YOUNG CHARLES LAMB 1775-1802

Charles Lamb at 29, dressed as a Venetian Senator; by William Hazlitt, 1804. One of Hazlitt's most sensitive portraits before he gave up painting for writing. (Hazlitt first met Lamb in 1803)

National Portrait Gallery

YOUNG CHARLES LAMB 1775-r8o2

Winifred F. Courtney

PALGRA VE MACMILLAN

© Winifred F. Courtney 1982, 1984

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without permission

Fz'rst Edz'tz'on 1982 Reprz'nted 1984

Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD

London and Basz'ngstoke Companz'es and representatz'ves

throughout the world

(eBook) ISBN 978-0-333-36379-9 ISBN 978-1-349-07056-5 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-07056-5

For Denis

I had no notion what an exquisite writer Lamb is; and thus I have a juster opinion of Miss V. S.: and God knows how I shall have the courage to dip my pen tomorrow.

-Virginia Woolf (as Miss Stephen) to Clive Bell, xgo8, from The Flight of the Mind, Volume 1 of The Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. and Hogarth Press Ltd, 1975)

Contents

List of Illustrations IX

Acknowledgments x Note on Riferencing xm Genealogical Trees XIV

Introduction xvi

I Starting Off 2 A Company of Witches I 2 3 Diversions I 8 The Times: No Popery, I 780 29 4 Schooling and Schoolfellows 34 The Times: The New Men and Women 50 5 Young City Man 58 6~~m ~ 7 Coleridge 84 The Times: Church, State and the Young Radicals 95 8 Difficulties 99 9 Disaster I I4

I o Loneliness I 20 I I To Nether Stowey I36 I 2 Charles Lloyd I 4 7 I 3 The Tragic Poet I 55 I4 The Break with Coleridge I6o I 5 The Quaker Lloyds I 7 5 I6 Political Lamb 186 I 7 New Friends: Dyer and Southey 203 I8 Robert Lloyd and John Woodvil 2I5 I9 Cheerfulness Breaks In 225 20 Mary Lamb- and Coleridge- Come Home 235 2 I Thomas Manning 245 22 Godwin 259 23 The Move to London 268 24 Lamb Among the Lions 278 The Times: Theatrical Interlude 291

Vll

Vlll Contents

25 Antonio 26 The Journalist: 1801-2

27 Lamb and Co.: Life and Letters, 1801-2

Appendix A Appendix B Notes Selected Bibliography Index

34 1

343 347 378 387

List of Illustrations

Frontispiece Charles Lamb dressed as a Venetian Senator, I 8o4, by William Hazlitt

Plate I Places associated with Lamb, drawn by an unknown artist: 7 Little Queen Street; Blenheims, the Ann Simmons Cottage at Widford; Interior of the Salu­tation and Cat; 45 Chapel Street, Pentonville

Plate II The Robert Hancock Portraits, I 796-8: William Wordsworth; Robert Southey; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Charles Lamb

Plate III The Lloyds: Charles Lloyd the Poet, by John Constable; Robert Lloyd, artist unknown; Sophia Lloyd and Child, by John Constable

Plate IV 'New Morality', cartoon by James Gillray

Plate V John Thelwall, Joseph Priestley and others, detail from 'Copenhagen House', by James Gillray, 1795

Plate VI Some of Lamb's close friends who were radicals: Thomas Holcroft and William Godwin, I 794, by Sir Thomas Lawrence; Thomas Manning, by an un­known artist; George Dyer in I 795, by J. Cristall

