Open Data for Sustainable Community:

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Advances in Sustainability Science and Technology

Neha Sharma
Santanu Ghosh
Monodeep Saha

Open Data for

Sustainable
Community
Glocalized Sustainable
Development Goals
Advances in Sustainability Science
and Technology

Series Editors
Robert J. Howlett, Bournemouth University & KES International,
Shoreham-by-sea, UK
John Littlewood, School of Art & Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University,
Cardiff, UK
Lakhmi C. Jain, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, NSW, Australia
The book series aims at bringing together valuable and novel scientific contribu-
tions that address the critical issues of renewable energy, sustainable building,
sustainable manufacturing, and other sustainability science and technology topics
that have an impact in this diverse and fast-changing research community in
academia and industry.
The areas to be covered are
• Climate change and mitigation, atmospheric carbon reduction, global warming
• Sustainability science, sustainability technologies
• Sustainable building technologies
• Intelligent buildings
• Sustainable energy generation
• Combined heat and power and district heating systems
• Control and optimization of renewable energy systems
• Smart grids and micro grids, local energy markets
• Smart cities, smart buildings, smart districts, smart countryside
• Energy and environmental assessment in buildings and cities
• Sustainable design, innovation and services
• Sustainable manufacturing processes and technology
• Sustainable manufacturing systems and enterprises
• Decision support for sustainability
• Micro/nanomachining, microelectromechanical machines (MEMS)
• Sustainable transport, smart vehicles and smart roads
• Information technology and artificial intelligence applied to sustainability
• Big data and data analytics applied to sustainability
• Sustainable food production, sustainable horticulture and agriculture
• Sustainability of air, water and other natural resources
• Sustainability policy, shaping the future, the triple bottom line, the circular
economy
High quality content is an essential feature for all book proposals accepted for the
series. It is expected that editors of all accepted volumes will ensure that
contributions are subjected to an appropriate level of reviewing process and adhere
to KES quality principles.
The series will include monographs, edited volumes, and selected proceedings.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/16477

Neha Sharma Santanu Ghosh
• •

Monodeep Saha

Open Data for Sustainable

Community
Glocalized Sustainable Development Goals

123
Neha Sharma Santanu Ghosh
Analytics and Insights Analytics and Insights
Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.
Pune, Maharashtra, India Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Monodeep Saha
Analytics and Insights
Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

ISSN 2662-6829 ISSN 2662-6837 (electronic)

Advances in Sustainability Science and Technology
ISBN 978-981-33-4311-5 ISBN 978-981-33-4312-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4312-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from
the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard
to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721,
Singapore
Foreword

I am pleased to write this foreword, because of my close association with the

themes of ‘Data Centricity’ and ‘Sustainability Ecosystems’ that is relevant for
businesses, communities and individuals. In my current role as the Global Head of
Analytics and Insights, Tata Consultancy Services, I come across various customer
execs, policy makers, government officials and industry leaders who are aspiring to
make their organizations more purpose driven and adaptive, attain business growth
but at the same time make a strong positive contribution towards environment and
communities. My association with industry bodies, academia and strategic think
tanks has led me to a view that growth, development and transformations are only
meaningful if they are sustainable. The power of data, analytics and AI and the
related digital technologies play a major role in this journey which is also vetted by
the guidance provided by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The
world is seeing democratization of technologies and data resulting in newer pos-
sibilities. Open data is one of the levers for achieving those.
In order to further the sustainability agenda, there needs to be a strong collab-
oration among governments, corporates, academia and citizens with resulting
ecosystem capabilities. This publication stands at the intersection of such an
ecosystem and an excellent compilation of research projects based on open data
with outcomes having a bearing on the community. The next generation is a very
important stakeholder of this ecosystem as they would foster innovation to shape up
a better tomorrow. Such a publication will encourage the students and academic
institutions to focus on sustainability as a theme and contribute to the ecosystem.
Each of the work outlines interesting possibilities which will be of interest to
business enterprises.
Open Data for Sustainable Community is a result of joint interests between the
students, data science communities and the TCS Analytics and Insights team. They
have been instrumental in terms of topic selection, open data resources and
researcher orientation. It explores and presents a part of the open datasets from
government institutions to achieve the sustainable objectives at local level, in turn
contributing towards global mission. Reading through the book, you will find some

v
vi Foreword

of the specific issues in the areas of environment, Indian agriculture and health care
seen through the lens of data science, which has deep relevance in today’s world.
I would encourage students, researchers and practitioners to contribute to the
sustainability ecosystem and build further on the good work that has been done.

Dinanath Kholkar
Vice President and Global Head
Analytics and Insights
Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.
Pune, India
Preface

By and large, we are at the crossroad of the 4th Industrial Revolution, where
phy-gital systems are going to play a massive role. This transformation is cutting
across every known sphere to mankind. The world will become globally localized
marketplace. COVID-19 has convoluted the entire space-time fabric, and there is a
massive paradigm shift. We are looking the world through the new lenses where
technological transformation via machine learning and artificial intelligence is the
new norm. We are at the cusp of the future where AI/ML will be imbibed in
day-to-day activities via cloud platforms. Doing business in a greener way is going
to be norm for us if we intend to sustain life force on this planet. Fighting against
natural calamities like drought, pandemics and pollution needs proactive inter-
vention, clear vision, ground-level implementable and scalable technology. The
transformation of thought process at an individual level will help to achieve the
same. Even the policies and strategies have to be top down and the implementation
needs to start bottom up and most importantly at grass-root level.
Since the last 300 years, industrial revolutions have game changing impact on
societies. As our topic suggests, we are looking at some of these like health care,
agriculture and environment through the lens of AI. Demographic-level analysis
and GIS analysis are novel methods that are used in this field. The intent is to
explore into these areas and identify cracks through which deeper in roads can be
made. With the above background given, we will go in the deeper waters and
explore the content of this book.
Health care—This chapter intends to dig on the Sustainable Development Goal
3. With that bigger picture as a vision, a study is conducted on COVID-19. The
kind of impact coronavirus has on our society is at a massive scale and there is no
geography which is untouched. There is no geography which is untouched.
A cohort study on the indeterminate contagion pattern of COVID-19 is done, and
effort is made to map the same with the potential features. The demand and supply
sides both are mapped and identified with some of the state-of-the-art ML tech-
niques which are used on the data to create analysis to derive insights from them.
Though these are early days, these are initial steps in that direction.

vii
viii Preface

Medical fraternity along with researchers are working to fast track a vaccine for
the COVID-19. Nations and pharmaceutical organizations are joining forces and
trying to gain a handle on situation carrying joint clinical trials. This book is a
first-hand attempt to provide a consultative approach of looking at the demand and
supply sides using federated data using open-source technology adoption. The
data-driven thought leadership shown in the book ensures a detailed outlook. While
pharmaceutical and healthcare organizations across the globe are in the process of
doing deep research around application of machine learning on federated data, the
opportunities are limitless. This approach of looking at catastrophic events, which
has the ability to shock both demand and supply metrics, is a perfect experimental
set-up and would be leveraged in future as framework for analysis. This study can
further be utilized in the financial services industry to analyse the perturbation effect
and how individual demographics are impacted. Utilities industries also can benefit
by bringing in another angle of pricing. This base framework in the chapters
provides the detail set-up of this experiment, data staging, analysing the data, steps
involved, peeling various layers of data, using algorithms to derive insights. Apart
from the results, the setting of the process will result in value.
Agriculture—The study is being done on farmer contact centre by Government
of India queries. The intent of the study is to reduce the false positives and identify,
define and create recommendations to remove these process deficiencies which can
reduce time debt on the government and in turn resolve queries for the farmers
faster. This solution provides and opens up the doors for usage of natural language
process and use of automating. The idea is novel and can be used in setting up of a
command centre which is in line with the revolution of Industry 4.0. Smart farming
alarm system can be used to build early warning systems, which can map the
grievances with solutions. One potential use case which can be tapped in is creating
a database for common grievances and mapping them demography-wise, which
when mapped with the loan data provided to farmers can become strong indicators.
Those who have operated with micro-finance institutions will find this information
extremely valuable. What this book aims is to create a methodology in terms of how
to stage the data and convert it into a goldmine.
Environment—This section highlights the use of data democratization to
identify correlations and patterns between air pollution and green cover for Pune
City. Different techniques are fused together to create analysis which are technically
intensive and extremely data driven to derive key insights from the data. They not
only establish the age-old fact that the trees are key to the societal development but
also help in forming strategy regarding where and how these plantations need to be
done for it to have maximum impact. Reduction in carbon footprint is one major
goal of all the corporate houses. Automobile sector and industries using fossil fuel
for their energy requirements have to relook from a different lens. The Pune City is
taken as a use case to highlight the fact that in case we want to develop technology
solutions to take us on the road of creating smart cities, then it can not happen
without a green cover. The book attempts not only using the available data but also
looking at environment barometer by using open-source technology.
Preface ix

The three domains mentioned above are the intended social sample that weaves
the social fabric by enabling interaction between individuals, technology and
governance. Our study of sustainable development by means of artificial intelli-
gence will help us understand these dynamics. The intent with which this book is
written is very close to our hearts and is to provoke the thought process which
draws out various possibilities in which our society becomes a better place for
living. The caveat to be drawn here is that all the three frameworks in finer way are
monetizable. The three domains and pillars of this book call out the essence of
process excellence, use of federated data and open-source technology.
In the new normal, these three trends are not going to go anywhere soon.
The book will cater to the wide range of readers including professionals from
sustainable development goals, social scientists, data scientists and machine
learning experts.
This book is an early attempt towards that process. The book presents a pro-
totype of thought process about taking the initial steps of harnessing data openly
available and how to craft a solution. The authors of this book have come together
from different walks of life with one common goal—a strong sense of commitment
and a burning desire for betterment of society utilizing their technical skills.
A sincere effort from the entire team which includes the authors, publishing house
and the students. A special mention to our family members, friends and colleagues
who kept us sane and focused during the entire journey.

