The Life of John Sterling

Summary

The Life of John Sterling (1851) is Thomas Carlyle's biography of a friend who died of lung disease at thirty-eight. John Sterling (1806–1844), born on the Isle of Bute and brought up in Wales, Paris and London, was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a writer for the Athenaeum, a young admirer of Coleridge, a sympathizer with Spanish revolutionaries, briefly a curate, and finally a poet and essayist whose books were little regarded. Shortly before his death he left the care of his writings to two friends, Julius Hare and Carlyle. Hare's memoir of 1848 dwelt on Sterling as a clergyman who had drifted from orthodoxy. Carlyle wrote to correct that portrait: Sterling, he insists, was a curate for exactly eight months, and should be remembered not as a defeated doubter but as a swift, generous, cheerful man whose life was a pilgrimage through the confusions of his century. The book has three parts. Part I covers childhood under a restless father, Edward Sterling, later known as the Thunderer of The Times; schools; Glasgow and Cambridge; London journalism; and the Highgate evenings with Coleridge, whom Carlyle portrays as a magician-sage talking without end. It then tells the darkest episode of Sterling's youth. He helped bring together the exiled general Torrijos and his cousin Robert Boyd, whose money bought arms for a rising; Torrijos and his followers, Boyd among them, were shot at Malaga in December 1831. Sterling, held back by marriage to Susannah Barton and a first grave attack of pulmonary illness, had gone to a family estate on St Vincent, where he survived a hurricane before the news reached him. Back in Europe he met Hare again at Bonn and took orders as Hare's curate at Herstmonceux. Part II traces his withdrawal from the curacy on medical advice in 1835, his growing friendship with Carlyle, winters in Madeira and Italy, and the founding of the Sterling Club. Part III follows his moves to Clifton, Falmouth, Naples and Ventnor, his poems and the tragedy Strafford, the deaths of his mother and his wife within two days in April 1843, and his own death in September 1844, preceded by a farewell letter to Carlyle. Carlyle writes with affection and candour. He praises Sterling's speed, courage and kindness, names his impatience and lack of concentration, and reads his illness as the bodily form of a too vehement spirit. The book also carries Carlyle's own case about faith in an age of dissolving creeds; he admires Sterling's honesty and disparages the Church formulas Sterling left, so readers must separate the biographer's convictions from the life recorded.

Plot or Argument

• Part I, Ch. I: Why a second Life

  Carlyle explains that Sterling entrusted his writings to Archdeacon Hare and himself, that Hare's memoir presented him almost wholly as a troubled churchman, and that a truer image is owed to those who knew him. He argues that a faithful portrait of a small man can interest the greatest, since each life is an emblem of every other.

• Part I, Ch. II–VIII: Bute, schools, Cambridge and Highgate

  Sterling's birth at Kames Castle in 1806, the energetic and changeable father Edward Sterling, a childhood in Llanblethian and Paris, schooling in London, Glasgow University and Cambridge, where he joins Maurice, Trench and the Apostles. In London he and Maurice run the Athenaeum, and he falls under the spell of Coleridge at Highgate, sketched in the book's most quoted chapter.

• Part I, Ch. IX–XIV: Torrijos, St Vincent and catastrophe

  Sterling befriends the Spanish exiles in London and helps connect General Torrijos with his cousin Robert Boyd, who funds an expedition from Gibraltar. Engagement to Susannah Barton and a near-fatal pulmonary illness keep Sterling at home; he marries and sails to the family estate on St Vincent, survives a hurricane, and learns in early 1832 that Torrijos, Boyd and fifty-four others have been executed at Malaga.

• Part I, Ch. XV – Part II, Ch. II: Curate and not curate

  At Bonn in 1833 Sterling meets Julius Hare again, resolves on the Church, is ordained deacon, and serves as Hare's curate at Herstmonceux. Within eight months his physicians advise him to give up preaching. Carlyle treats the departure as the second crisis of the life and follows Sterling's slow loosening from the Church through the next years.