Plate VII Hester Savory, miniature, artist unknown

IX

Acknowledgments

This book has been assisted and encouraged in countless ways by generous friends and professionals: Victor Allen, Barbara Bannon, F. L. Beaty, Michael Biddle, W. H. Bond, A. Day Bradley, Donald Breidt, Helen Burnham, Marchette Chute (who said, 'Yes, write it', over her own rose-hip tea), Kathleen Coburn (who allowed me to work in the Coleridge Collection, Victoria College Library, Toronto), my son Stephen Courtney, Jill Davies and Richard Pankhurst of the Royal Asiatic Society, Judith Damkoehler, Helen Duncan, Helen Einhorn, Kenneth Garlick, Marilyn Gaull, Janice Johnson, Betty Karpoff, Jessie Kitching, V. J. Kite, Molly Lefebure, R. F. Lloyd, Lillian McClintock, Sian Morgan, Leslie Parris of the Tate Gallery, W. Hugh Peal, Jean Peters, Miriam Phelps, Thoreau Raymond, Lynne Robinson, Duane Schneider, Aileen Ward, Carl Woodring, and Richard Wordsworth, whose Annual Wordsworth Summer Conference in the Lake District has twice provided information, stimulus and valuable friendship.

I record with sorrow the death before this book appeared of Dr Sam M. Seitz, psychiatrist, who provided voluntary and penetrat­ing modern professional interpretations of the psychological prob­lems of Mary Lamb, Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd and who became through this association a close personal friend.

Especial thanks goes to Marguerite Bodycombe for her voluntary, indefatigable typing of the first lengthy draft; to Malcolm C. Johnson, who encouraged this book from an early stage, and long thereafter; to Carl H. Pforzheimer,Jr, who offered me the use of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, and Donald H. Reiman, editor and scholar, whom I found there and who suggested many fruitful avenues of research, as well as Mihai M. Handrea, librarian, and the editorial and library staff of the Pforzheimer. The staff of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts provided research facilities, as did the Croton Free Library through its statewide borrowing system, and the R. R. Bowker Company Library in New York. The British Library kindly provided microfilm.

X

Acknowledgments XI

It was good to meet the Charles Lamb Society in London, of whom Florence Reeves and Basil Savage were particularly helpful; helpful also were the A. D. G. Cheynes, the Sidney Halls, Mary R. Wedd and Mr D. 0. Pam and the staff of the Edmonton Main Library, where the Society's Charles Lamb Library was housed until recently (it is now in the Guildhall, London).

Edwin W. Marrs,Jr, editor of the fine new Letters ofCharles and Mary Anne Lamb, has been most prompt and kind in providing information. I am grateful to the staff of the New York Public Library, where most of my research was done, and to Lola L. Szladits, Curator of its Berg Collection, who allowed me to study the Keats marginalia in a book by Charles Lamb (acknowledged below) and provided other assistance. Burton R. Pollin was kind enough to send me copies of his many articles on members ofLamb's circle. Mr T. R. T. Manning and his aunt Miss Ruth B. Manning were gracious hosts in Norfolk and Suffolk, providing the oppor­tunity to look at the family memorabilia ofThomas Manning. Anne Lonsdale of Oxford University's Oriental Institute, now writing a much-needed biography of Manning, was most generous in sharing her knowledge.

Clement Alexandre spent many hours going over earlier versions of the manuscript and providing editorial advice, sometimes severe and therefore immensely valuable. David V. Erdman gave much time and lent his own unpublished notes on the history of the Albion newspaper, for which Lamb wrote, as well as other material and assistance for my three-part article which provides the basis for much of Chapter 26. E. P. Thompson kindly provided me with an interesting sidelight on Lamb and John Thelwall.

My husband, Denis A. Courtney, read and proof-read all chapters in several versions, offering valuable suggestions, helped me in retyping the final manuscript and in countless other chores, besides providing inestimable moral (and financial!) support. Richard Garnett, T. M. Farmiloe, Julia Tame and others at Macmillan have been patient, prompt and responsive.