Pune, India Neha Sharma

Kolkata, India Santanu Ghosh
Bengaluru, India Monodeep Saha
Contents

Part I Environment—A Fact-Based Study using Tree Census

and Air Pollution Data
1 Inching Towards Sustainable Smart Cities—Literature Review
and Data Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2 Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3 Data Preparation: Tree Census Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.3.1 Understanding the Importance of Tree Census . . . . . . . 8
1.3.2 Introduction to Tree Census Open Data . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.3.3 Data Profiling of Tree Census Open Data . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.3.4 Data Cleaning and Wrangling for Analysis . . . . . . . . . 19
1.4 Data Preparation: Air Pollution Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
1.4.1 Understanding Air Pollution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.4.2 Introduction to Air Pollution Open Data . . . . . . . . . . . 36
1.4.3 Data Profiling of Air Pollution Open Data . . . . . . . . . . 37
1.4.4 Data Cleaning and Wrangling for Analysis . . . . . . . . . 38
1.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2 Exploring Air Pollution and Green Cover Dataset—A
Quantitative Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 49
2.1 Data Exploration: Tree Census . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 49
2.1.1 Hexbin Plot Representing Tree Density . . . . . . . . . . .. 50
2.1.2 Pie Chart Representing the Categories of Tree
Condition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 51
2.1.3 Violin Plots to Study Health-Category-Wise
Distribution of Girth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 52
2.1.4 Scatter Plot to Spot Clusters of Poor Quality and Dead
Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 54

xi
xii Contents

2.1.5 Mode of All Categorical Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 56

2.1.6 Top 10 Wards with Highest Number of Trees . . . . . .. 57
2.1.7 In-Depth Analysis of Tree Condition and Ownership
Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 57
2.1.8 Box Plot of Tree Girth and Canopy by Tree Condition
and Rarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 63
2.1.9 Count Plot of Trees by Their Yield Type . . . . . . . . . .. 65
2.1.10 Counts of Top 10 Most Commonly Occurring Trees
in Pune Which Yield Timber Wood . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 67
2.1.11 Counts of Balanced and Unbalanced Trees . . . . . . . .. 68
2.1.12 Count of Trees with Respect to the Reported Signs
of Stress/Damage on the Tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 69
2.1.13 Count Plot of Trees by the Rarity of Their
Occurrence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
2.1.14 Count Plot of Trees by Their Phenology Category . . . . 70
2.1.15 Flowering Season of the Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
2.1.16 Pair Plot of All the Numerical Variables . . . . . . . . . . . 71
2.1.17 K-Means Clustering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
2.2 Data Exploration: Air Pollution Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
2.2.1 Descriptive Statistics of Pollutants for the Five
Locations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 78
2.2.2 Visualizing Air Quality Index (AQI) . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 81
2.2.3 Visualizing Individual Pollutant Levels . . . . . . . . . . .. 84
2.2.4 Interrelationships Between AQI, SO2 and NOx
(in µg/m3) Concentration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
2.2.5 Pollutant Concentration for the Months of 2018 . . . . . . 91
2.2.6 AQI Variation for the Months of 2018 . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
2.3 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
3 Application of Statistical Analysis in Uncovering the Spatio-
Temporal Relationships Between the Environmental Datasets . . . . 105
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
3.2 Data Sketch for Air Pollution and Tree Census Dataset . . . . . . . 107
3.3 Methodology to Find Correlation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
3.3.1 Measuring Correlation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
3.3.2 Air Quality Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
3.3.3 Time-Series Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
3.3.4 Haversine Formula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
3.4 Analysis of Datasets to Find Correlation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
3.4.1 Exploratory Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
3.4.2 GIS Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
3.4.3 Time-Series Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
3.4.4 Statistical Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Contents xiii

3.5 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

3.6 Conclusion and Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

Part II Resilient Agriculture—A War Against Hunger

4 Farmer Call Centre Literature Review and Data Preparation . . . . 131
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
4.2 Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
4.3 Understanding the Operations of Kisan Call Centre . . . . . . . . . 140
4.4 Data Preparation: Kisan Call Centre Queries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
4.4.1 Data of Kisan Call Centre Queries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
4.4.2 Preparation of Kisan Call Centre Queries . . . . . . . . . . . 144
4.4.3 Pre-processing of Kisan Call Centre Queries . . . . . . . . 146
4.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
5 Analysis and Visualization of Farmer Call Center Data . . . . . . . . . 151
5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
5.2 Material Methods Used for Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
5.2.1 Check and Confirm the Pre-processed Data . . . . . . . . . 152
5.2.2 Form an Objective and Acquire Domain
Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
5.2.3 Data Visualization Criteria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
5.2.4 Libraries Used for Visualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
5.2.5 Visualization Charts Used . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
5.3 Data Exploration and Visualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
5.3.1 Donut Pie Chart Presenting Overview of Query
Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
5.3.2 Radar Chart and Stacked Bar Graph to Analyse
District-Wise Query Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
5.3.3 Radar Chart to Present Queries According
to Seasons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
5.3.4 Radar Chart and Plot Chart to Present Category-Wise
Query Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
5.4 Conclusion and Future Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
6 An Approach for Exploring New Frontiers for Optimizing Query
Volume for Farmer Call Centre—KCC Query Pattern . . . . . . . . . 169
6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
6.2 Different Approaches for Query Text to Query Type
Classification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
6.2.1 Text Similarity and Clustering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
6.2.2 Word-Based Encodings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
xiv Contents

6.2.3 Text to Sequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

6.2.4 Out of Vocabulary (OOVs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
6.2.5 Padding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
6.2.6 Visualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
6.3 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

Part III Demand and Supply Study of Healthcare Human Resource

and Infrastructure—Through the Lens of COVID 19
7 Sustainable Healthcare in COVID-19 Pandemic—Literature
Survey and Data Lifting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
7.2 Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
7.3 Data Preparation: COVID-19, Infrastructure, Human
Resource, State Population Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
7.3.1 Data Source Identification and Data Acquisition . . . . . . 192
7.3.2 Data Profiling: COVID-19, Infrastructure, Human
Resource, State Population Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
7.3.3 Data Cleaning and Wrangling for Analysis . . . . . . . . . 196
7.4 Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
7.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
8 COVID-19 and Indian Healthcare System—A Race Against
Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
8.2 Material Methods Used for Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
8.3 Data Analysis and Visualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
8.3.1 Progression of COVID-19 in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
8.3.2 Healthcare Infrastructure in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
8.3.3 Healthcare Human Resource in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
8.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
9 Estimating Cases for COVID-19 in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
9.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
9.2 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
9.2.1 The Database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
9.2.2 The Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
9.3 Polynomial Regression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
9.3.1 Why Polynomial Regression Model? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
9.3.2 Polynomial Regression—Model A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
9.3.3 Polynomial Regression—Model B . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
Contents xv

9.4 Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262

9.4.1 Why LSTM? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
9.4.2 LSTM Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
9.5 Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) . . . . . . . . 264
9.5.1 Why Is ARIMA Preferred to Exponential
Smoothing? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
9.5.2 ARIMA Model A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
9.5.3 ARIMA Model B . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
9.5.4 ARIMA Model C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
9.5.5 ARIMA Model D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
9.5.6 Validation of Models B, C and D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
9.6 Prophet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
9.6.1 Why Prophet? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
9.6.2 Prophet Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
9.7 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
10 Multifacet Impact of Pandemic on Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
10.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
10.2 Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
10.3 Economy During the Time of Pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
10.3.1 Impact of Lockdown on Banking Sector
and Insurers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
10.3.2 Layoffs in Various Industries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
10.3.3 Migration and Livelihood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
10.3.4 Reverse Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
10.4 Supply Chain Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
10.4.1 Demand of Essential Commodities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
10.4.2 What Are Decentralized Supply Chains? . . . . . . . . . . . 293
10.4.3 Framework of Decentralized Supply Chain . . . . . . . . . 294
10.4.4 Technologies Used . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
10.4.5 Quality Assurance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
10.4.6 Salient Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
10.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298
Authors and Contributors

About the Authors

Neha Sharma is working with Tata Consultancy

Services and is a Founder Secretary, Society for Data
Science. Prior to this she has worked as Director of
premier Institute of Pune, that run post-graduation
courses like MCA and MBA. She is an alumnus of a
premier College of Engineering and Technology,
Bhubaneshwar and completed her PhD from prestigious
Indian Institute of Technology, Dhanbad. She is an
ACM Distinguished Speaker, a Senior IEEE member
and Executive Body member of IEEE Pune Section. She
is an astute academician and has organized several
national and international conferences and published
several research papers. She is the recipient of “Best
PhD Thesis Award” and “Best Paper Presenter at
International Conference Award” at National Level. She
is a well-known figure among the IT circle, and well
sought over for her sound knowledge and professional
skills. Neha Sharma has been instrumental in integrating
teaching with the current needs of the Industry and
steering students towards their bright future.

xvii
xviii Authors and Contributors

Santanu Ghosh is a IT veteran with over 26 years of

experience and a Sustainability Evangelist. He leads the
Sustainability Ecosystem for TCS A&I unit. He is
responsible for the exploration and launch of Data &
Analytics-driven sustainability initiatives in the areas of
Environment, Climate, Health and Biodiversity for both
commercial and community enterprises. His endeavors
align with UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and its
mapping to Enterprise and Community KPIs. He opines
that data plays a critical role in creating data-driven
environment-friendly solutions and creating a circular
economy by creation of a knowledge ecosystem. He
has been part of many fora promoting his views on
Environment, Climate, Community Impacts and their
relationships with the SDGs.

