Selected Prose

by Charles Lamb

  Lamb’s conversation was neither relentless nor rehearsed but almost inspired. But Thomas Wainewright, a fellow contributor to the London Magazine, noticed that there was also something tricky and divisive about his conversation:

  … if another began … he was liable to interrupt – or rather append, in a mode difficult to define, whether as misapprehensive or mischievous.

  It sometimes seemed as though Lamb feared not being misunderstood. He certainly found the pressure of seriousness unbearable. ‘It was at Godwin’s that I met him, with Holcroft and Coleridge,’ wrote Hazlitt, ‘where they were disputing fiercely which was the best – Man as he was, or man as he is to be. “Give me,” says Lamb, “man as he is not to be.” ’

  Lamb himself spent some time in a madhouse in 1795, three years after starting at the East India Company. Few details about this are known, apart from Lamb’s own account in a letter and a revealing piece by his schoolfriend Le Grice (see Letter 1, note 4). The relative secrecy surrounding his sister’s madness probably reflects how disreputable it seemed and how frightening it was. We get a glimpse in the letters of Lamb needing to get a strait-jacket for Mary when she breaks down on a journey, but he writes more often of how abject and lonely he feels when she is ill and has to go away. He occasionally writes about madness but shows no special interest in recording the details of Mary’s condition. Proctor’s Memoir of Lamb, published in 1866, provides the most vivid account of the kind of vigilance that was required of Lamb:

  If any exciting talk occurred he had to dismiss his friend, with a whisper. If any stupor, or extraordinary silence was observed, then he had to rouse her instantly. He has been seen to take the kettle from the fire and place it for a moment on her head-dress to startle her into recollection. He lived in a state of constant anxiety …

  Lamb, once he was at home, had to be consistently attentive to her mood, organizing their life together in a way that would protect her from too much excitement. It is possible that protecting her was a way of protecting himself from other things, and that the image of Lamb’s devoted service to his sister overlooks the mutuality of need in their relationship. They certainly complemented each other in ways that Mary, at least, could allow herself to question. She once wrote:

  I know my dismal faces have been almost as great a drawback upon Charles’s comfort, as his feverish, teazing ways have been upon mine. Our love for each other has been the torment of our lives hitherto.

  Lamb’s only proposal of marriage, to the actress Fanny Kelly in 1819, was turned down (though he may not have known this) because of her fear of the madness in the family.

  When his friend Proctor got married in 1824, Lamb wrote to him about his work:

  I am married myself – to a severe step-wife, who keeps me, not at bed and board, but at desk and board, and is jealous of my morning aberrations. I cannot slip out to congratulate kinder unions. It is well she leaves me alone o’ nights – the damn’d Day-hag business. She is even peeping over me to see I am writing no Love Letters. I come, my dear – where is the Indigo Sale Book?

  Lamb’s good-natured resentment about his working life prompted some of his finest inventiveness.

  His attentiveness to Mary’s mood at home was matched by the meticulousness of his accounting work for the East India Company. ‘The Honourable East India Company’, as it was then known, exploited its employees almost as much as its empire. During the period of Lamb’s employment (1792–1825) it was a vastly influential trading company. Lamb’s department audited the accounts of the indigo, tea, drugs and other commodities that poured into their warehouses to be sold off at auctions. Having met Lamb for the first time at his work, De Quincey gave one of the few descriptions of Lamb’s office:

  I was shown into a small room, or else a small section of a large one … in which was a very lofty writing desk, separated by a still higher railing from that part of the floor on which … the laity … were allowed to approach the clerus or clerkly rulers of the room. Within the railing sat, to the best of my remembrance, six quill-driving gentlemen … they were all too profoundly immersed in their oriental studies to have any sense of my presence.

