Selected Prose

by Charles Lamb

  Charles Lamb

  SELECTED PROSE

  Edited by

  Adam Phillips

  Contents

  Note on the Text

  Introduction

  SELECTED PROSE

  Early Essays and Sketches (1811–14)

  1. On the Genius and Character of Hogarth

  2. On the Tragedies of Shakspeare

  3. Edax on Appetite

  4. Hospita on the Immoderate Indulgence of the Pleasures of the Palate

  5. The Good Clerk, a Character

  6. Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion’

  From Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays of Elia (1833)

  7. The Two Races of Men

  8. A Quakers’ Meeting

  9. The Old and the New Schoolmaster

  10. Imperfect Sympathies

  11. Witches, and Other Night-Fears

  12. Grace Before Meat

  13. My First Play

  14. Distant Correspondents

  15. On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century

  16. Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading

  17. Confessions of a Drunkard

  18. A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig

  19. A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People

  20. A Character of the Late Elia

  21. The Old Margate Hoy

  22. The Superannuated Man

  23. The Convalescent

  24. Stage Illusion

  25. Sanity of True Genius

  26. Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art

  Essays and Sketches (1821–7)

  27. Review of the First Volume of Hazlitt’s Table Talk, 1821 (unpublished)

  28. Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esquire

  29. Readers Against the Grain

  30. A Vision of Horns

  31. The Illustrious Defunct 3272/

  32. Many Friends

  33. Dog Days

  34. A Character

  35. Charles Lamb’s Autobiography

  Letters

  Notes

  Biographical Index of Correspondents and Contemporaries

  Appendix One: The Party at Haydon’s

  Appendix Two: A Selection of Lamb’s Notes From Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets (1808)

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  SELECTED PROSE

  CHARLES LAMB, essayist, poet and letter writer, was born in the Inner Temple, London, in 1775. He was educated on a scholarship at Christ’s Hospital, and there became friendly with Coleridge. In 1789 he started work as a clerk, first with a city merchant, then in 1791 at the South Sea House, and finally in 1792 with the accountant’s office of the East India Company, where he remained until his retirement in March 1825. Lamb’s personal life was a tragic one: in 1796 his sister, Mary, in a mad seizure stabbed their mother to death. Thereafter Lamb agreed to take responsibility for Mary, who relapsed for brief periods into bouts of madness.

  Lamb’s literary career began as a writer of poetry, and in 1794 he and Coleridge wrote sonnets for the Morning Post, and Lamb also had four sonnets in Coleridge’s volume Poems on Various Subjects (1796) and more poems in the second edition, published in the following year. He also wrote some plays which were notably unsuccessful; a romance, Rosamund Gray (1798), and, with his sister, various works for children, including the extremely popular Tales from Shakespeare (1807). His first work of criticism was Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare (1808), which, together with other important works of that time, stimulated the growing interest in the older English dramatists. In August 1820 he started contributing essays under the name ‘Elia’ to the London Magazine, and in 1823 these were collected as Essays of Elia; another volume, The Last Essays of Elia, was published in 1833. Some of the best of Lamb’s writing is to be found in his letters (published posthumously in 1848). He died in 1834.

  ADAM PHILLIPS is a psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. His books include On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane, Side Effects, On Balance and Missing Out. He is also the co-author, with historian Barbara Taylor, of On Kindness.