Mr. Monodeep Saha is currently working as Project

Lead in TCS for BFSI clients. He has a rich and diverse
experience of over a decade in Financial services
Analytics industry, with consulting experience of major
financial institutions/FinTech’s in Asia pacific/US/
EMEA region. Analytics/Machine Learning expert with
industry expertise in Risk and Marketing Analytics
space. Mr. Saha has master’s in physics from IIT
Madras with focus on advanced mathematics and
computing. In his spare time, he spends time with
family, loves to read and write. He authors short
writeup at various forums covering fiction and non-
fictional topics. This book is an attempt to converge his
professional skills for greater good of humanity and
society at large.
Authors and Contributors xix

Contributors

Sudhanshu Bhoi is a computer engineering student

who loves to think through problems and build creative
solutions and an enthusiast in the field of AI; currently,
he is studying machine learning and applying models to
create a better world.

Sanket Bijawe is an undergraduate student at VIT,

Pune, and an Exe-com member at Student Branch, VIT,
Pune. He is interested in the field of deep learning and
NLP.

Arjun Ghose is pursuing M.Sc. in applied statistics

from Symbiosis Statistical Institute, Pune. He has
graduated with a B.Sc. degree in statistics from
St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai.
xx Authors and Contributors

Chaitanyasuma Jain is a computer engineering

undergraduate student. She has previously worked on
software development and data science projects. She is
an active participant in women-based STEM commu-
nities and has a keen interest in machine learning. She
believes in ideation and wishes to use her technical
skills for meaningful social causes.

Monisha Jhamb is currently pursuing masters in

applied statistics at Symbiosis Statistical Institute, Pune.
She is a data science engineer with a post-graduate
programme in data science and engineering from Great
Lakes Institute of Management. She is also Six Sigma
Green Belt certified by KPMG.

Shreyas Joshi is currently pursuing his graduation in

electronics and telecommunication engineering at P. E. S.
Modern College of Engineering, Pune. His area of interest
includes embedded systems and Python for speech
recognition.
Authors and Contributors xxi

Anirudh Kolwadkar is a dynamic, team-spirited and

performance-driven computer engineering student. He
is CS sophomore passionate about technology, Android
development and artificial intelligence. His interests
include coding and writing technical blogs.

Aboli Marathe is a third-year student studying com-

puter engineering at Pune Institute of Computer
Technology. She is a machine learning researcher and
is working towards transforming the idea of artificial
intelligence for social good. Her research interests
include causal inference, explainable artificial intelli-
gence and deep learning.

Vaishnavi Nair is currently pursuing her undergradu-

ate course in electronics and telecommunication engi-
neering from P. E. S Modern College of Engineering,
Pune-05. She is currently serving as the CoSSR of the
IEEE Pune Section.
xxii Authors and Contributors

Aman Pande is pursuing M.Sc. in applied statistics

from Symbiosis Statistical Institute. He has graduated
with a B.Sc. degree in statistics from Sir Purshurambhau
College of Pune.

Manoj Patil, is currently pursuing his graduation in

electronics and telecommunication engineering at
P. E. S. Modern College of Engineering, Pune. His
area of interest includes IoT and Python programming.

Shivraj Patil is currently pursuing bachelor’s degree

and has developed a keen interest in the field of
machine learning, especially in computer vision. He
wishes to work on more amazing projects in the future.
As a beginner in reinforcement learning, his current
goal is to train an agent (bot) to play tennis.
Authors and Contributors xxiii

Atreyee Saha is pursuing M.Sc. in applied statistics

from Symbiosis Statistical Institute. She has completed
B.Sc. in statistics honours from Bethune College
affiliated by Calcutta University, Kolkata.

Siddharth Saoji is pursuing CS Undergrad at VIT,

Pune. He is CoSSR of IEEE Pune section and interested
in finding solutions to real-world problems using data
science and full stack development.

Madhavi Shamkuwar is currently working as an assis-

tant professor in Zeal Education Society, Zeal Institute of
Business Administration, Computer Application and
Research (ZIBACAR), Pune, Maharashtra, India. She is
pursuing Ph.D. from Department of Management Sciences
(PUMBA), Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune,
in wildlife management using information technology
tools. She had published several research papers and
participated in conferences, seminar and FDPs. She had 11
years of teaching experience, and her areas of interest are
data mining, system analysis and design, algorithms and
big data.
xxiv Authors and Contributors

Mishita Sharma is currently pursuing master of

science in applied statistics at the Symbiosis
Statistical Institute, Pune. She is having a strong
background in mathematics; her interests lie in data
mining, statistical analysis and machine learning tech-
niques.

Arpan Sil is currently a student of applied statistics in

Symbiosis Statistical Institute. He is a bronze medallist
in electrical engineering from Maulana Abul Kalam
Azad University of Technology for his outstanding
academic achievements at undergraduate level. Besides
taking an avid interest in data sciences and allied fields,
he is passionate about football and writing and has
published several articles in reputed sports websites.
A through and through optimist, he envisages a better
future for humankind and is dedicated to make it
happen.

Vineet Tambe is a budding E&TC engineer with a keen

interest in robotics and AI. He works with embedded
systems and robotics and aims to build advanced secure
robotic technology and hardware systems for the future
using various artificial intelligence techniques.
 Part I
Environment—A Fact-Based Study using
Tree Census and Air Pollution Data

(SDG13—Climate Action and SDG15—Life on Land)

Chapter 1
Inching Towards Sustainable Smart
Cities—Literature Review and Data
Preparation

1.1 Introduction

Conservation of environment is critical for sustainable survival of diverse species on

this planet [1–3]. Hence to create the awareness among the global ecosystem, and the
term ‘biodiversity’ was coined by Conservation International (CI) in the year 1998
[4]. Biodiversity implies coexistence of variety of living organism (terrestrial and
marine) and plants in a particular region to create a favourable environment and to
lift the productivity of the ecosystem [4]. Earth is in natural possession of biodiverse
regions, mainly in tropical areas which covers 10% of Earth’s surface but is a habitat
of 90% of world’s species [5–7]. The endeavour should be to preserve species in
biodiverse hotspots as well as conserve environment to ensure natural sustainability
for all life forms [8–10]. However, in reality, of more than 300,000 known species of
plants, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has evaluated only
12,914 species, finding that about 68% of evaluated plant species are threatened with
extinction [11, 12]. Many such precarious situations forced United Nations to present
a blue print of 17 global goals (also known as Sustainable Development Goals—
SDGs) in the year 2015 to ensure social development, environmental protection as
well as economic growth and to be achieved by 2030 [13–15].
Conservation International listed 17 countries that are mega-biodiverse and are
mostly located in the tropical or subtropical region. India is at 16th position in the
world with 21% of forest and 5% protected area covered around the total land area
of the country [16]. But deforestation and other harmful human activities pose a
great threat to these existing biodiverse forests [17]. Therefore, in keeping with the
sustainable development goals related to the environment (SDG13-Climate Action),
the Government of India has adopted a National Action Plan on Climate Change
as well as a National Mission for Green India, to address this issue directly. These
national schemes are complemented by a host of specific programmes on solar energy,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 3
N. Sharma et al., Open Data for Sustainable Community,
Advances in Sustainability Science and Technology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4312-2_1
4 1 Inching Towards Sustainable Smart Cities—Literature Review …

enhanced energy efficiency, sustainable habitats, water, sustaining the Himalayan

ecosystem, and to encourage strategic knowledge exchange towards climate change.
Another important Sustainable Development Goal towards environment is SDG15
(Life on Land), which calls for urgent action to halt the degradation of natural habitats,
to end poaching and trafficking of animals, as well as to integrate ecosystem and
biodiversity values into local planning and development processes. Two important
targets for SDG15 are to conserve, restore and sustain land and water ecosystems
and its resources like forests, wetlands, mountains and drylands and to promote
sustainable management of forests, halt deforestation and increase afforestation as
well as reforestation globally [18].
Trees constitute a major part of the ecosystem and play a key role in sustainable
development. Through photosynthesis, they provide the oxygen we breathe as well
as the food we eat and are thus the foundation of most life on Earth. Trees absorb
carbon dioxide (CO2 ) we release in the atmosphere and store it in the form of carbon
in its branches, leaves, trunks, roots and in the soil. Carbon is sequestered in soil
by plants through photosynthesis and can be stored as soil organic carbon [19–
22]. However, due to pollution and deforestation, stored carbon is released into the
atmosphere, mainly as CO2 , resulting in global warming and many health hazards.
Smart cities thus must provide carbon-neutral atmosphere by intelligently using data
and technology towards implementing green infrastructure, smart grids, carbon-free
public transport, energy-efficient homes, etc. [23, 24]. The key objectives of the
Smart City mission in India revolve around making cities more sustainable and
citizen friendly, and Pune Smart City mission is fully aligned with that. One of the
major steps in this process of transforming cities is using the available open data and
analyzing them appropriately for determining the best way to plan the modifications
to be carried out [25–27].
In this unit, we present a case study using democratization of green cover data and
air pollution data for Pune City in Maharashtra State to find important correlations
as well as insightful patterns using data science techniques as shown in Fig. 1.1. The
data used in the study is the open data related to tree census and air pollution created
by Pune Municipal Corporation [28]. Along with NGOs and social organizations,
the civic body has been involved in conducted various tree plantation drives in the
city on a large scale. Due to this, they have helped increase the green cover by 20
lakh trees and documented their progress in tree census surveys [29–32]. Also, the
air pollution dataset gave us the air pollution characteristics (AQI, concentration of
SO2 , NOx , PM10 ) in five areas of Pune city (Swargate, Pimpri, Nalstop, Bhosari
and Karve) from January 2018 to March 2019. We can observe the environment,
measure the biodiversity, find the correlation with major pollutant levels, integrate
data analytics and suggest effective sustainable practices to build the smart cities.