• Part II, Ch. III–VII: London, Madeira, the Club and Italy

  Living near London, Sterling becomes Carlyle's close friend, writes for the magazines, and spends winters abroad in pursuit of health, at Madeira with the consumptive Dr Calvert and on an Italian tour advised by Sir James Clark. In 1838 friends found the Sterling Club, whose members included Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Tennyson and Connop Thirlwall.

• Part III: Clifton to Ventnor

  Settled successively at Clifton, Falmouth and Ventnor, with winters in Naples, Sterling persists in poetry against discouragement, including Carlyle's. A ruptured blood-vessel, his mother's fatal heart disease and his wife's death after childbirth in the same week in April 1843 break the household. He spends his last year at Ventnor writing to his children and working on Coeur-de-Lion, sends Carlyle a farewell in August 1844, and dies on 18 September. A closing chapter describes his appearance and character.

Characters

• John Sterling, subject

  Essayist, poet and briefly an Anglican curate (1806–1844), quick, warm and restless, whose short life Carlyle presents as a brave struggle against illness and spiritual confusion.

• Thomas Carlyle, biographer and friend

  Narrator who knew Sterling from 1835, quarrels openly with his poetry and his churchmanship, and writes the Life to give a truer likeness than Hare's.

• Julius Charles Hare, mentor and first biographer

  Sterling's Cambridge tutor, later Archdeacon of Lewes and rector of Herstmonceux, who took him as curate and published his writings with a memoir in 1848.

• Edward Sterling, father

  Soldier, farmer and journalist, the forceful leader-writer known as the Thunderer of The Times, whom Carlyle sketches as a Captain Whirlwind.

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, sage of Highgate

  Poet-philosopher whose talk captivated the young Sterling; Carlyle's portrait is admiring of his gifts and scornful of his endless metaphysics.

• José María Torrijos, Spanish exile

  Liberal general in London exile whose 1831 expedition from Gibraltar ended in capture and execution at Malaga.

• Robert Boyd, cousin

  Former officer of the Indian army who put his money into Torrijos's enterprise through Sterling's introduction and was shot with the rest.

• Susannah Barton Sterling, wife

  Married Sterling in 1830, shared his wanderings for health, and died in April 1843 two days after his mother.

• Dr John Calvert, friend and fellow invalid

  A physician suffering from incurable pulmonary disease whom Sterling met at Madeira and who travelled with him to Italy.

Lessons

• Correcting a friend's likeness

  Carlyle wrote because he believed Hare's memoir, kind as it was, showed a pale figure in a torn surplice instead of the man he knew. The book therefore raises the question of what a biographer owes the dead: accuracy, proportion, and the courage to disagree with another friend in print. Carlyle's answer is that the whole life must outweigh any single phase, which is why he stresses that the curacy lasted only eight months.

  • What exactly does Carlyle object to in Hare's memoir, and is his objection fair to Hare?
  • Carlyle says a faithful portrait of the smallest man can interest the greatest. Why might the life of someone who never became famous be worth telling at length?
  • Where does Carlyle judge Sterling harshly, and does the criticism make the praise more credible?

• Enthusiasm and its casualties

  The Torrijos chapters show the young Sterling throwing himself into a revolutionary cause and introducing his cousin Boyd, who paid for the expedition with his money and his life. Carlyle does not hide that Sterling was the heedless means of Boyd's ruin, nor the misery it caused him. The episode teaches that eagerness for a cause carries responsibility for those one draws into it.

  • What role did Sterling play in bringing Boyd and Torrijos together, and how does Carlyle assign blame?
  • Why did Sterling's family forbid mention of Torrijos afterwards?
  • How might the Malaga executions have shaped Sterling's later turn toward the Church?

• A life governed by the lungs

  From Part I onward, pulmonary disease decides where Sterling lives, what work he can do and whether he can preach. Carlyle records the physicians' advice, the flights to Madeira, Italy and the southern coasts, and Sterling's refusal to rest, and he interprets the disease as the outward form of an over-vehement inner life. Students can study how chronic illness shapes a vocation without letting it define the whole person.

  • List the places Sterling moved to for his health. What did each move cost his family and his work?
  • Carlyle often scolded Sterling for not learning the art of sitting still. Was that fair advice for a man in his condition?
  • Is Carlyle's explanation of Sterling's illness as a too vehement life a medical claim, a moral one, or a figure of speech?

