Mary and Charles Lamb: poems, letters, and remains: now first collected, with reminiscences and notes

Introduction

TN the closing years of the eighteenth century, a small English family, in very humble circumstances, was occupying rooms at No. J Little Queen Street, Lincoln's- Inn Fields. * The circle was composed of an old man and his wife, their two children (a brother and sister), and these children's aunt on the mother's side — a maiden lady already advanced in years.

There was another son, who held some responsible position in the South- Sea House ; but he, though a bachelor, lived apart. He was a person of rather peculiar disposition. The intercourse between him and his relatives was comparatively limited.

The old man himself had formerly been clerk to one of the benchers of the Inner Temple, and had retired on a slender annuity. The son whom he had living with him under the same roof was, like his elder brother John, on the South- Sea establishment. John, it appears, had had it in his power to place him there. If we are not mistaken, this was nearly the only obligation under which the family ever lay to John.

* The site is at present (1868) occupied by Trinity Church, which has absorbed Nos. 6, 7, and 8. What tender memories were swept away to make room for what is popularly called an improvement /

B

The insignificant salary which the younger son derived from his labours at the South-Sea House was what, with his father's trifling allowance, supported for some years the entire household. There was about loot a year altogether; yet they lived, these five, in some fashion, and bore their lot patiently.

It wras a mere youth who formed their main stay. He had been educated at Christ's Hospital, which he entered when he was seven, and quitted when he was between fourteen and fifteen. He had the happiness to form, during his continuance upon that noble foundation, a few life-friendships ; but it was his special good fortune to form one which was indescribably precious.

About two years subsequently to their removal from a previous residence in the Temple to Little Queen Street, the youth, to whom the family looked for their maintenance, managed to get sufficient influence exerted in his behalf* to procure his transfer from the South-Sea House to the service of the East-India Company, in Leadenhall Street. Personally, he lost whatever moral support and companionship his brother's presence under the same roof might have been to him ; but the prospect became brighter for them all. Very slight benefit accrued at first, perhaps ; but a few pounds a year formed a rather important consideration, in these days, in the eyes of the members of the small, obscure home, in the neighbourhood of Holborn.

* In the "Essay on Modern Gallantry," there is the following passage: "Joseph Paice, of Bread-Street Hill, merchant, and one of the directors of the South-Sea Company — the same to whom Edwards, the Shakespeare commentator, has addressed a fine sonnet — was the only pattern of consistent gallantry I have met with. He took me under his shelter at an early age, and bestowed some pains upon me. I owe to his precepts and example whatever there is of the man of business (and that is not much) in my composition. It was not his fault that I did not profit more."

They lived much to themselves, content if the means were at hand of supplying their day-to-day wants. The old people were gradually sinking into dotage. The daughter worked at her needle, and had an apprentice bound to her; but her earnings probably added little to their resources. They saw no society, and friends were few.

It must have been with no common sense of loneliness that the young clerk passed to and from the dreary building in Leadenhall Street, through the bustling thoroughfares,— observing, but not observed. At one end of his daily journey there was a home, which was only a home in name ; at the other, there was drudgery, only made sufferable by the feeling of how much depended on his labour — only sweetened by the load which rested on his individual shoulders, too young yet to be so overweighted.

Here is the story in outline of the very early years of Charles and Mary Ann Lamb.* In the present little undertaking, there is no pretence to an elaborate delineation and portraiture of the lives of these two, but merely an attempt to bring forward some neglected particulars in them, and to gather up into a sheaf all that still remained uncollected of Elia's writing.

To glean after the gleaners, to take a last turn round the stubble, in the hope that, by using our eyes uncommonly well, we may fall in with just enough to make up a small sheaf, is a doubtful kind of business to enter upon ; but, at the same time, it is one of those tasks from which, if we can emerge at all creditably, we are

* There had been another sibter, but she died in infancy. Miss Lamb, in a letter to Mrs. Cowden Clarke of 1820, elsewhere printed in extenso, speaks of her thus : " Together with the recollections of your dear baby, the image of a little sister I once had comes as fresh into my mind as if I had seen her as lately," &c. See infra, pp. 89-91.

apt, rightly or wrongly, to think rather better of our capabilities than we did before.

This is always more particularly the case, of course, where our predecessors were.no laggards, but smart hands, good men and true, persons of mark and likelihood. This is the position in which I cannot help feeling that I am, to a certain extent, placed in regard to the enterprise before me. But there were one or two other considerations which influenced me in determining to proceed with it.

The life of Lamb is a subject which many have attempted, and in which no one, as it seems to me, has been very happy. We do not get at the man in any of these pen-and-ink paintings ; and that is precisely what we should wish to get at. They are as unsatisfactory as his portraits, which are all unlike one another, and none of them very like the original.

