I have been reading more and more and more books on my phone lately (my Nook having reached obsolescence a year ago). I’m always reading a print book, or two, but I enjoy the convenience of having the e-books available wherever I am.

One of these books I finished in May. Mr. Froude and Carlyle, by David Wilson. Published in 1898, seventeen years after Carlyle’s death, the book appears to have been written to counter the four-volume biography of Caryle that James Anthony Froude had written and published in the mid-1880s.

It seems that Froude, at least in Wilson’s mind, had been very hard on Carlyle. But that was only in relation to Carlyle’s wife, Jane. It seems that Wilson thought that Jane could do no wrong and Thomas no right whenever there was a dispute between them. Wilson didn’t like that. He took up each of those disputes and re-cast it as favorable to Thomas and negative to Jane.

I have not yet read Froude’s four-volume work. After having read Wilson’s book, I started on Froude’s but haven’t read very far into it yet. That Froude’s biography of Carlyle would be inaccurate is puzzling, since it was an authorized bio and Froude had access to all of both Thomas’s and Jane’s papers.

I found the book a bit comical. Wilson wrote it in a format something like this:

• Froude wrote about this incident in 1848, indicating how Thomas treated Jane shabbily.
• But I, Wilson, have looked into that incident and in fact it was Jane who was in the wrong.
• How could Froude have been so far off the mark? He must have wanted to run Thomas down.
• Oh, and Froude regularly redacted critical information from letters or journals. Shame on him.

I’m anxious to get further into Foude’s book to see if it’s as lopsided against Thomas as Wilson said. I began that book at Volume 3, because all of Wilson’s examples were in that time period or later. For the 60 pages I’ve read in it, I can find no fault.

This book by Wilson is something that would be of interest only to Carlyle scholars and amateur scholars, like me. It’s certainly not worth picking up and reading for anyone else.