The drawing room. In the corner over the piano you can see a painting of the same drawing room. Jane Carlyle complained bitterly about the amount of time that the painter was taking and the expense of keeping a fire lit for him, “when coals are seven and twenty shillings a cartload.”

Thomas Carlyle had his portrait painted by Whistler, as a sequel to Whistler’s Mother. “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2” was not the popular success that No. 1 was, perhaps because Whistler had to keep shouting at Carlyle to sit still.

The sitting room, with a screen that Jane Carlyle pasted all over with prints.

The next few are Carlyle’s study, an attic room added on to the house, with a failed attempt at soundproofing.

The garden.

The Crapper toilet in the outhouse is not original.

Carlyle is rarely read these days, partly because of his impenetrable prose style and partly because he thought slavery was a good idea. He did contribute a lot to the English language, though, by coining hundreds of words many of which are still in use: manhunt, foreshadow, mainstream, outcome, gullible, genetic, elitist, improvised, craftsmanship, embodiment, sincerity, self-help, tailor-made, decadent, wreckage, rehabilitated, and many others. However, some of his coinages did not make it into popular usage. I have to ask, why not? Surely English needs words like brool, pigdom, hawky, quackle, bumbarge, fugle, and mowl. “I say, old brool, lets have a hawky down the crackle, fugle a pigdom or two, and and then mowl up a bumbarge.”

The Chelsea flower show is on now, so many of the shops along the Kings Road have extravagant floral decorations.

Queen Victoria is dead, but perhaps not quite as dead as Prince Albert, as her memorial isn’t quite as gloppy.

The monument does feature public breastfeeding, so if it was good enough for Queen Victoria there should not be any reason to complain about it in the 21st century.

There’s also a woman trying to breastfeed a ship.

She seems disappointed that it isn’t working. The Victorians must have had some pretty strange ideas about naval architecture.

There’s the god of holding-things-up-in-the-air (and a lion)…

… the goddess of wardrobe malfunctions (and a lion)…

… an artist’s model who has seized control of the means of production…

… and naked children being chided by the Angel of Silly Hats.

All in all a typical Victorian day out.

Queen Victoria is not amused, probably because of her bad nose job.