All that has been done hitherto in this direction has helped, more or less, to swell the stock of materials, with which somebody hereafter will have to do his best. We must be thankful to Barry Cornwall for his Recollections ; and the late Mr. Justice Talfourd laid the world under obligations, to a certain extent, by the Memorials which he gave to it of his friend. But neither of these books realises our conception of what a Life of Lamb ought to be. Miss Lamb, in an unpublished letter to a correspondent, speaks of their — hers and her brother's — what-we-do existence. There is want of a volume yet which should describe that for us, which should paint the Lambs' fireside, and present to us a view, or even glimpses, of those two, as they were and moved, even at the hazard of a little pre-Raphaelitish detail.

The Lambs, I apprehend, were not genteel people, in the severely conventional acceptation of the term ;

INTBODUCTION. 9

and it is to be added, that the times in which they lived were, unhappily for them, or happily for us, not quite such irenteel times as we find ourselves cast in. This

o

delightful and accomplished couple had not only poor and humble antecedents, but at the outset,, and for some long while after, their own circumstances were poor and humble ; and there were certain old-world notions, archaic ways, in which they were born ; and with these they grew up and died.

There seems to be less necessity for attempting to present Lamb to ourselves and to our posterity in an inexact light, — in other words, for holding him up to have been something which he was not, — while we, in common with all comers after us, possess Elia and those inimitable Letters, to display to our view so unmistakably the true manner of man this was.

All that is needed for his Biography, not to add his Monument, is an edition of the Essays and Correspondence, with just so many notes as are necessary in strictness to explain allusions and passages which time has obscured, or is obscuring. One scarcely likes to think what he himself would have felt about such a publication : but it is the inevitable penalty upon authors who are durable enough to have in the fulness of time editors and scholiasts.

It is certainly unfortunate that there should have been a want of entire cordiality between Lamb and both his biographers. It would be useless to contend that lie enjoyed the complete or unreserved sympathy either of Talfourd* or of Mr. Procter. His genius

* " I may, perhaps, be allowed the opportunity of stating, that an edition of such of the late Mr. Charles Lamb's writings as can be recovered bj' his executors, with a large selection from his correspondence, is now preparing, under the superintendence of Mr. Sergeant Talfourd, M.P.; and will be accompanied by a notice, from that learned io INTRODUCTION.

and temperament were wholly different from theirs ; he was cast in quite a different mould ; his beginning, progress, and fortune in life had no point of affinity with their beginnings, progress, and. fortune in life; there was absolutely nothing in common between them, beyond the fact that they were members of the same literary brotherhood— longo intervallo. Even while he lived, Lamb represented almost an extinct type : his social tastes and sympathies were chiefly with the generation which had passed away before he met Talfourd or Procter, — as his writings belong to us in a larger sense than they can be said to have belonged to his contemporaries. His heart was only half with an age which scarcely so much as half understood him. He was very possibly more than semi-serious when he once said, in a letter to a friend: " Hano* the age! I will write for posterity !"

The almost irreparable injury which Talfourd, by his peculiar ideas of friendship and editorial responsibility, has inflicted on the writings of Lamb, may seem to put out of sight any small peccadilloes on the part of Mr. Procter and others ; and yet an apology may be made for Talfourd which can never be offered for his successor, namely, that the former committed to the press what he had to say, and what remains of his friend he had collected, while several persons were surviving, whose names were introduced into some portions of the correspondence in a manner, and under circumstances, rendering unreserved publication at that time inexpedient. In 1866, when Barry Cornwall issued his biography, no such plea for extenuating — or rather, to speak to the point, misrepresenting — several features in Lamb's character and life, was at all susceptible of being urged. A course

and accomplished gentleman, of the Life and Genius of his departed friend."— New Monthly Magazine, Feb. 1835,

INTRODUCTION. n

of policy questionable enough in 1848 — but, I am read j to grant, pardonable then on grounds of delicacy — became, in almost twenty years, a course equally destitute of meaning and justification ; and it must be added that, supposing an election made, literary falsification, by which I mean the garbling of letters, is a rather more venial sin than moral falsification, by which I intend the distortion of biographical facts. Truly, if Lamb could have foreseen the strange work which his commentators (of the old school) were to make of his productions and of himself, and the liberties which his so-called editors were to take, not merely with the letter, but often with the spirit, of his unique correspondence, those " waste wrappers of foolscap," which " took the impression so kindly" of sonnets, odes, and what not else, would have been left to lie till John Company's charwoman swept them before her besom into the dust; or, like Prospero, he would have " broken his staff, and buried it certain fathoms in the earth." It was not as if these gentlemen had failed to comprehend and appreciate the great and rare mind with which two of them, at least, had the advantage of coming into direct contact; the mischief was done by a desire to present Lamb before a generation, which had not known him as they knew him, in a light which was not a true one ; and, for this purpose, they did not scruple to tamper with the man's correspondence, and to put a figure of wTax of their own fashioning in the place of the real flesh and blood. Lamb was deranged once or twice in the course of his life ; but this was to be glossed over at any cost. Lamb partook freely of beer and spirits ; but this was to be flatly contradicted. Lamb used strong expletives; but this was not to be allowed to appear any where. What was the object ? it may be inquired. Perhaps, reverence for the memory of Lamb? Was it not, rather, half-heartedness, egotism, effeminate prudery? Was it not a solicitude to exhibit the man in as elegant an aspect as might be, for fear the world should be scandalised at the notion of gentlemen of position associating on intimate terms with a person who quaffed porter out of a pewterpot, and interlarded his discourse with profane expressions ?

