Thousands who were quite incapable of appreciating the letters as literature could read between the lines, and apply the immortal principle that a warming-pan is a cover for hidden fire.
Unfortunately, Carlyle's heart-broken ejaculations over his dead wife's words leant themselves to theories and surmises.

He thought that he had not made enough of her when she was alive, and apparently he wanted the world to know that he thought so.

Yet the bulk of the letters are not those of an unhappy, oppressed, down- trodden woman, nor of a woman unable to take care of herself.

Some few are intensely miserable, almost like the cries of a wounded animal, and these, even in extracts, might well have been omitted.
Mrs.Carlyle would not have written them if she had been herself, and in a collection of more than three hundred they would not have been missed.

Some thought also that there were too many household details.* On the whole, however, these letters, with the others published in the Life, are a rich store-house, and they retain their permanent value, untouched by ephemeral rumour.
-- * "A good woman," I remember Lord Bowen saying of Mrs.Carlyle, "with perhaps an excessive passion for insecticide." -- I doubt if he bathed before he dressed.
A brasier?
the pagan, he burned perfumes! You see, it is proved, what the neighbours guessed: His wife and himself had separate rooms.
Carlyle had been dead more than twenty years before the controversies about all that was unimportant in him flickered out and died an unsavoury death.