  De Quincey conveys a sense of the reverential hierarchy, the atmosphere of close concentration. For thirty-three years Lamb was immersed in his ‘oriental studies’. He was increasingly obsessed, as the letters show, by the cost to his health, the lack of time to himself and his temperamental unsuitability for the over-careful, exacting work of accounting. In his office he had a copy of Booth’s Tables of Simple Interest, a standard work on the subject, on the inside cover of which he wrote mock reviews of the book, including: ‘This is a Book of great interest, but does not much engage our sympathy.’ Sympathy was to be one of those words which Lamb would, in Coleridge’s term, ‘desynonymise’.

  Though most of Lamb’s published writing is more or less obliquely about coercion, the kind of essays he wrote (apart from ‘The Good Clerk, A Character’) tend to preclude direct engagement with the world of his work. He was writing, as he said, for ‘the most untheorizing reader’, and never made grandiose claims for the significance of his writings. He insisted that his real ‘Works’ could be found on the shelves of East India House: ‘More MSS. in folio than ever Aquinas left, and full as useful!’ Retirement through ill-health in 1825 from his ‘official confinement’, his ‘33 years’ slavery’, brought immense relief at first, then a gradual decline. The essays ‘The Superannuated Man’ and ‘The Convalescent’ were written at about this time. The nine and a half years of his retirement are a miserable record of Mary’s frequent bouts of madness and Lamb’s aimlessness. After moving out of London with Mary towards the end of his life, to Enfield, he missed ‘the fresher air of the metropolis’, the inverted pastoral of the city that he had been inventing over the years. Fonder, as he said, ‘of Men sects than of insects’, he needed his friends and his occupation.

  ‘No good criticism of Lamb, strictly speaking, can ever be written,’ Swinburne wrote in 1886, ‘because nobody can do justice to his work who does not love it too well to feel himself capable of giving judgement on it.’ This most damning of judgements speaks of the curious power of Lamb’s writing, which, together with certain compelling details of Lamb’s personal life, had until relatively recently thwarted any kind of critical reading of his work. It is part of Elia’s complicity with the reader to disarm criticism. The assumption is not that his work wouldn’t bear scrutiny, but that somehow one wouldn’t want to scrutinize it. An unassertive writer, unallied to any obvious vested interests, Lamb has always satisfied his readers. Leigh Hunt, reviewing Lamb’s first collected works of 1818, broached the problem only to go on to suggest its peculiar accomplishment:

  There is a spirit in Mr Lamb’s productions which is in itself so anti-critical, and tends so much to reconcile us to all that is in the world, that the effect is almost neutralizing to everything but complacency and a quiet admiration … the author’s genius [is] in fact of an anti-critical nature (his very criticism chiefly tending to overthrow the critical spirit …).

  Hunt begins with the conviction that there is something smug about Lamb’s acceptance of things as they are, but then feels, in a way that he can’t quite formulate, that there is actually something rather undermining about Lamb’s anti-critical criticism. It was the critical spirit, as one of the spirits of the age, that Lamb wrote against so inoffensively. And it is an appropriate irony that in the Essays of Elia he would turn his distrust of the definitive, imposing view into an aesthetic that would be virtually unacknowledged.

  Having begun as a poet in Coleridge’s company in the 1790s, Lamb went on in his spare time to write plays (which were notably unsuccessful); Rosamund Gray, a romance (1798) and, with his sister, various works for children: the Tales from Shakespeare (1807), in which Lamb ‘did the tragedies’, have been the most consistently popular of all his works. Unlike his contemporaries Coleridge, Hazlitt and Hunt, he never wrote from economic necessity, and what he did wri
te was at the request of editors and friends. Lamb took a long time to find the style and form for his preoccupations, writing his first Essay of Elia for the London Magazine when he was forty-five. His talent, though, can be discerned earlier in the letters, with their particular inventive enthusiasm, and the echoes of his favourite authors – Sir Thomas Browne, Burton, Sterne, Shakespeare, and the lesser-known Elizabethan dramatists that Lamb made popular. (‘The beauty of the world of words in that age,’ he wrote, ‘was in their being less definite than they are now, fixed and petrified.’) Lamb’s early ‘imitations’ of Robert Burton (1802) provide a preface in miniature to his later work, by imagining his critics who

  will blame, hiss, reprehende in many things, cry down altogether, my collections for crude, inept, putid [sic] … verbose, incrudite, and not sufficiently abounding in authorities dogmata sentences, of learneder writers which have been before me … judge of my labours to be nothing else than a messe of opinions.