• Faith, doubt, and the biographer's own creed

  Carlyle insists that Sterling was a believer, not a sceptic, yet he also treats the creeds of the Church as worn-out clothes and celebrates Sterling's departure from them. Readers should state Carlyle's view accurately, then compare it with Sterling's own words, including the farewell letter in which he goes into the darkness without fear and with much hope, though without certainty. The gap between biographer and subject is part of what the book teaches.

  • What does Carlyle mean when he calls Sterling a victorious believer rather than a vanquished doubter?
  • Read Sterling's letter of 10 August 1844. What does he hope for, and what does he admit he lacks?
  • Would Hare and Carlyle describe Sterling's final faith in the same terms? Which account does the evidence in the book better support?

Context

Sterling's generation came of age in the 1820s, when Coleridge's attempt to reconcile Christian belief with German philosophy, the Cambridge Apostles' debating society, liberal sympathy for exiled Spanish and Italian revolutionaries, and controversies over the Church of England all pressed on thoughtful young men. Pulmonary consumption was among the commonest causes of death in early Victorian Britain, and wealthy patients were routinely sent to Madeira, Italy or the south coast of England in hope of a cure.

Composition

Sterling died in September 1844. Julius Hare published Essays and Tales by John Sterling with a long memoir in 1848, and the controversy over Sterling's theology that followed prompted Carlyle to write his own account, which he says he composed swiftly; it was published in 1851. The attached Gutenberg text is taken from a collected edition and includes a footnote dated 1870.

Reception

The book was well received as one of Carlyle's most humane works, and its chapter on Coleridge at Highgate became a standard, if satirical, image of Coleridge's later years. It has kept readers chiefly as a portrait of friendship and of the intellectual circles around Carlyle, Maurice and Mill, more than for Sterling's own writings, which are now seldom read.

Comparisons

• Sartor Resartus

  Sterling wrote to Carlyle from Herstmonceux in May 1835 after reading Teufelsdröckh twice, praising and resisting it; the Life quotes the letter, so the two books record both sides of the argument about belief that ran through the friendship.

• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

  Heroes celebrates figures whose force changed history; the Life of Sterling applies the same values of sincerity and courage to a friend who, as Carlyle admits, achieved neither what the world calls greatness nor what intrinsically is such.

• Essay on Burns

  Carlyle's 1828 essay judges a gifted writer whose life was cut short and whose gifts were scattered, a pattern he finds again in Sterling, though Burns is assessed from his poems and Sterling from personal knowledge.

• Apologia Pro Vita Sua

  Newman's Apologia (1864) narrates a clergyman's religious journey from inside and toward Rome; Carlyle tells Sterling's from outside and away from the Church, so together they map opposite responses to the same Victorian crisis of authority.

• The Life of Samuel Johnson

  Both are biographies by a friend drawing on conversation and letters, but Boswell builds a monument to a famous man over twenty years of notes, while Carlyle writes quickly to rescue the likeness of an obscure one.

• The French Revolution: A History

  Carlyle recalls in Part II being shown a freshly bound copy of The French Revolution at the Sterlings' Blackheath cottage in 1837 as a first sign the book might live; the history's vision of collapsing old forms frames how Carlyle reads Sterling's exit from the Church.

• In Memoriam A. H. H. (Alfred Tennyson)

  Tennyson, a member of the Sterling Club, published his elegy for his Cambridge friend Arthur Hallam in 1850, a year before this Life; both are memorials of brilliant young men of the Apostles' circle written through grief and religious doubt.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The quarrel with Hare's memoir in Part I, Ch. I. Notice the claim that Sterling was a curate for exactly eight months and how it governs the proportions of the whole book.
• Carlyle's portrait of Coleridge in Part I, Ch. VIII. Ask how much is admiration, how much mockery, and what it tells you about Carlyle as well as Coleridge.
• The Torrijos chapters, Part I, Ch. IX–XIII, and the letter in which Sterling says he hears the musketry at Malaga.
• Every report of illness: the doctors' warnings, the hemorrhages, the winter voyages. Track how the disease decides where Sterling lives and what he can do.
• The farewell letter of August 1844 and the account of Sterling's last days in Part III, Ch. VI.