I am also indebted to the following firms and individuals: Cornell University and Cornell University Press for permission to quote extensively from The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, edited by Edwin W. Marrs, Jr, Volume 1, copyright © 1975 by Cornell University, Volume n, copyright © 1976 by Cornell University, Volume m, copyright© 1978 by Cornell University; and to Cornell University and its Press for permission to quote from The Letters of

Xll Acknowledgments

John Wordsworth, edited by Carl H. Ketcham, I969; to Roger Robson Maddison of Knapp-Fishers, Solicitors, London, and his co-trustee for the Estate of the late E. V. Lucas, and Associated Book Publishers (UK) Ltd for permission to quote from Volumes I, II and III of The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, edited by E. V. Lucas, I935; to Lord Abinger for permission to read and to quote from William Godwin's unpublished diaries, recorded on microfilm at the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library; to Oxford University Press and Mr A. H. B. Coleridge for permission to quote from Volume I of The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, I956; to Columbia University Press and Professor Kenneth Curry on behalf of the late Mrs F. F. Boult for permission to quote from Volumes I and II of New Letters of Robert Southey, edited by Kenneth Curry, I965; to the Charles Lamb Society, London, for permission to quote from two (then) unpublished articles in its possession, and The Charles Lamb Bulletin (formerly The Charles Lamb Socie~ Bulletin) for quotation from published articles including two of my own (all specifically acknowledged in the text); to the British Library, Department of Manuscripts, for permission to quote from a letter of Sir john Stoddart; to the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, for the Keats marginalia in Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare; to Studies in Romanticism for quotations from Burton R. Pollin's 'Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd asj acobins and Anti-J acobins' in its Summer I973 issue; to the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation, Inc., for permission to quote from Volume 1 of Shelley and His Circle, edited by Kenneth Neill Cameron, I961; to the Author's Literary Estate, Harcourt Bracejovanovich, Inc., and the Hogarth Press Ltd for permission to quote from Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader: Second Series, and The Flight of the Mind, Volume 1 of The Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson.

If there are any inadvertent omissions, my repentant apologies. All errors are, of course, entirely my own responsibility. The search for copyright owners of three of the illustrations (of Charles Lloyd, Robert Lloyd and Hester Savory) has been unavailing; I should welcome their claims.

Croton-on-Hudson, Nr November 1!}1Jo

WINIFRED F. CouRTNEY

Note on Referencing

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Introduction

Had Mary Lamb not stabbed their mother to the heart in 1 796 in a fit of madness, would her brother Charles have reaped so much success with his 'Elia' essays in the London Magaz;ine of the 182os? Was the tension of tragedy required to make him an enduring figure in English literature? The old question is intriguing- and beyond our power to answer. But the man who at twenty-one promised to look after his sister for life, to keep her out of Bedlam, and did so, maintaining her at home where she could be as independent as she chose (but subject to recurring periods of unreason), cannot fail to move us and arouse our curiosity.

When 'Elia' appeared in the London and the reading public took him to their hearts, it was as a quirkish bachelor of forty-five, informal, witty, sentimental, sharp, scholarly, wise, original, a 'reasonable Romantic' who could say a great deal in brief space and who enjoyed his fellows, the odder the better. Lamb is a little out of fashion today, though the informal essay is returning-with E. B. White's recent collection, the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, and other manifestations. But he continues to attract enthusiasts; he stands up as a writer still. There is a flourishing Charles Lamb Society in London with an international membership. When I recommended him to a young woman she immediately began to encounter him in the New York City of 1978. There was even a Charles Lamb Restaurant then, on East 88th Street. And until it gave up the building on West 44th Street, also in the 1970s, the Lambs' Club displayed portraits and mementos of Charles and Mary- because they so loved actors and the stage.

If you cannot bear whimsy, Lamb has important essays free of it. Then there are the fine letters, now appearing in a new edition, which reveal several Lambs, some straightforward and unsenti­mental as distinct from Elia, with whom the real Lamb shares a good many traits but not all. There is even a political Lamb, whose existence has been little noticed until recently.

