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Wanting Something Else

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Carlyle in 1855, so nine years after the letter in question.

One of my reading places is The Carlyle Letters Online, which has 11,000 letters written by Thomas and Jane Carlyle. They were active letter writers during the Victorian era in England, and earlier mostly from Scotland. Thomas wrote for a living. He struggled in the early years, picking up encyclopedia hackwork and magazine contributions as he could get them. By around 1840, with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson championing Carlyle’s books in the US, he had reached a measure of financial comfort. I’ve written other blog posts about Carlyle.

Maybe two months ago, I came across an interesting tidbit in one of his letters and wanted to blog about it. But I faced a dilemma of my own making: how to properly reference the letter and location? Traditional referencing, handed down through various academic organizations, expects you to give the publisher, publisher’s location, name of publication, author name, page no., etc.

I’ve come to believe that’s an archaic way of doing references in the Information Age. Here’s my example. The specific letter I’m interested in was written 8 April 1846 by Thomas to his wife Jane, who was on holiday at a seaside villa. It’s been published in a  4-volume biography of Carlyle by Anthony Froude written in the years after Carlyle’s death in 1881.  That biography has been republished, and the letter has been in other collections of Carlyle’s letters. Now it’s available at the Carlyle Letters Online.

Since there are so many potential sources for someone to go to check my work and the quote I’m fixing to give, it seems like the traditional methods of citing sources forces the reader to get a copy of the exact publication the person doing the quote used and find the page. How about we do something like this.

Here’s the letter I want to make the quote from. I find an interesting observation of Carlyle in the third paragraph of the letter. Assuming the paragraph breaks are Carlyle’s own and not the publisher’s [online publisher in this case], why not just cite the source as a particular letter written by Carlyle to a particular person [his wife] and found in a particular paragraph? In this case, it would be:

Carlyle, Thomas; a letter to his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle, 8 April 1846, paragraph 3. Accessed 7 September 2026 at Carlyle Letters Online.

If the quote is from a long paragraph, you can add a letter to designate approximately where in the paragraph the quote is from, e.g. paragraph 3a, or 3b, or 3c…. In this case the quote comes from a relatively short paraph and starts the paragraph, so a letter shouldn’t be needed to clarify the location. The person wishing to verify the quote can look through the entire paragraph if necessary, which is no more work than having to scan an entire page based on the traditional citation method.

Of course, my method will result in the person making the citation having to do a little more work to count up the paragraph and decide on the letter designation, but I think it’s time well spent. Of course, I doubt if anyone at the Chicago Manual of Style or other organizations care about my better way of doing it.

Well, that’s a lengthy introduction. Time to give the quote.

I really wish you could find an eligible House somewhere out under the quiet sky,—removed fairly from these tumults and loud-braying discords of every kind; which it is growing really horrible and miserable to me to spend the remnant of my days among!

Carlyle, Thomas; a letter to his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle, 8 April 1846, paragraph 3; accessed 7 September 2026 at Carlyle Letters Online.

Thomas was at their London home, Jane at some friend’s seaside villa near Liverpool. He was working on the second edition of his book about Oliver Cromwell, she just lazing around and enjoying her holiday. Thomas had asked her to look around for a house in a quiet place they could rent for a season to get away from London’s summer climate.

I must say I sympathize with him. How often do I think it would be nice to get away for a long stretch, not have to worry about home repairs, organization of stuff, other routines. It would be nice, if I could swing it, to have a cook and a house maid. I think we could do without a butler and a footman and a chauffer. We sort of tried that with a four week road trip last summer that included a week on Cape Cod (unpleasant) and two weeks in the Berkshires (very nice). Perhaps we’ll get to do that again some day.

Well, that’s my post for today. Not exactly earth shattering—that is, of course, unless the CMOS sees this and decides to adopt the Todd Method as an alternative way of making citations.

ETA: I see that I also posted about this comment in this letter earlier this year. I forgot about that. Ah, well, it was obviously still on my mind.

Decumulation, Health, holidays, St. Lucia, travel, Uncategorized

Quite A Year

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Snow greeted our year, but my doctor said I shouldn’t shovel it.

A year such as 2025 can most easily be shared as a series of bullet points.

  • We began the year in Worcester, Massachusetts. This was a five-day trip by air, delayed a week after I suffered a seizure with ER visit on Dec. 22, 2024. We visited our son and his husband. It was a good trip, during which we celebrated my 73rd birthday and New Year’s Day rather than Christmas.
  • Charles was in good spirits before his brain surgery.

    In February, our son, Charles, had brain surgery due to the seizure he suffered in Oct 2024. We flew back for the surgery. The surgery was successful, and his recovery was much more rapid and complete than the most optimistic expectations.

  • In mid-April, I suffered a second seizure, of about the same severity as the first one. This left my speech further impaired than it had been after my two strokes in 2024. But except for speech, I seemed to have no impairments from the seizures.
  • We traveled masked so as not to infect Charles.

    I completed out-patient cardio rehab in March. Recovery from my Sept 30, 2024 open-heart surgery for valve replacement has been good. I get a fleeting pain once in a while, but all in all I’m glad I went through with the surgery and pleased with the results.

  • You never know who you’ll run into in Worcester.