  With a sure sense of himself as ‘nothing else than a messe of opinions’, Lamb turned the private, rambling, ‘wit-melancholy’ of the letters into the public form of the conversational essay that was personal, but not intimate; seemingly casual, but shrewdly mannered and allusive. With Elia, Lamb found a way of organizing with apparent ease the wonderfully coherent and lively prose of his best letters. His description of Captain Burney’s household conveys Lamb’s genial idea of order:

  a visiting place where every guest is so perfectly at his ease … where harmony is so strangely the result of confusion. Everybody is at cross-purposes, yet the effect is so much better than uniformity … the most perfect concordia discors you shall meet with.

  Wary of an urbane wit, or a visionary confidence, it was part of Elia’s persona to be self-possessed but often at cross-purposes with himself and other people.

  In Lamb’s letters there is an extraordinary responsiveness both to his own experience and to the presence of his individual correspondents. His early critical essays are preoccupied with the markedly unreceptive character of the contemporary audience for the arts. He puts this down to ‘that accursed critical faculty, which, making a man the judge of his own pleasures, too often constitutes him the executioner of his own and others’. It is not the suspension of disbelief that Lamb is advocating, but of disapproval. What he observes of the audience in the boxes at the theatre is a new detachment:

  I see such frigid indifference, such unconcerned spectatorship, such impenetrability to pleasure or its contrary, such being in the house and yet not of it, certainly they come far nearer the nature of the Gods …

  Elia would claim, nearly ten years later, that he could ‘look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons’, that he regarded indifference as a pretension.

  Lamb’s indignation about privileged attitudes is convincingly argued in the remarkable essays on Hogarth and Shakespeare that he was writing at the same time as some of the theatre criticism for which he became well known among contemporary actors and critics. The standards of taste imposed by the Academy consigned Hogarth to the status of a ‘mere comic painter’. But Lamb identified their ‘extreme narrowness of system alone’, their ‘rage for classification’, as an organized denial of the conditions of the life of the time. It not only pre-empted any response to the pictures, it also numbed perception of life itself. As Lamb says, comparing Poussin’s ‘Plague at Athens’ with Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’, ‘Disease, and Death, and bewildering Terror, in Athenian garments are endurable’, whereas Hogarth is dismissed for his vulgar contemporary subject-matter. Hogarth was an important artist for Lamb because his prints ‘prevent that disgust at common life … which an unrestricted passion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing’. Throughout his writing Lamb projected an idea of ordinariness, of common life, that was not merely drab, and which prompted Hazlitt’s superbly simple compliment in The Spirit of the Age that ‘his love of the actual does not proceed from a want of taste for the ideal’.

  Hogarth gave Lamb the opportunity to elaborate what was to become an important idea for him: that great art was unfinished in the sense that it relied on the imaginative involvement of the audience to complete it. It was not something that by virtue of its perfection diminished its audience. It was not an idol but an invitation. He valued

  imaginary work, where the spectator must meet the artist in his conceptions half-way; and it is peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust so much to spectators or readers. Lesser artists show everything distinct and full, as they require an object to be made out to themselves before they can comprehend it.

  In his best criticism Lamb insisted that although art employed artifice it should do so in order to suggest rather than to instruct. When we see Shakespeare’s tragedies performed, the characters and scenes become visually distinct. This pre-empts the kind of imaginative involvement we feel when we read the plays. Lamb does not say that the plays cannot be performed, but that performance is a different kind of experience, one that too easily accommodates the intensity of feeling. There is something coercive in the very vividness of the acted play that can inure us to feeling by simplifying the complexities of character into definite people. ‘How cruelly this operates upon the mind,’ Lamb wrote, ‘to have its free conceptions thus cramped and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality.’ There were the beginnings here, as in the other early pieces, of an aesthetic that was evolving out of Lamb’s experience of the pressures of a ‘strait-lacing actuality’ and that would find its final, unfinished form in his greatest essay, ‘Imperfect Sympathies’.