VisualizaƟon and ClassificaƟon

Data
Data Cleaning Data and Time Series Report Insights
Preprocessing
ExploratoraƟon Analysis

Fig. 1.1 Data science pipeline for handling open data and generating insights
1.1 Introduction 5

In this study, we are confirming the positive changes in the environment, correlated
with afforestation, for the city of Pune.
The main objectives of the Unit I are as follows:
1. To study the features, distribution and contents of the green cover (tree census)
and air pollution dataset.
2. To find correlations between the above mentioned datasets, so as to confirm the
positive environmental effect of tree density on a region.
3. To suggest improvements in existing city flora, so as to curtail the alarming air
pollution levels.
In this chapter, an attempt has been made to understand the green cover (tree
census) and air pollution dataset in detail and present the detailed process of data
preparation. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows: Section 1.2 discusses
various literatures in the similar domain, Sect. 1.3 deliberated on green cover (tree
census) and air pollution dataset, respectively, Section 1.4 presents the data cleaning
and preparation process, and Sect. 1.5 concludes the chapter.

1.2 Literature Review

According to the National Geographic, around 70% of Earth’s land animals and
plants live in forests and many cannot survive the deforestation which destroys their
home [33]. Cutting trees results in the habitat loss for animal species, which in
turn damages ecosystems. Likewise, the Amazon rainforest, a tropical rainforest,
contributes a cycle of evaporation and rainfall. Loss of such huge ecosystems could
result in warmer and drier climates near the tropics, eventually resulting in habitat
destruction for the species of plants and animals living there. Interestingly, trees
provide many more services and benefits, [34] which may or may not be visible to
the common man. They also have a lot of economic value and a potential to conserve,
clean and maintain other natural resources. They even have psychological benefits
like reduction in air temperature, pollution removal, building energy use, reduction
in ultraviolet radiation, conserving wildlife populations and so on.
In 2003, the Parks and Recreation Department of Little Rock, Arkansas, took
an initiative that encouraged people to adopt a natural setting and promote healthy
lifestyle choices. The Medical Mail Trail, a part of the Arkansas River Trail system
which runs for eighty miles, is health inspired and supported by the medical commu-
nity. It includes picnicking areas, playgrounds, sculptures, spray grounds and a mural
wall with the underlying message to inspire fitness and nutrition among the people.
Also, urban forests mitigate a variety of health-related issues, ranging from
respiratory diseases to melanoma, promoting an active lifestyle, which can help
in reducing obesity. Many studies done by the health professionals and government
agencies have found that being beset by natural settings (specifically urban forests)
have a tremendous impact on mental health. A 20-min walk or sitting in a forested
6 1 Inching Towards Sustainable Smart Cities—Literature Review …

park in a busy metropolis can help in reducing mental stress for people with attention-
deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), thus improving concentration and promoting
creativity.
Talking about canopy cover and its importance, Scott Trimble in his blog posted
on 2 April 2019 [35] explained that the canopy cover was the layer formed by
the branches and crowns of plants or trees. This cover can be either continuous
(for primary forests) or discontinuous—with gaps (for orchards). In tropical and
temperate forests, canopies serve as very important habitats for many animals and
plants species. A dense canopy cover generally lets in little light which can reach
the ground and subsequently work in lowering the temperatures. The canopy also
protects the ground from the force of rainfall and somewhat moderates the wind
force. Thus, the ground habitat conditions are affected by a considerable degree by
the canopy cover. There are differences in forest canopies and their effects on the
immediate ecology.
David J. Nowak, USDA Forest Service, Syracuse, NY 2002 [36], in his research
paper, had talked about the effects the urban trees on air quality. Tree transpiration and
tree canopies hugely affect air temperature [37], radiation absorption, heat storage,
wind speed, relative humidity, turbulence, surface albedo and surface roughness.
These changes in local meteorology can go a long way in altering pollution levels in
the urban areas.
Trees generally remove gaseous air pollutants primarily via leaf stomata. Inside
the leaf, gases get diffused into the intercellular spaces and may end up getting
absorbed by the water films to form acids or react with the surfaces of the inner
leaf. Trees also reduce pollution levels by intercepting the airborne particles. Some
particles might be absorbed into the tree, though most of the particles which get
intercepted are retained on the surface of the plant. The intercepted particles often
get resuspended back into atmosphere, get washed off by rain or get dropped to the
ground with leaf falls. As a result, vegetation is only some sort of transient retention
site for most of the atmospheric particles. In 1994 [38], a study found that trees in
the New York City removed an estimated 1821 metric tons of air pollutants at an
estimated value of $9.5 million to the society. Air pollutants removal by the urban
forests in the city of New York was far greater than in Atlanta (1196 t; $6.5 million)
and Baltimore (499 t; $2.7 million), but pollution removal per m2 of canopy cover
was fairly along the same lines for these cities (New York: 13.7 g/m2 /year; Baltimore:
12.2 g/m2 /year; Atlanta: 10.6 g/m2 /year). These standardized pollution removal rates
differ among cities in accordance to the exact amount of air pollution, the length of
leaf in season, the precipitation and some other important meteorological variables.
Larger and healthier trees which are greater than 77 cm in diameter remove more
or less around 70 times more air pollution (1.4 kg/year) annually than the smaller
healthy trees which are less than 8 cm in diameter (0.02 kg/year). The total air quality
improvement in the city of New York due to the pollution removal by the trees
during daytime of the in-leaf season averaged around 0.30% for nitrogen dioxide,
0.47% for the particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5), 0.43% for sulphur dioxide,
0.45% for ozone, and 0.002% for carbon monoxide. Air quality genuinely improves
with the increase in percentage of tree cover and decreased mixing-layer heights. In
1.2 Literature Review 7