Lamb had no grandiose purpose in the matter of English prose. If he occasionally seems long-winded and overfond of the archaisms of

xvi

Introduction xvu

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, of Isaak Walton and Sir Thomas Browne, he sought in his essays merely to entertain, or to arrive at some modest truths in the context ofhis own era- and of'antiquity'. 'His serious conversation, like his serious writing, is his best', said William Hazlitt. His very defects are engaging, for he was a bundle of frailties- shy, depressive, belligerent, a heavy smoker, and sometimes tipsy- all of which Elia knew how to exploit as literary capital. There was, too, a kind of fine madness in his own balance and sense of proportion. If things were too solemn, he wanted to laugh, if pompous, he wanted to puncture. Hence his puns and jokes, which were the other side of despair, and an outlet for it.

Lamb often turns up in quotation. His characterization of Coleridge as an 'Archangel, slightly damaged' has suggested the title for a recent book on that poet. 'Get the Writings of John Woolman by heart; and love the early Quakers' echoes into our time- and gives us his view on slavery. Roast pork is the more succulent because he wrote about it. Charles and Mary's Tales from Shakespear seem never to have been out of print since first publication. The illustrator Grabianski has embellished in colour Ten Tales from Shakespeare (Dent) as lately as 1969.

Lamb survives because within his small frame the core was diamond- his determination to live his constricted life and to enable Mary to live hers with all the artistry and happiness they could muster. His quick eye is directed outward, now amused, now sardonic, on the scenes and people he daily encounters, or remembers. What makes them tick? and contradict themselves? Elia is hero, but more often antihero, victim ofignorances, accidents and malignant forces. Or he is the serious critic of art and manners. Looking at people through his eyes, we understand them as he did. They are alive; we have seen and met them.

His originality lies in how they come alive to us; his treatment of character brought several steps closer some of the methods of the modern novelist. Geoffrey Tillotson says,

I must confess that in my own case it was an accident that drew me back to him- a fortunate accident if only because it enabled me to see that for anyone working in the mid-nineteenth-century field Lamb is as important as Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, Jane Austen and Scott. His essays were of the very mind of his successors, whose work in poetry and the novel we are coming to value more truly. We know how much Dickens

XVlll Introduction

admired him .... Thackeray also admired the essays, as did Charlotte Bronte, and Browning, and Le Fanu ....

I take it that the essays are irremovable masterpieces in their own right, but I am looking at some of them here mainly as a reminder that Lamb's work in this particular field is vital to our proper understanding of the great things that followed in the mid­nineteenth century. (Tillotson, 8g-go)

John Keats, who knew Charles Lamb, gave his fiancee, Fanny Brawne, Lamb's Specimens rif English Dramatic Poets (I 8o8)­excerpts, with commentary, from the Elizabethans-as what proved the poet's last birthday gift to Fanny, from his own library. (It is now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.) Below one of Lamb's comments he wrote, 'This is the most acute deep sighted and spiritual piece of criticism ever penned.' Modern scholars are according fresh tribute to Lamb as critic of literature, drama and painting.

Lamb went to an office daily and experienced a time of rapid change not unlike our own. Who were his friends and what were the forces that moulded him? When we learn that he knew in his youth some of the most important radicals of his day we cannot suppose him altogether immune to politics. Nor was he, in spite ofhis care for his sister, immune to love. Lamb grew~ of course, out of his age, and it is as a man and writer ofhis age that this book attempts to see him.

The last 'definitive' biography of Lamb, by E. V. Lucas, appeared in its fifth edition in I92I. A new one is sorely needed. roung Charles Lamb (even as Volume I) does not pretend to fill that gap. It is, rather, an effort to interest the modern general reader in the man and writer from some new perspectives related to our own times.

A final note: I have quoted Lamb and his friends freely and often because I as reader like to know what they said of each other and their lives, not what someone says they said. The manner and tone of voice of people speaking and writing most quickly brings to us the real essence of a time, of a society long gone. They do not talk- they do not even think- as we do. What better way to arrive at some comprehension of their world than by listening to them directly?

W.F.C.