On 5 june 1824 Thomas Carlyle, aged twenty-nine, sailed from Leith, Edinburgh, to London on a visit that was to last until March 1825. Within an hour of leaving he had sent his family copies of his translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, published in Edinburgh at the end of May; then he was off to the metropolis to visit his friend the Reverend Edward Irving and to resume his tutoring of young Charles Buller. “The expedition was an epoch in Carlyle's life,” writes Froude. “There was, perhaps, no one of his age in Scotland or England, who knew so much and had seen so little.” He had read enormously in history, poetry, philosophy—the whole range of modern literature in French, German, and English—yet he had seen no town larger than Glasgow and little cultivated society. He had no illusions of winning immediate recognition, but doubtless expected the kind of benefits he had foreseen for Jane Welsh had her hoped-for visit to London come to pass: “You will see new forms of life, you will converse with cultivated men, you may gather insight into character and manners, and what is equally desirable, into the nature and extent of your own powers and the best mode of turning them to use.”