urban areas with around 100% tree cover (i.e. contiguous forest stands), short-term
improvements in air quality (one hour) from pollution removal by trees were near
around 15% for ozone, 14% for SO2 , 13% for particulate matter, 8% for NOx and
0.05% for CO.
David, in his another paper, ‘Assessing the Benefits and Economic Values of
Trees’, [37] discussed ‘i-Tree’ software. i-Tree is a state-of-the-art software suite
developed and used by the USDA Forest Service which provides analysis of urban
and rural forestry along with various assessment tools. The i-Tree tools can help in
strengthening the forest management and related advocacy efforts by quantifying the
forest structure and the associated environmental benefits that trees can provide [38].
An article published by The Hindu Newspaper on 22 June 2019 and updated on
27 June 2019, [39] described about the tree census that was conducted in Bangalore.
Some of the key points discussed were regarding the increment of green cover in
a locality, the necessary things to do and the important points to be kept in mind.
Taking a good stock of the trees that share space in the selected area and preparing
an inventory should be the first priority. In December 2016, the last census was
conducted by the students in the city of Bangalore in order to take stock of the losses
due to Cyclone Vardah.
Pauline Deborah R., an associate professor of the Department of Plant Biology
and Plant Biotechnology of WCC, who had led these tree censuses, explained the
significance and benefits of conducting a tree census. She also highlighted that the
key to any census is planning the time and date of the census, selection of volunteers
and requisite permission from concerned authorities. Training of the volunteers and
a tree identification guide are essential to derive the maximum output from a tree
census. Height, girth, canopy diameter, stress, flowering, fruiting season, name and
frequency of distribution and the health of the tree are to be collected. Suitable
measures should be taken if a rare tree is identified. The removal of precariously
standing trees and appropriate pest treatment is also essential for the unhealthy and
the infected ones.
The paper ‘The urban forest in Beijing and its role in air pollution reduction’
written by Yang et al. [40] focused on the study of a proposal given by the municipal
government as a measure to alleviate the air pollution levels in the Chinese capital,
Beijing. It was based on the analyses done with the help of the satellite images and
requisite field surveys to study the defining characteristics of the urban forest in the
central part of Beijing. The Urban Forest Effects Model studied the influence of
urban forests on the air pollution level of the designated area. The results showed
that there are around 2.4 million trees in the central part of Beijing. Small diameter
distribution trees were more prominent, and the urban forest was mostly dominated
by a few species. About 29% of trees in the central part of Beijing were classified
as being in poor condition. With respect to air pollution removal levels, the trees
around 1261.4 tons of pollutants from the air in 2002. PM10 was the pollutant
most reduced by the tree cover; the reduction amounted to around 772 tons. Also,
the carbon dioxide (CO2 ) stored in biomass formed by urban forests amounted to
around 0.2 million tons.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
have a private opportunity of hearing Mr. Irving and judging of his
fitness.
Let the autumn of 1819 be supposed to have passed, with
Carlyle’s studies and early risings in his father’s house at Mainhill in
Dumfriesshire,[20] and those negotiations between Irving and Dr.
Chalmers which issued in the definite appointment of Irving to the
Glasgow assistantship. It was in October 1819 that this matter was
settled; and then Irving, who had been on a visit to his relatives in
Annan, and was on his way thence to Glasgow, to enter on his new
duties, picked up Carlyle at Mainhill, for that walk of theirs up the
valley of the Dryfe, and that beating-up of their common friend,
Frank Dickson, in his clerical quarters, which are so charmingly
described in the Reminiscences.
Next month, November 1819, when Irving was forming
acquaintance with Dr. Chalmers’s congregation, and they hardly
knew what to make of him,—some thinking him more like a “cavalry
officer” or “brigand chief” than a young minister of the Gospel,—
Carlyle was back in Edinburgh. His uncertainties and speculations as
to his future, with the dream of emigration to America, had turned
themselves into a vague notion that, if he gave himself to the study of
law, he might possibly be able to muster somehow the two or three
hundreds of pounds that would be necessary to make him a member
of the Edinburgh Bar, and qualify him for walking up and down the
floor of the Parliament House in wig and gown, like the grandees he
had seen there in his memorable first visit to the place, with Tom
Smail, ten years before. For that object residence in Edinburgh was
essential, and so he had returned thither. His lodgings now seem to
be no longer in Carnegie Street, but in Bristo Street,—possibly in the
rooms which Irving had left.
No portion of the records relating to Carlyle’s connection with
our University has puzzled me more than that which refers to his law
studies after he had abandoned Divinity. From a memorandum of his
own, quoted by Mr. Froude, but without date, it distinctly appears
that he attended “Hume’s Lectures on Scotch Law”; and Mr. Froude
adds that his intention of becoming an advocate, and his consequent
perseverance in attendance on the “law lectures” in the Edinburgh
University, continued for some time. Our records, however, are not
quite clear in the matter. In our Matriculation Book for the session
1819–20, where every law student, as well as every arts student and
every medical student, was bound to enter his name, paying a
matriculation-fee of 10s., I find two Thomas Carlyles, both from
Dumfriesshire. One, whose signature, in a clear and elegant hand, I
should take to be that of our Carlyle at that date, enters himself as
“Thomas Carlyle, Dumfries,” with the addition “5 Lit.,” signifying
that he had attended the Literary or Arts Classes in four preceding
sessions. The matriculation number of this Thomas Carlyle is 825.
The other, whose matriculation number is 1257, enters himself, in a
somewhat boyish-looking hand, as “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfriesshire,”
with the addition “2 Lit.,” signifying that he had attended one
previous session in an Arts Class. Now, all depends on the
construction of the appearances of those two Carlyles in the
independent class-lists that have been preserved, in the handwritings
of the Professors, for that session of their common matriculation and
for subsequent sessions. Without troubling the reader with the
puzzling details, I may say that the records present an alternative of
two suppositions: viz. either (1) Both the Thomas Carlyles who
matriculated for 1819–20 became law students that session; in which
case the “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfriesshire,” notwithstanding the too
boyish-looking handwriting, and the gross misdescription of him as
“2 Lit.,” was our Carlyle; or (2) Only one of the two became a law
student; in which case he was the “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfries,” or
our Carlyle, using “Dumfries” as the name of his county, and
correctly describing himself as “5 Lit.” On the first supposition it has
to be reported that Carlyle’s sole attendance in a law class was in the
Scots Law Class of Professor David Hume for the session 1819–20,
while the other Carlyle was in the Civil Law Class for “the Institutes”
that session, but reappeared in other classes in later sessions. On the
second supposition (which also involves a mistake in the
registration), Carlyle attended both the Scots Law Class and the
“Institutes” department of the Civil Law Class in 1819–20, and so
began a new career of attendance in the University, which extended
to 1823 thus:—
Session 1819–20: Hume’s Scots Law Class, and Professor
Alexander Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Institutes”).
Session 1820–21: Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Pandects”), and Hope’s
Chemistry Class (where the name in the Professor’s list of his
 vast class of 460 students is spelt “Thomas Carlisle”).
Session 1821–22: No attendance.
Session 1822–23: Scots Law Class a second time, under the new
Professor, George Joseph Bell (Hume having just died).[21]
With this knowledge that Carlyle did for some time after 1819
contemplate the Law as a profession,—certain as to the main fact,
though a little doubtful for the present in respect of the extent of
time over which his law studies were continued,—let us proceed to
his Edinburgh life in general for the five years from 1819 to 1824. He
was not, indeed, wholly in Edinburgh during those five years. Besides
absences now and then on brief visits, e.g. to Irving in Glasgow or
elsewhere in the west, we are to remember his stated vacations,
longer or shorter, in the summer and autumn, at his father’s house at
Mainhill in Annandale; and latterly there was a term of residence in
country quarters of which there will have to be special mention at the
proper date. In the main, however, from 1819 to 1824 Carlyle was an
Edinburgh man. His lodgings were, first, in Bristo Street, but
afterwards and more continuously at No. 3 Moray Street,—not, of
course, the great Moray Place of the aristocratic West End, but a
much obscurer namesake, now re-christened “Spey Street,” at right
angles to Pilrig Street, just off Leith Walk. It was in these lodgings
that he read and mused; it was in the streets of Edinburgh, or on the
heights on her skirts, that he had his daily walks; the few friends and
acquaintances he had any converse with were in Edinburgh; and it
was with Edinburgh and her affairs that as yet he considered his own
future fortunes as all but certain to be bound up.
No more extraordinary youth ever walked the streets of
Edinburgh, or of any other city, than the Carlyle of those years.
Those great natural faculties, unmistakably of the order called
genius, and that unusual wealth of acquirement, which had been
recognised in him as early as 1814 by such intimate friends as
Murray, and more lately almost with awe by Margaret Gordon, had
been baulked of all fit outcome, but were still manifest to the
discerning. When Irving speaks of them, or thinks of them, it is with
a kind of amazement. At the same time that strange moodiness of
character, that lofty pride and intolerance, that roughness and
unsociableness of temper, against which Margaret Gordon and
others had warned him as obstructing his success, had hardened
themselves into settled habit. So it appeared; but in reality the word
“habit” is misleading. Carlyle’s moroseness, if we let that poor word
pass in the meantime for a state of temper which it would take many
words, and some of them much softer and grander, to describe
adequately, was an innate and constitutional distinction. It is worth
while to dwell for a moment on the contrast between him in this
respect and the man who was his immediate predecessor in the
series of really great literary Scotsmen. If there ever was a soul of
sunshine and cheerfulness, of universal blandness and good
fellowship, it was that with which Walter Scott came into the world.
When Carlyle was born, twenty-four years afterwards, it was as if the
Genius of Literature in Scotland, knowing that vein to have been
amply provided for, and abhorring duplicates, had tried almost the
opposite variety, and sent into the world a soul no less richly
endowed, and stronger in the speculative part, but whose cardinal
peculiarity should be despondency, discontentedness, and sense of
pain. From his childhood upwards, Carlyle had been, as his own
mother said of him, “gey ill to deal wi’” (“considerably difficult to
deal with”), the prey of melancholia, an incarnation of wailing and
bitter broodings, addicted to the black and dismal view of things.
With all his studies, all the development of his great intellect, all his
strength in humour and in the wit and insight which a lively sense of
the ludicrous confers, he had not outgrown this stubborn gloominess
of character, but had brought it into those comparatively mature
years of his Edinburgh life with which we are now concerned. His
despondency, indeed, seems then to have been at its very worst. A
few authentications may be quoted:—
April, 1819.—“As to my own projects, I am sorry, on several accounts, that I
can give no satisfactory account to your friendly inquiries. A good portion of my
life is already mingled with the past eternity; and, for the future, it is a dim scene,
on which my eyes are fixed as calmly and intensely as possible,—to no purpose.
The probability of my doing any service in my day and generation is certainly not
very strong.”[22]
March, 1820.—“I am altogether an —— creature. Timid, yet not humble, weak,
yet enthusiastic, nature and education have rendered me entirely unfit to force my
way among the thick-skinned inhabitants of this planet. Law, I fear, must be given
up: it is a shapeless mass of absurdity and chicane.”[23]
October, 1820.—“No settled purpose will direct my conduct, and the next
scene of this fever-dream is likely to be as painful as the last. Expect no account of
my prospects, for I have no prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being
thrown from another planet on this terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim among its
possessors; I have no share in their pursuits; and life is to me a pathless, a waste
and howling, wilderness,—surface barrenness, its verge enveloped under dark-
brown shade.”[24]
March 9, 1821.—“Edinburgh, with all its drawbacks, is the only scene for me.
In the country I am like an alien, a stranger and pilgrim from a far-distant land. I
must endeavour most sternly, for this state of things cannot last; and, if health do
but revisit me, as I know she will, it shall ere long give place to a better. If I grow
seriously ill, indeed, it will be different; but, when once the weather is settled and
dry, exercise and care will restore me completely. I am considerably clearer than I
was, and I should have been still more so had not this afternoon been wet, and so
prevented me from breathing the air of Arthur Seat, a mountain close beside us,
where the atmosphere is pure as a diamond, and the prospect grander than any
you ever saw,—the blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills swelling
gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags and precipices at our feet, where
not a hillock rears its head unsung; with Edinburgh at their base, clustering
proudly over her rugged foundations, and covering with a vapoury mantle the
jagged, black, venerable masses of stonework that stretch far and wide, and show
like a city of Fairyland.... I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down,
and the moon’s fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as it is, was riding quietly
above me.”[25]
Reminiscence in 1867.—“Hope hardly dwelt in me ...; only fierce resolution in
abundance to do my best and utmost in all honest ways, and to suffer as silently
and stoically as might be, if it proved (as too likely!) that I could do nothing. This
kind of humour, what I sometimes called of “desperate hope,” has largely attended
me all my life. In short, as has been indicated elsewhere, I was advancing towards
huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this my Edinburgh
purgatory, and had to clean and purify myself in penal fire of various kinds for
several years coming, the first and much the worst two or three of which were to be
enacted in this once-loved city. Horrible to think of in part even yet!”[26]
What was the cause of such habitual wretchedness, such lowness
of spirits, in a young man between his five-and-twentieth and his
seven-and-twentieth year? In many external respects his life hitherto
had been even unusually fortunate. His parentage was one of which
he could be proud, and not ashamed; he had a kindly home to return
to; he had never once felt, or had occasion to feel, the pinch of actual
poverty, in any sense answering to the name or notion of poverty as
it was understood by his humbler countrymen. He had been in
honourable employments, which many of his compeers in age would
have been glad to get; and he had about £100 of saved money in his
pocket,—a sum larger than the majority of the educated young
Scotsmen about him could then finger, or perhaps ever fingered
afterwards in all their lives. All this has to be distinctly remembered;
for the English interpretations of Carlyle’s early “poverty,”
“hardships,” etc., are sheer nonsense. By the Scottish standard of his
time, by the standard of say two-thirds of those who had been his
fellows in the Divinity Hall of Edinburgh, Carlyle’s circumstances so
far had been even enviable. The cause of his abnormal unhappiness
was to be found in himself. Was it, then, his ill-health,—that fearful
“dyspepsia” which had come upon him in his twenty-third year, or
just after his transit from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh, and which clung to
him, as we know, to the very end of his days? There can be no doubt
that this was a most important factor in the case. His dyspepsia must
have intensified his gloom, and may have accounted for those
occasional excesses of his low spirits which verged on hypochondria.
But, essentially, the gloom was there already, brought along with him
from those days, before his twenty-third year, when, as he told the
blind American clergyman Milburn, he was still “the healthy and
hardy son of a hardy and healthy Scottish dalesman,” and had not yet
become “conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement
called a stomach.”[27] In fact, as Luther maintained when he
denounced the Roman Catholic commentators as gross and carnal
fellows for their persistently physical interpretation of Paul’s “thorn
in the flesh,” as if there could be no severe enough “thorn” of a
spiritual kind, the mere pathological explanations which physicians
are apt to trust to will not suffice in such instances. What, then, of
those spiritual distresses, arising from a snapping of the traditional
and paternal creed, and a soul left thus rudderless for the moment,
which Luther recognised as the most terrible, and had experienced in
such measure himself?
That there must have been distress to Carlyle in his wrench of
