It was good of God, a catty observer wrote more than a century ago, to marry Thomas and Jane Carlyle together, “and so make only two people miserable instead of four.”

That’s a famously unkind cut at two of the central figures of the Victorian era, prolific writers who captured the spirit of this time of burgeoning industrialism and empire in their many letters. But readers can now decide for themselves whether the Carlyles were shallow creeps or keen observers (or both) because Duke University Press has just opened the Carlyle Letters Online, available free.

The archive features thousands of letters written by the Carlyles to more than 600 recipients: politicians, poets, scientists, and others. Each letter in the collection is indexed with multiple terms, and can be searched by date, subject, and recipien