Key terms and names

Cambridge Apostles

A Cambridge debating society to which Sterling, F. D. Maurice and Richard Trench belonged; Tennyson and Arthur Hallam were also members in these years.

Curate

An assistant clergyman; Sterling served as curate to Julius Hare at Herstmonceux in Sussex for eight months in 1834–35.

Consumption

The period name for wasting pulmonary disease, usually what is now called tuberculosis; Sterling's doctors raise it after his first serious illness.

Climate cure

The practice of sending patients with lung disease to warm or mild places such as Madeira, Italy or the English south coast for the winter.

The Athenaeum

A London literary weekly that Sterling and Maurice owned and edited for a time around 1828.

The Sterling Club

A dining and conversation club founded by Sterling's friends in 1838; the members listed in the book include Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Tennyson, Thirlwall and Spedding.

Highgate

The hill north of London where Coleridge lived in Mr Gillman's house and received young admirers.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why does Carlyle think Hare's memoir gave a false impression of Sterling, and what does he set out to show instead?
2. Comprehension How was Sterling connected with the Torrijos expedition, and what happened to Robert Boyd?
3. Comprehension Why did Sterling give up the Herstmonceux curacy, and where did he live in the years that followed?
4. Interpretation Carlyle calls Sterling sheet-lightning that would not condense into a thunderbolt. What strengths and weaknesses does the image capture?
5. Interpretation How does Carlyle's portrait of Coleridge prepare us to understand Sterling's religious development, and is it a fair portrait?
6. Interpretation Carlyle disapproved of Sterling's poetry yet praises his persistence in it. What does that tension reveal about the biographer's honesty?
7. Big Question What does it mean to live a faithful life when illness keeps cutting short one's work, and how should such a life be measured?

Faith Connections

• Proverbs 27:6 (Scripture)

  Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Carlyle's candour about Sterling's restlessness and weak poems is offered as a friend's fidelity, and students can ask whether the book earns that description.

• 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (Scripture)

  Paul speaks of the outward man perishing while the inward man is renewed. Sterling's last year at Ventnor, as Carlyle records it, shows a body failing while patience and composure grow, and the passage gives a Christian frame for reading it.

• Hebrews 11:13-16 (Scripture)

  The faithful confess themselves strangers and pilgrims seeking a better country. Carlyle repeatedly calls Sterling's life a pilgrimage, and Sterling's farewell letter speaks of hope without certainty; the comparison sharpens what each man meant by hope.

• Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (1825) (Great Conversation)

  Coleridge's attempt to ground Christian faith in reason as distinct from understanding shaped the young Sterling and the Apostles. Carlyle's Highgate chapter mocks that project, so reading a page of Coleridge lets students judge the dispute for themselves.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: A biography should present the whole man in true proportion; Sterling's eight months as a curate were a brief episode in thirty-eight years of varied, courageous and cheerful effort; Hare's memoir, by dwelling on his doctrinal struggles, made him look like a defeated doubter; therefore a truer portrait must show him as an active believer and worker hampered by illness, whose life is an emblem of the honest search of his whole generation.

Rhetorical device: recurring metaphor. In Part I, Ch. I Carlyle likens Sterling to sheet-lightning that plays across mountain barriers without breaking them, and he returns to the image in Part I, Ch. V, so that one figure carries his judgment of Sterling's brilliance and diffuseness.

Debate: Resolved: Carlyle's Life gives a truer account of John Sterling than a memoir written by a fellow clergyman could have done.

Memory Work

John Sterling committed the care of his literary Character and printed Writings to two friends, Archdeacon Hare and myself. His estimate of the bequest was far from overweening

Writing Prompts

Essay: Carlyle insists that Sterling was a believer, not a doubter. Using Part I, Ch. I, the curacy chapters in Part II, and Sterling's farewell letter in Part III, Ch. VI, argue whether the evidence in the book supports Carlyle's description.