himself away from the popular religious faith, the faith of his father
and mother, needs no argument. The main evidence, however, is that
his clear intellect had cut down like a knife between him and the
theology from which he had parted, leaving no ragged ends. The
main evidence is that, though he had some central core of faith still
to seek as a substitute,—though he was still agitating in his mind in a
new way the old question of his Divinity Hall exegesis, Num detur
Religio Naturalis?, and had not yet attained to that light, describable
as a fervid, though scrupulously unfeatured, Theism or
Supernaturalism, in the blaze of which he was to live all his after-life,
—yet he was not involved in the coil of those ordinary “doubts” and
“backward hesitations” of which we hear so much, and sometimes so
cantingly, in feebler biographies. There is, at all events, no record in
his case of any such efforts as those of Coleridge to rest in a
theosophic refabrication out of the wrecks of the forsaken orthodoxy.
On the contrary, whatever of more positive illumination, whatever of
moral or really religious rousing, had yet to come, he appears to have
settled once for all into a very definite condition of mind as to the
limits of the intrinsically possible or impossible for the human
intellect in that class of considerations.
Yet another cause of despondency and low spirits, however, may
suggest itself as feasible. No more in Carlyle than in any other ardent
and imaginative young man at his age was there a deficiency of those
love-languors and love-dreamings which are the secrets of many a
masculine sadness. There are traces of them in his letters; and we
may well believe that in his Edinburgh solitude he was pursued for a
while by the pangs of “love disprized” in the image of his lost
Margaret Gordon.
Add this cause to all the others, however, and let them all have
their due weight and proportion, and it still remains true that the
main and all-comprehending form of Carlyle’s grief and dejection in
those Edinburgh days was that of a great sword in too narrow a
scabbard, a noble bird fretting in its cage, a soul of strong energies
and ambitions measuring itself against common souls and against
social obstructions, and all but frantic for lack of employment.
Schoolmastering he had given up with detestation; the Church he
had given up with indifference; the Law had begun to disgust him, or
was seeming problematical. Where others could have rested, happy
in routine, or at least acquiescent, Carlyle could not. What was this
Edinburgh, for example, in the midst of which he was living, the
solitary tenant of a poor lodging, not even on speaking terms with
those that were considered her magnates, the very best of whom he
was conscious of the power to equal, and, if necessary, to vanquish
and lay flat? We almost see on his face some such defiant glare round
Edinburgh, as if, whatever else were to come, it was this innocent
and unheeding Edinburgh that he would first of all take by the throat
and compel to listen.
 Authentication may be again necessary, and may bring some
elucidation with it. “The desire which, in common with all men, I feel
for conversation and social intercourse is, I find,” he had written to a
correspondent in November 1818, “enveloped in a dense, repulsive
atmosphere, not of vulgar mauvaise honte, though such it is
generally esteemed, but of deeper feelings, which I partly inherit
from nature, and which are mostly due to the undefined station I
have hitherto occupied in society.”[28] Again, to a correspondent in
March 1820, “The fate of one man is a mighty small concern in the
grand whole in this best of all possible worlds. Let us quit the subject,
—with just one observation more, which I throw out for your benefit,
should you ever come to need such an advice. It is to keep the
profession you have adopted, if it be at all tolerable. A young man
who goes forth into the world to seek his fortune with those lofty
ideas of honour and uprightness which a studious secluded life
naturally begets, will in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, if
friends and other aids are wanting, fall into the sere, the yellow
leaf.”[29] These feelings were known to all his friends, so that Carlyle’s
despondency over his poor social prospects, his enormous power of
complaint, or, as the Scots call it, “of pityin’ himsel’,” was as familiar
a topic with them as with his own family.
No one sympathised with him more, or wrote more
encouragingly to him than Irving from Glasgow; and it is from some
of Irving’s letters that we gather the information that certain
peculiarities in Carlyle’s own demeanour were understood to be
operating against his popularity even within the limited Edinburgh
circle in which he did for the present move. “Known you must be
before you can be employed,” Irving writes to him in December 1819.
“Known you will not be,” he proceeds, “for a winning, attaching,
accommodating man, but for an original, commanding, and rather
self-willed man.... Your utterance is not the most favourable. It
convinces, but does not persuade; and it is only a very few (I can
claim place for myself) that it fascinates. Your audience is worse.
They are, generally (I exclude myself), unphilosophical, unthinking
drivellers, who lie in wait to catch you in your words, and who give
you little justice in the recital, because you give their vanity or self-
esteem little justice, or even mercy, in the encounter. Therefore, my
dear friend, some other way is to be sought for.”[30] In a letter in
March 1820 Irving returns to the subject. “Therefore it is, my dear
Carlyle,” he says, “that I exhort you to call in the finer parts of your
mind, and to try to present the society about you with those more
ordinary displays which they can enjoy. The indifference with which
they receive them [your present extraordinary displays], and the
ignorance with which they treat them, operate on the mind like gall
and wormwood. I would entreat you to be comforted in the
possession of your treasures, and to study more the times and
persons to which you bring them forth. When I say your treasures, I
mean not your information so much, which they will bear the display
of for the reward and value of it, but your feelings and affections;
which, being of finer tone than theirs, and consequently seeking a
keener expression, they are apt to mistake for a rebuke of their own
tameness, or for intolerance of ordinary things, and too many of
them, I fear, for asperity of mind.”[31] This is Margaret Gordon’s
advice over again; and it enables us to add to our conception of
Carlyle in those days of his Edinburgh struggling and obstruction the
fact of his fearlessness and aggressiveness in speech, his habit even
then of that lightning rhetoric, that boundless word-audacity, with
sarcasms and stinging contempts falling mercilessly upon his
auditors themselves, which characterised his conversation to the last.
This habit, or some of the forms of it, he had derived, he thought,
from his father.[32]
Private mathematical teaching was still for a while Carlyle’s
most immediate resource. We hear of two or three engagements of
the kind at his fixed rate of two guineas per month for an hour a day,
and also of one or two rejected proposals of resident tutorship away
from Edinburgh. Nor had he given up his own prosecution of the
higher mathematics. My recollection is that he used to connect the
break-down of his health with his continued wrestlings with
Newton’s Principia even after he had left Kirkcaldy for Edinburgh;
and he would speak of the grassy slopes of the Castle Hill, then not
railed off from Princes Street, as a place where he liked to lie in fine
weather, poring over that or other books. His readings, however,
were now, as before, very miscellaneous. The Advocates’ Library, to
which he had access, I suppose, through some lawyer of his
acquaintance, afforded him facilities in the way of books such as he
had never before enjoyed. “Lasting thanks to it, alone of Scottish
institutions,” is his memorable phrase of obligation to this Library;
and of his appetite for reading and study generally we may judge
from a passage in one of his earlier letters, where he says, “When I
am assaulted by those feelings of discontent and ferocity which
solitude at all times tends to produce, and by that host of miserable
little passions which are ever and anon attempting to disturb one’s
repose, there is no method of defeating them so effectual as to take
them in flank by a zealous course of study.”
One zealous course of study to which he had set himself just
after settling in Edinburgh from Kirkcaldy, if not a little before, was
the study of the German language. French, so far as the power of
reading it was concerned, he had acquired sufficiently in his
boyhood; Italian, to some less extent, had come easily enough; but
German tasked his perseverance and required time. He was
especially diligent in it through the years 1819 and 1820, with such a
measure of success that in August in the latter year he could write to
one friend, “I could tell you much about the new Heaven and new
Earth which a slight study of German literature has revealed to me,”
and in October of the same year to another, “I have lived riotously
with Schiller, Goethe, and the rest: they are the greatest men at
present with me.” His German readings were continued, and his
admiration of the German Literature grew.
Was it not time that Carlyle should be doing something in
Literature himself? Was not Literature obviously his true vocation,—
the very vocation for which his early companions, such as Murray,
had discerned his pre-eminent fitness as long ago as 1814, and to
which the failure of his successive experiments in established
professions had ever since been pointing? To this, in fact, Irving had
been most importunately urging him in those letters, just quoted, in
which, after telling him that, by reason of the asperity and irritating
contemptuousness of his manner, he would never be rightly
appreciated by his usual appearances in society, or even by his
splendid powers of talk, he had summed up his advice in the words
“Some other way is to be sought for.” What Irving meant, and urged
at some length, and with great practicality, in those letters, was that
Carlyle should at once think of some literary attempts, congenial to
his own tastes, and yet of as popular a kind as possible, and aim at a
connection with the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood.
Carlyle himself, as we learn, had been already, for a good while,
turning his thoughts now and then in the same direction. It is utterly
impossible that a young man who for five years already had been
writing letters to his friends the English style of which moved them
to astonishment, as it still moves to admiration those who now read
the specimens of them that have been recovered, should not have
been exercising his literary powers privately in other things than
letters, and so have had beside him, before 1819, a little stock of
pieces suitable for any magazine that would take them. One such
piece, he tells us, had been sent over from Kirkcaldy in 1817 to the
editor of some magazine in Edinburgh. It was a piece of “the
descriptive tourist kind,” giving some account of Carlyle’s first
impressions of the Yarrow country, so famous in Scottish song and
legend, as visited by him in one of his journeys from Edinburgh to
Annandale. What became of it he never knew, the editor having
returned no answer.[33] Although, after this rebuff, there was no new
attempt at publication from Kirkcaldy, there can be little doubt that
he had then a few other things by him, and not in prose only, with
which he could have repeated the trial. It is very possible that several
specimens of those earliest attempts of his in prose and verse,
published by himself afterwards when periodicals were open to him,
remain yet to be disinterred from their hiding-places; but two have
come to light. One is a story of Annandale incidents published
anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine for January 1831, under the title
“Cruthers and Jonson, or the Outskirts of Life: a True Story,” but
certified by Mr. William Allingham, no doubt on Carlyle’s own
information, to have been the very first of all his writings intended
for the press.[34] The other is of more interest to us here, from its
picturesque oddity in connection with Carlyle’s early Edinburgh life.
It is entitled “Peter Nimmo,” and was published in Fraser’s Magazine
for February 1831, the next number after that containing Cruthers
and Jonson.
Within my own memory, and in fact to as late as 1846, there was
known about the precincts of Edinburgh University a singular being
called Peter Nimmo, or, by tradition of some jest played upon him,
Sir Peter Nimmo. He was a lank, miserable, mendicant-looking
object, of unknown age, with a blue face, often scarred and patched,
and garments not of the cleanest, the chief of which was a long,
threadbare, snuff-brown great-coat. His craze was that of attending
the University class-rooms and listening to the lectures. So long had
this craze continued that a University session without “Sir Peter
Nimmo” about the quadrangle, for the students to laugh at and
perpetrate practical jokes upon, would have been an interruption of
the established course of things; but, as his appearance in a class-
room had become a horror to the Professors, and pity for him had
passed into a sense that he was a nuisance and cause of disorder,
steps had at last been taken to prevent his admission, or at least to
reduce his presence about college to a minimum. They could not get
rid of him entirely, for he had imbedded himself in the legends and
the very history of the University.——Going back from the forties to
the thirties of the present century, we find Peter Nimmo then already
in the heyday of his fame. In certain reminiscences which the late Dr.
Hill Burton wrote of his first session at the University, viz. in 1830–
31, when he attended Wilson’s Moral Philosophy Class, Peter is an
important figure. “A dirty, ill-looking lout, who had neither wit
himself, nor any quality with a sufficient amount of pleasant
grotesqueness in it to create wit in others,” is Dr. Hill Burton’s
description of him then; and the impression Burton had received of
his real character was that he was “merely an idly-inclined and
stupidish man of low condition, who, having once got into practice as
a sort of public laughing-stock, saw that the occupation paid better
than honest industry, and had cunning enough to keep it up.” He
used to obtain meals, Burton adds, by calling at various houses,
sometimes assuming an air of simple good faith when the students
got hold of the card of some civic dignitary and presented it to him
with an inscribed request for the honour of Sir Peter Nimmo’s
company at dinner; and in the summer-time he wandered about,
introducing himself at country houses. Once, Burton had heard, he
had obtained access to Wordsworth, using Professor Wilson’s name
for his passport; and, as he had judiciously left all the talk to
Wordsworth, the impression he had left was such that the poet had
afterwards spoken of his visitor as “a Scotch baronet, eccentric in
appearance, but fundamentally one of the most sensible men he had
ever met with.”[35]——Burton, however, though thus familiar with
“Sir Peter” in 1830–1, was clearly not aware of his real standing by
his University antecedents. Whatever he was latterly, he had at one
time been a regularly matriculated student. I have traced him in the
University records back and back long before Dr. Burton’s knowledge
of him, always paying his matriculation-fee and always taking out
one or two classes. In the Lapsus Linguæ, or College Tatler, a small
satirical magazine of the Edinburgh students for the session 1823–
24, “Dr. Peter Nimmo” is the title of one of the articles, the matter
consisting of clever imaginary extracts from the voluminous
notebooks, scientific and philosophical, of this “very sage man,
whose abilities, though at present hid under a bushel, will soon blaze
forth, and give a very different aspect to the state of literature in
Scotland.” In the session of 1819–20, when Carlyle was attending the
Scots Law Class, Peter Nimmo was attending two of the medical
classes, having entered himself in the matriculation book, in
conspicuously large characters, as “Petrus Buchanan Nimmo,
Esquire, &c., Dumbartonshire,” with the addition that he was in
the 17th year of his theological studies. Six years previously, viz. in
1813–14, he is registered as in the 8th year of his literary course. In
1811–12 he was one of Carlyle’s fellow-students in the 2d
Mathematical Class under Leslie; and in 1810–11 he was with Carlyle
in the 1st Mathematical Class and also in the Logic Class. Peter seems
to have been lax in his dates; but there can be no doubt that he was a
known figure about Edinburgh University before Carlyle entered it,
and that the whole of Carlyle’s University career, as of the careers of
all the students of Edinburgh University for another generation, was
spent in an atmosphere of Peter Nimmo. What Peter had been
originally it is difficult to make out. The probability is that he had
come up about the beginning of the century as a stupid youth from
Dumbartonshire, honestly destined for the Church, and that he had
gradually or suddenly broken down into the crazed being who could
not exist but by haunting the classes for ever, and becoming a fixture
about the University buildings. He used to boast of his high family.
Such was the pitiful object that had been chosen by Carlyle for
the theme of what was perhaps his first effort in verse. For the
essential portion of his article on Peter Nimmo is a metrical
“Rhapsody,” consisting of a short introduction, five short parts, and
an epilogue. In the introduction, which the prefixed motto, “Numeris
fertur lege solutis,” avows to be in hobbling measure, we see the
solitary bard in quest of a subject:—
Art thou lonely, idle, friendless, toolless, nigh distract,
Hand in bosom,—jaw, except for chewing, ceased to act?
Matters not, so thou have ink and see the Why and How;
Drops of copperas-dye make There a Here, and Then a Now.
 Must the brain lie fallow simply since it is alone,
And the heart, in heaths and splashy weather, turn to stone?
Shall a living Man be mute as twice-sold mackerel?
If not speaking, if not acting, I can write,—in doggerel.
For a subject? Earth is wonder-filled; for instance, Peter Nimmo:
Think of Peter’s “being’s mystery”: I will sing of him O!

