When Carlyle Pinched His Wife

A volume by the late Anthony Froude, the historian, tells this story of Carlyle and his wife, who lived on notoriously bad terms, the latter dying first: "Carlyle found a remembrance in her diary of the blue marks which in a fit of passion he had once inflicted on her arms. As soon as he could collect himself he put together a memoir of her, in which with deliberate courage he inserted the incriminating passages of her diary, the note of the blue marks among them, and he added an injunction of his own that, however stern and tragic that record might be, it was never to be destroyed."