  Though Lamb wrote very little in the years between these early essays and the great period of the Essays of Elia (1820–26), he must have acquired a considerable but mixed reputation by the time the London Magazine began on 1 January 1820. After the painter Haydon had recommended Lamb as a possible contributor, the editor, John Scott, wrote to Baldwin, the owner of the new magazine:

  I should be very glad to have Mr Lamb as an auxiliary – but I have no real means of procuring him: and indeed I believe he is what is called a very idle man, – who hates trouble and above all a regular occupation.

  Despite Scott’s misguided reservations, Lamb’s contributions were secured and he was paid double the rate of the other contributors. Publishing what became Hazlitt’s Table-Talk, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, as well as Lamb’s Essays of Elia, the London was an influential literary success; but with a circulation of about 1,600 a month, far less than Blackwoods (its Tory rival in Edinburgh), it was not financially viable enough to last more than a few years.

  Scott’s prospectus, and choice of contributor, pitched the new magazine as one in which he was ‘not, on the whole, sorry, that our authors have rather suggested systems than engaged in them’. The writers for which the magazine became famous wrote idiosyncratic, often explicitly autobiographical pieces about a wide range of subjects. The titles of Hazlitt’s essays – ‘On Going a Journey’, ‘On the Ignorance of the Learned’, ‘On the Pleasures of Painting’, ‘On Living to Oneself’, ‘On the Fear of Death’ – are all suggestive of general, unspecialized middle-class interests. Lamb’s titles are more specific and often more quirky. Less intent than Hazlitt, more casual in his distractions and less fierce about his prejudices, Elia appeared as the most accessible and charmingly humorous of the London essayists. ‘Who does not eulogize his writing,’ his editor wrote, ‘for displaying a spirit of deep and warm humanity, enlivened by a vein of poignant wit, – not caustic, yet searching.’ Not everyone was pleased. The one hostile review of the first Essays of Elia in the Monthly Magazine complained of a ‘disagreeable quaintness and affectation’, a ‘ridiculous puerility’. Others were more puzzled by Lamb’s wit, what the Monthly Review called a ‘rich but peculiar fund of drollery’. Trying to define this odd humour, the reviewer wrote of Lamb’s ‘original humour; – a sort of simple shrewdness and caustic irony, such as we have occasionally known to baffle, in the shape o
f a simple witness, some keen-set and veteran practitioner of the law’. It was a large part of Lamb’s subtlety, in his life as in his writing, to charm people and yet in some way to unsettle their response to him. Like the simple witness, he loved to baffle people, especially people with any kind of militant intent or conviction.

  Above all, the essays of Elia aroused interest without being divisively controversial. Unlike the essays of Hunt or Hazlitt, they rarely referred to contemporary events. They were original but harmless, a rare combination, excluding, as Marilyn Butler has written,

  both the old Neo-classical posture of addressing the world in generalities in order to change it, and the modern Coleridgean posture of the literary man as sage, as extraordinary. Lamb’s ordinariness made him in the 1820s … his variant of the man of letters was the figure with which the middle-class readership could empathize.

  It was precisely the ease with which this middle-class readership could empathize with Elia that made him so easy to dismiss and yet it was often empathy that Lamb was both intrigued and disturbed by (‘The unthinking man in the street,’ Denys Thompson pointed out contemptuously, ‘shares a number of Lamb’s tastes and interests – drink, gastronomy and smoking’). When Lamb created Elia as pen-name (or pun-name), he found the stamp of a recognizable but elusive character. Though he loved the essays of Plutarch and Montaigne because they ‘imparted their own personal peculiarities to their themes’, Lamb’s essays expressed the personal peculiarities of a fictitious character. As an essayist, he takes his lead from Thomas Browne rather than Montaigne: his evasiveness, that is to say, is the form his scepticism takes. There was a certain cunning in his comment that ‘the more my character becomes known, the less my veracity will come to be suspected’.