In the first part Peter is introduced to us by his physiognomy and

appearance:—
Thrice-loved Nimmo! art thou still, in spite of Fate,
Footing those cold pavements, void of meal and mutton,
To and from that everlasting College-gate,
With thy blue hook-nose, and ink-horn hung on button?

Six more stanzas of the same hobbling metre inform us that Peter is
really a harmless pretender, who, for all his long attendance in the
college-classes, could not yet decline τιμή; after which, in the second
part, there is an imagination of what his boyhood may have been. A
summer Sabbath-day, under a blue sky, in some pleasant country
neighbourhood, is imagined, with Peter riding on a donkey in the
vicinity, and meditating his own future:—
Dark lay the world in Peter’s labouring breast:
Here was he (words of import strange),—He here!
Mysterious Peter, on mysterious hest:
But Whence, How, Whither, nowise will appear.

Thus meditating on the “marvellous universe” into which he has

come, and on his own possible function in it, Peter, caught by the
sight of the little parish-kirk upon a verdant knoll, determines, as the
donkey canters on with him, that God calls him to be a priest. His
transition from Grammar School to College thus accounted for, the
third part sings of his first collegeraptures in three stanzas. In the
fourth part he is the poor mendicant Peter who has become the
Wandering Jew of the University, and whose mode of living is a
problem:—
Where lodges Peter? How his pot doth boil,
This truly knoweth, guesseth, no man;
He spins not, neither does he toil;
Lives free as ancient Greek or Roman.
Whether he may not roost on trees at nights is a speculation; but
sometimes he comes to the rooms of his class-fellows. The fifth part
of the rhapsody tells of one such nocturnal visit of his (mythical, we
must hope) to the rooms of the bard who is now singing:—
At midnight hour did Peter come;
Right well I knew his tap and tread;
With smiles I placed two pints of rum
Before him, and one cold sheep’s-head.

Peter, thus made comfortable, entertains his host with the genealogy
of his family, the far-famed Nimmos, and with his own great
prospects of various kinds, till, the rum being gone and the sheep’s
head reduced to a skull, he falls from his chair “dead-drunk,” and is
sent off in a wheel-barrow! The envoy moralizes the whole rather
indistinctly in three stanzas, each with this chorus in italics:—
Sure ’tis Peter, sure ’tis Peter:
Life’s a variorum.