  Note on the Text

  The texts used in this selection are from:

  Lucas, E. V. (ed.), The Letters of Charles Lamb: To Which are Added Those of his Sister, Mary Lamb, 3 vols., Dent and Methuen, 1935

  Lucas, E. V. (ed.), The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 7 vols., Methuen, 1903–5

  Macdonald, W. (ed.), The Works of Charles Lamb, 12 vols., Dent, 1903

  Marrs, W., Jr (ed.), The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, Cornell University Press, 1975– (3 volumes published so far, covering the years from 1796 to 1817)

  Introduction

  ‘Poor Lamb! Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius!’ Carlyle wrote in his diary after visiting Lamb in 1831. As a writer of appealing and slightly eccentric ‘occasional’ essays, Lamb endeared himself to late-Victorian and Edwardian readers. Although in his last years Lamb was by all accounts a sad caricature of the legend he was to inherit after his death, Carlyle was virtually unique for being quite uncharmed by him, distrusting the way he talked:

  All must be packed up into epigrammatic contrasts, startling exaggerations, claptraps that will get a plaudit from the galleries! I have heard a hundred anecdotes about William Hazlitt for example; yet cannot by ever so much cross-questioning even form to myself the smallest notion of how it really stood with him. Wearisome, inexpressibly wearisome to me is that sort of clatter; it is not walking (to the end of time you would never advance, for these persons indeed have no whither); it is not bounding and frisking in graceful, natural joy; it is dancing – a St Vitus’s dance … Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane … he is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners … Besides, he is now a confirmed, shameless drunkard.

  Carlyle’s contempt for Lamb is more finely perceptive than the generosity of some of his friends. The sense that there was, perhaps, something compulsively evasive about Lamb that was also indicative of a new, modern kind of sensibility goes some way to countering the legend that has exempted him from intelligent consideration. Writing to Marianne Hunt in 1823 Mary Shelley reports

  a good saying of Lamb’s: talking of someone he said, ‘Now some men who are very veracious are called matter-of-fact men; but such an one I should call a matter-of-lie man.’

  Writing his greatest essays under the enigmatic name of Elia, Lamb inherited the tradition of the eighteenth-century periodical essay of Addison, Steele and Johnson. Johnson, Lamb wrote, ‘deals out opinion, which he would have you take for argument; and is perpetually obtruding his own particular views of life for universal truths’. In his unpublished review of Hazlitt’s Table-Talk, Lamb described the new essay in which particular views of life ‘obtruded’ only if they were represented as universal truths. It had required the invention of a fictitious persona, Steele’s Isaac Bickerstaff, to allow ‘still further licence in the delivery of … peculiar humours and opinions’. This ‘further licence’ characterized the Essays of Elia, with their variety, their wish to improvise and not to improve, and their flair for ordinary life, full of his ‘peculiar humours and opinions’. Elia treated serious subjects, like the theories of history in ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’, in a beguiling, apparently ingenuous way. In ‘Grace before Meat’, or ‘A Bachelor’s Complaint’, he examined the arbitrary power of conventional views and manners with a disarming casualness, telling stories and alluding to bits and pieces of literature. The essays, like the letters, revealed not only Lamb’s idiosyncratic reading but a vigorous moral intelligence that was always whimsically understated
. His art made light of things. The invention of Elia released Lamb from the constraints of argument and universal truth, but it made the identity of Elia himself perplexing.

  In what was to be a life of passionate and dutiful commitment there was the pleasure of being elusive. In 1796, at the age of twenty-one, Lamb returned home from work to find that his sister, Mary, had stabbed their mother to death. Ten years his senior, she had been nursing both their aged parents for some time, and the signs of strain were such that on the morning before the murder, Lamb had tried and failed to get a Dr Pitcairn to see Mary. As the Morning Chronicle reported, ‘for a few days prior to this the family had observed some symptoms of insanity in her’. If the tragedy had occurred only three years later, under a new Act of Parliament Mary would have been imprisoned for life. As it was, in a characteristic reaction, and against the wishes of their elder brother, John, Lamb determined that she should not be sent away. Despite the coroner’s verdict of lunacy, Lamb got permission from the parish authorities to take responsibility for her for the rest of his life. Nearly every year, from 1797 to Lamb’s death in 1834, Mary relapsed for brief periods, sometimes months; during those years, as a consequence of her madness, they had to move house nearly a dozen times (see, for example, Letter 12).