Comparison with Sartor Resartus: Sterling read Sartor Resartus twice in 1835 and wrote Carlyle a long letter of praise and objection, quoted in Part II, Ch. II. Compare Teufelsdröckh's passage from the Everlasting No to the Everlasting Yea with the religious course of Sterling's life as Carlyle tells it, and argue whether Carlyle shaped Sterling in his own hero's image.

Medical Lens

The Life is one of the fullest Victorian literary records of living with chronic pulmonary disease, called consumption by Sterling's doctors. It documents relapses with blood-spitting and hemorrhage, the advice of physicians including Sir James Clark, the climatic cure through winters in Madeira, Italy and the south coast, and the economic and family cost of perpetual removal. Carlyle offers a psychosomatic reading of the illness as the expression of an over-vehement temperament; this is his interpretation, not a diagnosis. The book also records a maternal death after childbirth in 1843, the father's decline into paralysis, and Sterling's composed death at Ventnor.

• Part I, Ch. V

  Carlyle notes that Sterling's thin, excitable frame already showed pulmonary symptoms, ruling out a parliamentary career that would have wrecked him in months.

  Tuberculosis Consumption
• Part I, Ch. XI

  Soon after marriage Sterling falls into dangerous pulmonary illness, lies for weeks nursed by wife and mother, and is told by the doctors that consumption is in question; a warm climate is recommended.

  Tuberculosis Consumption Nursing Caregiving Physicians Doctors
• Part II, Ch. II

  Physicians advise in February 1835 that a constitution prone to pulmonary ailments is unfit for preaching, and Sterling resigns the Herstmonceux curacy.

  Physicians Doctors Tuberculosis Consumption
• Part II, Ch. III

  Sterling secretly takes morning services for a sick neighbour in the cold spring of 1836 against his health, and is rebuked by his doctor.

  Physicians Doctors
• Part II, Ch. V–VII

  At Madeira Sterling befriends Dr Calvert, a physician himself dying of pulmonary disease; Sir James Clark, the leading authority on pulmonary therapeutics, prescribes the Italian journey.

  Tuberculosis Consumption Physicians Doctors
• Part II, Ch. VI

  Carlyle's theory that Sterling's bodily disease expressed the too vehement life within him, and that he never learned to rest.

  Mind Body Psychology Unconscious
• Part III, Ch. II

  At Clifton the hopes of a settled home fail when winter comes; spitting of blood returns in November and forces a new flight to Madeira.

  Tuberculosis Consumption
• Part III, Ch. V

  Sterling breaks a blood-vessel lifting a table; his mother develops heart disease and dies; his wife, safely delivered on Good Friday 1843, sinks unexpectedly and dies two days after his mother.

  Childbirth Maternal Grief Death Dying
• Part III, Ch. VI

  Sterling's last year at Ventnor, his letters to his son, the Maurices' nursing, and his death on 18 September 1844.

  Death Dying Nursing Caregiving
• Part I, Ch. I

  Carlyle contrasts Sterling with the morbid self-questioning he calls a nosology of spiritual maladies common in his day.

  Psychology Unconscious

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Using Part I, Ch. I, set out Carlyle's objections to Hare's memoir, then write a short reply in Hare's defence that uses only facts the Life itself supplies.

• Fiction

  Write Sterling's journal for the day in early 1832 when news from Malaga reaches St Vincent, drawing on his letter to his brother and the hurricane Carlyle describes.

• Dialogue

  Stage an evening at the Sterling Club in 1838 in which Sterling defends his decision to keep writing poetry against Carlyle's advice to stick to prose.

• Classroom

  Draw a map of Sterling's moves from Bute to Ventnor, marking beside each place the medical advice or family event that sent him there.

Further Reading

• Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle

  The book Sterling answered in his 1835 letter.

• Essays and Tales by John Sterling, with a Memoir of His Life, Julius Charles Hare (ed.)

  The 1848 memoir Carlyle set out to correct.

• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Thomas Carlyle

• In Memoriam A. H. H., Alfred Tennyson

  Elegy for another young man of the Apostles' circle.

• Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of His Life, James Anthony Froude

• The Life of John Sterling, Thomas Carlyle

  Attached Project Gutenberg #1085.