22 Feb Thomas Carlyle

In 1834 Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane moved into 5 (now 24) Cheyne Row, a Georgian terraced house in London’s elegant Chelsea district, where Carlyle lived until his death in 1881. It was there that he wrote his masterwork The French Revolution: A History (three volumes, 1837) which was the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Literary celebrities were frequent visitors to the house, including Browning, Dickens, Eliot, Ruskin, Tennyson, Thackeray and the young Oscar Wilde.

Now known as Carlyle’s House and owned by the National Trust, the property has been carefully preserved and looks much as it did when the Carlyles lived there. It stands not only as a memorial to the man but also as a faithful reminder of the times in which he lived. Incidentally, the adjacent Cheyne Walk is one of London’s great literary streets. Elizabeth Gaskell was born at number 93 in 1810. George Eliot died at number 4 in 1880.