After so long a courtship—and a year’s separation before the event—the Carlyles’ marriage was likely to be anticlimactic, and so it proved. Once the ‘odious ceremony’ had been performed (CL 4: 136), the patterns that it was intended to resolve began to assert themselves. ‘Yes, you will marry,’ Thomas told Jane in November 1823 (CL 2: 472): ‘but do something far more glorious than “make puddings”: you shall make immortal food for the souls of generous men in lands and ages that you have never seen and never can see.’ Six months before the wedding day his roots were showing (CL 4: 69): ‘The Man should bear rule in the house and not the Woman.’