Verse, if we may judge from this grim specimen,[36] was not

Carlyle’s element. Hence, though he had not yet abandoned verse
altogether, and was to leave us a few lyrics, original or translated,
which one would not willingly let die, it had been to prose
performances that he looked forward when, on bidding farewell to
Kirkcaldy, he included “writing for the booksellers” among the
employments he hoped to obtain in Edinburgh. Scientific subjects
had seemed the most promising: and among the books before him in
“those dreary evenings in Bristo Street” in 1819 were materials for a
projected life of the young astronomer Horrox. Irving’s letter of
December 1819 was the probable cause of that attempt upon the
Edinburgh Review, in the shape of an article on M. Pictet’s Theory of
Gravitation, of which we hear in the Reminiscences. The manuscript,
carefully dictated to a young Annandale disciple who wrote a very
legible hand, was left by Carlyle himself, with a note, at the great
Jeffrey’s house in George Street; but, whether because the subject
was not of the popular kind which Irving had recommended, or
because editors are apt to toss aside all such chance offers, nothing
more was heard of it.
 This was in the cold winter of 1819–20; and, to all appearance,
Carlyle might have languished without literary employment of any
kind for a good while longer, had he not been found out by Dr. David
Brewster, afterwards Sir David. The Edinburgh Encyclopædia,
which Brewster had begun to edit in 1810, when he was in his
twenty-ninth year, and which had been intended to be in twelve
volumes, thick quarto, double-columns, had now, in 1820, reached
its fourteenth volume, and had not got farther than the letter M.
Among the contributors had been, or were, these: Babbage,
Berzelius, Biot, Campbell the poet, the second Herschel, Dionysius
Lardner, Lockhart, Oersted, Peacock of Cambridge, Telford, and
other celebrities at a distance; besides such lights nearer at hand as
Brewster himself, Graham Dalzell, the Rev. Dr. David Dickson, Sir
Thomas Dick Lauder, the Rev. Dr. Duncan of Ruthwell, Professor
Dunbar, the Rev. Dr. John Fleming, the Rev. Dr. Robert Gordon,
David Irving, Professor Jameson, the Rev. Dr. John Lee, Professor
Leslie, and the Rev. Dr. Andrew Thomson. This was very good
company in which to make a literary début, were it only in such
articles of hackwork as might be intrusted conveniently to an
unknown young man on the spot. The articles intrusted to Carlyle
were not wholly of this kind; for I observe that he came in just as the
poet Campbell had ceased to contribute, and for articles continuing
the line of some of Campbell’s. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore,
were his first six, all under the letter M, and all supplied in 1820,
with the subscribed initials “T.C.”; and between that year and 1823
he was to contribute ten more, running through the letter N, and
ending in the sixteenth volume, under the letter P, with Mungo Park,
William Pitt the Elder, and William Pitt the Younger. It was no bad
practice in short, compact articles of information, and may have
brought him in between £35 and £50 altogether,—in addition to
something more for casual bits of translation done for Brewster.
More agreeable to himself, and better paid in proportion, may have
been two articles which he contributed to the New Edinburgh
Review, a quarterly which was started in July 1821, by Waugh and
Innes of Edinburgh, as a successor to the previous Edinburgh
Monthly Review, and which came to an end, as might have been
predicted from its title, in its eighth number in April 1823. In the
second number of this periodical, in October 1821, appeared an
article of 21 pages by Carlyle on Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends,
to be followed in the fourth number, in April 1822, by one of 18 pages
on Goethe’s Faust.
Even with these beginnings of literary occupation, there was no
improvement, as far as to 1822 at least, in Carlyle’s spirits. “Life was
all dreary, ‘eerie,’” he says, “tinted with the hues of imprisonment
and impossibility.” The chief bursts of sunshine, and his nearest
approaches to temporary happiness, were in the occasional society of
Irving, whether in visits to Irving in Glasgow, or in the autumn
meetings and strolls with Irving in their common Annandale, or in
Irving’s visits now and then to Edinburgh. It was in one of the
westward excursions, when the two friends were on Drumclog Moss,
and were talking together in the open air on that battle-field of the
Covenanters, that the good Irving wound from Carlyle the confession
that he no longer thought as Irving did of the Christian Religion. This
was in 1820.
More memorable still was that return visit of Irving to
Edinburgh, in June 1821, when he took Carlyle with him to
Haddington, and introduced him, at the house of the widowed Mrs.
Welsh, to that lady’s only child, Jane Baillie Welsh. Irving’s former
pupil, and thought of by him as not impossibly to be his wife even
yet, though his Kirkcaldy engagement interfered, she was not quite
twenty years of age, but the most remarkable girl in all that
neighbourhood. Of fragile and graceful form, features pretty rather
than regular, with a complexion of creamy pale, black hair over a
finely arched forehead, and very soft and brilliant black eyes, she had
an intellect fit, whether for natural faculty or culture, to be the
feminine match of either of the two men that now stood before her.
——Thirty years afterwards, and when she had been the wife of
Carlyle for four-and-twenty years, I had an account of her as she
appeared in those days of her girlhood. It was from her old nurse, the
now famous “Betty”; to whom, on the occasion of a call of mine at
Chelsea as I was about to leave London for a short visit to Edinburgh,
she asked me to convey a small parcel containing some present. The
address given me was in one of the little streets in the Old Town, on
the dense slope down from the University to the back of the
Canongate; and, on my call there to deliver the parcel, I found the old
Haddington nurse in the person of a pleasant-mannered woman, not
quite so old as I had expected, keeping a small shop. Naturally, she
talked of her recollections of Mrs. Carlyle before her marriage; and
these, as near as possible, were her very words:—“Ah! when she was
young, she was a fleein’, dancin’, licht-heartit thing, Jeannie Welsh,
that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a’ at ance. There
was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher: and he cam
aboot her. Then there was Maister——[I forget who this was]. Then
there was Maister Carlyle himsel’; and he cam to finish her off, like.
I’m told he’s a great man noo, and unco’ muckle respeckit in
London.”——That was certainly a memorable day in 1821 when there
stood before the graceful and spirited girl in Haddington not only the
gigantic, handsome, black-haired Irving, whom she had known since
her childhood, but also the friend he had brought with him,—less tall
than Irving, of leaner and less handsome frame, but with head of the
most powerful shape, thick dark-brown hair several shades lighter
than her own, and an intenser genius than Irving’s visible in his deep
eyes, cliff-like brow, and sad face of a bilious ruddy. It was just about
this time that Irving used to rattle up his friend from his desponding
depths by the prophecy of the coming time when they would shake
hands across a brook as respectively first in British Divinity and in
British Literature, and when people, after saying “Both these fellows
are from Annandale,” would add “Where is Annandale?” The girl,
looking at the two, may have already been thinking of Irving’s jocular
prophecy.
A most interesting coincidence in time with the first visit to
Haddington would be established by the dating given by Mr. Froude
to a memorandum of Carlyle’s own respecting a passage in the
Sartor Resartus.
In that book, it may be remembered, Teufelsdröckh, after he has
deserted the popular faith, passes through three stages before he
attains to complete spiritual rest and manhood. For a while he is in
the state of mind called “The Everlasting No”; out of this he moves
on to a middle point, called “The Centre of Indifference”; and finally
he reaches “The Everlasting Yes.” The particular passage in question
is that in which, having long been in the stage of “The Everlasting
No,” the prey of the most miserable and pusillanimous fears, utterly
helpless and abject, there came upon him, all of a sudden, one sultry
day, as he was toiling along the wretched little street in Paris called
Rue Saint Thomas de l’Enfer, a kind of miraculous rousing and
illumination:—
“All at once, there rose a thought in me, and I asked myself: ‘What art thou
afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go
cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that
lies before thee? Death? Well, death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that
the Devil and Man may, will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst
thou not suffer whatso it be; and, as a child of freedom, though outcast, trample
Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet
it and defy it!’ And, as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my
whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown
strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was
changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it; but Indignation and grim fire-eyed
Defiance. Thus had the Everlasting No (das Ewige Nein) pealed authoritatively
through all the recesses of my Being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me
stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest.
Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation
and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No
had said, ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the
Devil’s)’; to which my whole Me made answer: ‘I am not thine, but Free, and for
ever hate thee!’ It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or
Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.”
In the memorandum of Carlyle’s which Mr. Froude quotes, he
declares that, while most of Sartor Resartus is mere symbolical
myth, this account of the sudden spiritual awakening of the
imaginary Teufelsdröckh in the Rue St. Thomas de l’Enfer in Paris is
a record of what happened literally to himself one day in Leith Walk,
Edinburgh. He remembered the incident well, he says in the
memorandum, and the very spot in Leith Walk where it occurred.
The memorandum itself does not date the incident; but Mr. Froude,
from authority in his possession, dates it in June 1821. As that was
the month of the first visit to Haddington, and first sight of Jane
Welsh, the coincidence is striking. But, whatever was the amount of
change in Carlyle’s mind thus associated with his recollection of the
Leith Walk incident of June 1821, it seems an exaggeration to say, as
Mr. Froude does, that this was the date of Carlyle’s complete
“conversion,” or spiritual “new birth,” in the sense that he then
“achieved finally the convictions, positive and negative, by which the
whole of his later life was governed.” In the first place, we have
Carlyle’s own most distinct assurance in his Reminiscences that his
complete spiritual conversion, or new-birth, in the sense of finding
that he had conquered all his “scepticisms, agonising doubtings,
fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-
gods,” and was emerging from a worse than Tartarus into “the
eternal blue of Ether,” was not accomplished till about four years
after the present date: viz. during the year which he spent at Hoddam
Hill between 26th May 1825 and 26th May 1826. In the second place,
it would be a mistake to suppose that the spiritual change which
Carlyle intended to describe, whether in his own case or in
Teufelsdröckh’s, by the transition from the “Everlasting No,” through
the “Centre of Indifference,” to the “Everlasting Yes,” was a change of
intellectual theory in relation to any system of theological doctrine.
The parting from the old theology, in the real case as well as in the
imaginary one, had been complete; and, though there had been a
continued prosecution of the question as to the possibility of a
Natural Religion, the form in which that question had been
prosecuted had not been so much the theoretical one between
Atheism or Materialism on the one hand and Theism or Spiritual
Supernaturalism on the other, as the moral or practical one of
personal duty on either assumption. That the “theory of the
universe” which Carlyle had adopted on parting with the old faith
was the spiritualistic one, whether a pure Theism or an imaginative
hypothesis of a struggle between the Divine and the Diabolic, can
hardly be doubted. No constitution such as his could have adopted
the other theory, or rested in it long. But, let the Theistic theory have
been adopted however passionately and held however tenaciously,
what a tumult of mind, what a host of despairs and questionings,
before its high abstractions could be brought down into a rule for
personal behaviour, and wrapt with any certainty or comfort round
one’s moving, living, and suffering self! How was that vast
Inconceivable related to this little life and its world; or was there no
relation at all but that of merciless and irresistible power? What of
the origin and purpose of all things visible, and of man amid them?
What of death and the future? It is of this course of mental groping
and questioning, inevitable even after the strongest general
assumption of the Theistic theory, that Carlyle seems to have taken
account in his description of a progress from the “Everlasting No” to
the “Everlasting Yes”; and what is most remarkable in his description
is that he makes every advance, every step gained, to depend not so
much on an access of intellectual light as on a sudden stirring at the