    The months of April-May-June-July were mainly taken up with decumulation tasks and yardwork. My blackberries did well. But I made only one cobbler and didn’t come close to picking all the berries. I lacked strength to do all the work required. Consequently…

  • …I did no stock/options trading until almost the end of May. Of course, that means I had almost no exposure to the wild market gyrations of Feb. and April.
  • The Berkshire woods looked a lot like our Ozarks woods.

    We decided to get away for a while, and built an almost 4-week road trip in August around my 55-year high school reunion. We spent a few days in Rhode Island with friends for the reunion, then a week on Cape Cod that included excursions to Provincetown and Martha’s Vineyard, then two weeks in the Berkshires, just enjoying our resort, taking easy hikes, walking the resort grounds, and doing a few tourist things. On the return drive, we spent two days at the Columbus OH zoo, which Lynda had wanted to see for several years due to its connection with Jack Hanna.

  • We decided to drive to Lake Jackson, Texas in early October to visit Sara and her family. We hadn’t seen them since Thanksgiving 2024. We got to attend cross-country races and other things. It was an enjoyable trip, which we thought might be the last for te year. However, three more adventures awaited us.
  • Finally went to beautiful St. Lucia after years of dreaming.

    In June, Charles attended a professional conference that included a keynote presentation about universities and slavery. That got him interested in where our black ancestry came from, and said, “We need to go to St. Lucia.” That’s been a dream of mine for years, to see the place my maternal grandmother grew up in. It turned out Thanksgiving was the best time, so we took our third plane trip of the year and spent seven days/six nights in Castries, using up all accumulated timeshare points (and some cash). It was a wonderful trip, one I’m planning to blog more about.

  • Charles had finally convinced Lynda that if we moved in a downsizing, it would be better if we moved to the Lake Jackson-Houston area rather than to Massachusetts. So we made plans to move in about a year. Then, a week after we got back from L.J., and house very close to Sara went up for sale. It was the perfect downsize for us. We made another road trip to L.J., saw the house, it looked just right, we put in an offer, and bought it.
  • So now our decumulation has turned into moving preparation. We took a U-Haul load on Dec 19 and stayed through Christmas. Now we are planning on moving for good around Feb. 1, 2026. I don’t want to be paying for two houses for too long.

So that’s our year. With all the trips and work, I put off having knee surgery, originally scheduled for Nov, then Dec, then Jan, until sometime after the move. I suspect it will be part of my 2027 story.

Also, I’ve said nothing about my writing activities. So stay tuned for another post in a couple of days to cover that.

America, Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Documenting America, Genealogy, goals, miscellaneous, Short Stories, The Forest Throne, Uncategorized

November Progress, December Goals

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Ah, the first of the month comes on a regular blogging day. Perfect time to address progress and set some goals. First, the November progress.

  • As always, blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. I missed one day, Friday of Thanksgiving week. Otherwise, I had a meaningful blog post on each scheduled day. 
  • Attend three writers group meetings. I managed to do this. Thought I was going to miss one, but was able to make all three.
  • Finish editing Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution, and schedule all chapters to publish to Kindle Vella. Yes! I got this done. All are published to Kindle Vella, no one is spending any money to read them. Alas.
  • Finish the first draft of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. This will be a stretch, but I should get close. No, did not quite get this done. As of yesterday’s writing, I still have a little over two chapters to go. I lost more than a week over Thanksgiving. Before that, I had a hard time with some of the writing, often missing my daily goal, occasionally having to spend the day in study and write nothing. But that’s okay; it was still progress in small steps.
  • Get a little more done on the ideas for The Artwork of God. I’m still in the research stage on this project. Ideas continue to come, so I guess I met this goal. I didn’t put much on paper, however, just brainstorming it. Found a couple of good quotes to go in it. So the goal was met, but just barely.
  • Begin writing down some plot ideas for the next volume in The Forest Throne series. My granddaughter and I sat and talked about this one day while she was here. I told her my ideas and she gave me feedback as well as some of her ideas. Since the book will be about the girl in the Wagner family, I will really need her help.

Now, what about goals for December? It’s the time I’ll have to try to get much done to meet my goals for the year. I haven’t looked at those for a long time. But, without looking back, here’s what I hope to accomplish this month.

  • Blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday.
  • Attend three writers meetings. I’m not sure the third one will be held, as it will be getting close to Christmas.
  • Finish the first draft and much of the editing of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. As I said above, I’m down to the last couple of chapters. If I can maintain my writing schedule, I should finish the writing by December 10. That gives me two weeks to edit, enough time to go through the whole thing.
  • Type up some of the ideas for book 3 in The Forest Throne series. I don’t intend to begin actually writing this for perhaps a year, but I want to lock in the ideas generated so far.
  • Work some on Nature: The Artwork of God. This may be the next book I write (still trying to decide), so I need to expand the notes I’ve already taken.
  • Finish the new Danny Tompkins short story and decide what to do with it.
  • Read for research for the next book in the Documenting America series. Actually, until I do my research, I don’t know if this will be the next one or not.
  • Oh, one more: Finish and submit my article on a genealogical brick wall to the NWA Genealogical Society. The contest deadline is Dec 31. The article has been done for almost two months. Time to dust it off and do a final edit.