Five-minute digest
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.
Top 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.
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.
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.
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.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“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”
“a true delineation of the smallest man, and his scene of pilgrimage through life, is capable of interesting the greatest man”
“Belief, not doubt, attended him at all points of his progress; rather a tendency to too hasty and headlong belief”
“I likened him often, in my banterings, to sheet-lightning”
Frequently cited
“Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle”
“I hear the sound of that musketry; it is as if the bullets were tearing my own brain”
“the doctors intimated that there lay consumption in the question, and that perfect recovery was not to be looked for”
“The oracle of the physicians, like that of Delphi, was not exceedingly determinate”
“Sterling's bodily disease was the expression, under physical conditions, of the too vehement life which, under the moral, the intellectual and other aspects, incessantly struggled within him”
“I tread the common road into the great darkness, without any thought of fear, and with very much of hope. Certainty indeed I have none”
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Part I, Ch. I
Carlyle contrasts Sterling with the morbid self-questioning he calls a nosology of spiritual maladies common in his day.