  Lamb started work in the South Sea Company in 1791, almost immediately after leaving school, and his devotion to Mary led him to work for thirty-three years of his adult life as a clerk in the East India Company. Unlike the friends for which he has become famous – Hazlitt, Wordsworth and Coleridge – all Lamb’s working life was taken up by his routine employment; and all his writing, apart from the letters, was done after hours. It was the tragedy and duty of his life, with the apparently innocent charm of his writings, that gave Lamb what Roy Park has called ‘the status of cultural teddy-bear in the Victorian Establishment’.

  It is striking that the two stark facts of Lamb’s life, Mary’s madness and the actual nature of his work, are not documented in any detail, either by his contemporaries or by later writers. From early in the nineteenth century there was increasing interest in the lives and personalities of artists and a new market for biography. When Lewes and Talfourd, his first biographers, revealed after Mary’s death in 1847 the actual harshness of Lamb’s life, the legend was set. The Life tended to sentimentalize both his heroic oddness and his writings, isolating Lamb’s domestic concerns from the rest of his life and the period in which he lived – a time of almost revolutionary social and political unrest in England. Lamb nearly always wrote for liberal, reformist editors and publishers. But there was now good reason why there appeared to be in Lamb’s writings what Orwell describes in a different context as ‘no attention to the urgent problems of the moment, above all no politics in the narrower sense’. Even when Lamb was attacked as an ‘Anarchist’, with Coleridge, Southey and Lloyd (by the magazine the Anti-Jacobin, in 1797), Lloyd wrote in Lamb’s defence that he was ‘a man too much occupied with real and painful duties – duties of high personal self-denial – to trouble himself about speculative matters’.

  Lamb wrote finely of the risk that we might ‘sink the existence of vice and misery in our speculations’; but there seemed a determination on the part of his admirers, however patronizing or implausible, that Lamb should be exempted from his time. On the one hand there were the horrors of his ordinary life, his sister’s madness and the monotonous strain of his work; on the other there was his amusing, sometimes nostalgic charm as an essayist and exemplary friend, for whom the collecting and reading of literature was a relief from the reality of his circumstances. He became the man who, as Wilde said, ‘had, undoubtedly, great sorrows, or motives for sorrow, but … could console himself at a moment’s notice for the real tragedies of life by reading any one of the Elizabethan tragedies, provided it was in a folio edition’. He was an embodiment of a Victorian ideal of heroic renunciation. Having read one of Lamb’s letters, Thackeray is reported to have pressed it to his forehead with the words, ‘Saint Charles!’ Whether Lamb was silly or saintly, he was popular not as a writer but as the character suggested by his writings and reinvented within a coercive mythology of the writer as benign eccentric.

  Lamb was born in the Temple in London in 1775. His paternal grandfather had been a cobbler, but his descendants on both sides seem to have been mostly servants or agricultural labourers. His father, John Lamb, had come to London from Lincoln as a young man, having been a footman in Bath. He became a waiter at the barristers’ dinners in the Inner Temple Hall, and then worked for over fifty years as a general assistant to the barrister Samuel Salt, who became a Whig member of parliament. It was through Salt that Lamb was sponsored for a place at Christ’s Hospital School, where he met Coleridge and made, at least in retrospect, a distinctive impression. His friend Valentine Le Grice wrote:

  I never heard his name mentioned without the addition of Charles, although as there was no other boy of the name of Lamb, the addition was unnecessary; but there was an implied kindness in it, and it was a proof that his gentle manners excited that kindness.

  ‘Gentle’ was a word that a number of people were drawn to use about Lamb, and to which he took exception when Coleridge referred to him as ‘gentle-hearted Charles’ in his poem ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ (‘the meaning of gentle is equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited’, as Lamb wrote back to him – see Letters 14 and 16). Since oratory was a crucial part of the entrance examinations, Lamb’s stutter, coupled with his lack of finances, prevented him going up to university after school. Had he gone there, Wordsworth wrote, ‘he would have probably been preserved from the indulgences of social humours and fancies which were often injurious to himself, and causes of severe regret to his friends’.

  The accounts of Lamb by his contemporaries, from his schooldays onwards, stress three particular things about him: his great kindness, his lack of affectation and his considerable peculiarity, usually associated with his eccentric humour (‘His jokes would be the sharpest thing in the world,’ wrote Hazlitt, ‘but that they are blunted by his good nature. He wants malice – which is a pity’). Lamb’s infamous good nature, and the conviviality he writes about so brilliantly, created its own kind of demand on him. Every so often in the letters, the great pleasure he takes in his friends is interrupted by a feeling of harassment and a need for privacy. In 1806 he was driven to take a room to write in ‘to avoid my nocturnal – alias knock-eternal – visitors’. One of the first writers to celebrate the anonymity of the city, Lamb also wrote of the intrusiveness of commercial city life which brought with it new needs for privacy and new anxieties about that privacy. Some of Lamb’s less well-known essays (Edax, Hospita) glimpse at the rituals of genteel privacy with a fascination and sense of the bizarre that anticipate Dickens.

  Keats complains of having been ‘devastated and excruciated’ by Lamb’s ‘bad and repeated puns’, but after his death his friends insisted on the uniqueness of his humour which, as Proctor wrote in the Athenaeum in 1835, ‘was not affected. It was a style, – a habit.’ It was distinctive of Lamb’s character. ‘He could not enter a room without a joke,’ George Dyer wrote, ‘and he may be said to have almost conversed in extemporaneous humour.’ For most of his life people seem to have enjoyed Lamb (see Appendix One), though there was clearly something unsettling about his love of the excessive and the inappropriate. An article in the British Quarterly Review for May 1848 told of

  a whimsical recklessness which would occasionally beset him. To give an instance: he dined one day at the house of a friend of ours, and on entering the drawing-room after dinner, saw a gentleman standing in the middle of the room, whose bent shoulders, in school-boy leap-frog phrase, ‘made a back’; the temptation was too great for Lamb, he placed his hands on the unconscious victim and flew over his head, to the astonished indignation of many and amusement of the few.

  De Quincey writes of an evening in which Lamb fell asleep in his company:

  On awaking from his brief slu
mber, Lamb sat for some time in profound silence, and then with most startling rapidity, sang out – ‘Diddle, diddle, dumpkins’; not looking at me, but as if soliloquizing. For five minutes he relapsed into the same deep silence; from which again he started up into the same abrupt utterance of – Diddle, diddle, dumpkins. I could not help laughing aloud at the extreme energy of this sudden communication, contrasted with the deep silence that went before and followed. Lamb smilingly begged to know what I was laughing at, and with a look of as much surprise as if it were I that had done something unaccountable, and not himself.

  Lamb’s relish for punning suggests that there was something calculated about his absurd impulsiveness. He was also committed, by inclination, to a belief that being ridiculous was a form of intelligence. His ‘love of Fools’ has a subtlety beyond mere self-justification. He wrote in ‘All Fools’ Day’:

  I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his more cautious neighbour … I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you.

  It is perhaps not extraordinary that a man who felt himself to be so appropriated, by his sister, by his work, by his friends, should come to love the inappropriate.

  The combination of Lamb’s stutter and his temperament gave this same abrupt, impromptu quality to his conversation. Elia often addresses the reader directly in the essays, and it is as though the reader is being talked to, but in a leisurely way. In company Lamb always talked in bursts. Coleridge, writing to Godwin, said that Lamb’s taste

  acts so as to appear like the unmechanic simplicity of an Instinct – in brief he is worth an hundred men of mere Talents. Conversation with the latter tribe is like the use of leaden bells – one warms by exercise – Lamb every now & then eradiates, & the beam, tho’ single and fine as a hair, yet is rich with colours, & I both see & feel it.