I shall abstain from occupying space uselessly by repeating anecdotes and other details in which I have been anticipated ; and I do not feel it necessary to transfer to these pages any casual allusions to the Lambs, or any incidental elucidations of their checkered history, which I may have introduced elsewhere.* But I shall have occasion to bring forward, — for the sake of modification, and even of attempted disproof, — here and there, certain statements or speculations which have appeared in other places. This I could not help considering as part of my business. How far I have succeeded in any case, it is reserved for the public to decide.

There are some notices of Lamb in Leigh Hunt's London Journal. One is a sketch by the editor; another consists of Mr. Moxon's recollections ; and many pages are occupied by a narrative, based on personal intimacy, from a third pen. I observe, too, at page 348 of the second volume, a saying or two which should not be lost sight of.

Mr. Patmore's Reminiscencesf are also deserving of a perusal ; and the same may be said of Mr. Allsop's Recollections of S. T. Coleridge.

In the tenth volume of the third series of Notes and Queries , again, there is an interesting paper on the subject of Lamb, from the pen of Mr. Thomas West-

* Memoirs of William Hazlitt; with Portions of his Correspondence. 1867, 2 vols. 8vo.

f My Friends and Acquaintances. 1854, 3 vols. 8vo.

wood. All these sources have been exhausted, and have proved more or less informing and suggestive.

The late Mr. J. B. Pulham possessed two curious and highly valuable volumes, sold after his decease, containing portions of Mr. Gutch's Bristol reprint of George Wither's works, interleaved with large quarto paper. Upon these blank sheets Mr. Gutch himself, Dr. Nott, and, I believe, Mr. Pulham, in a few instances, wrote comments illustrative of the old poet, extending to considerable length ; and to those comments Charles Lamb, to whom the volumes were forwarded by Gutch, added comments upon comments, or remarks upon remarks.* Of those, some were very severe ; and Lamb in several places puns at Dr. Nott's expense, and passes upon that gentleman rather rigorous strictures. The two volumes are a great curiosity; but their history would be rather obscure if it were not elucidated by a letter from Lamb to Gutch, which was first printed in Mr. Gutch's Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode (1847), anc^ wni°n will De given by and by, with one or two other letters from Lamb to Gutch.

The pencil-jottings in the interleaved Wither formed the prima stamina of the article " On the Poetical Works of George Wither," in the common editions of Lamb's works, but with a difference !

It may be inquired, after all, why a regular Life of Lamb was not entered upon in this case. But the feeling, as regarded such an undertaking (if it had been otherwise feasible), was, that the ground was to a certain extent preoccupied, and that constant repetition of what has been said and resaid would have formed a necessary

* I gather, from a citation of one of these in the Edinburgh Review for July 1866, that the writer of the article "Charles Lamb" in that number had access to the volumes. They are now, I believe, in the possession of A. C. Swinburne, Esq.

i + INTRODUCTION.

portion of the enlarged plan. To this sort of thing I, for ni}r part, had an instinctive dislike; and I accordingly resolved to make it a mere book of gleanings and notes.

As the writer of a portion of the following pages, I desire to have my purpose distinctly understood. To relate the life of Charles Lamb is beside my immediate object — even, I may say, beyond my immediate ambition. I do not deal here with dates and circumstances which should be familiar to most people. My intention is to give a new prominence to certain facts not, at least, generally known ; and to commit to paper a few speculations which, if of any value, may serve their turn, and, if of none, will soon be forgotten.

The sectional character of the present volume is obviously disadvantageous to its symmetry and unity ; but the fact is, that it was never expected that the " New Illustrations" would have extended to the dimensions which they now assume. The book has been on the anvil for a considerable time, and — crevit eundo. In some respects the delay has been an undoubted gain ; but the homogeneity of the publication has suffered from the (originally unintended) prominence given to the Second Part, and its increase to an equality in bulk with the Lamb- IS toddart Correspondence. As a necessary consequence, the same ground has been occasionally traversed more than once, and repetitions will be here and there detected. This fault might have been easily avoided, if the exact nature and extent of my plan had been known to me beforehand ; but the book, as I have said, is emphatically a book of waifs and strays.

I had intended to prefix a motto ; and it was to be those words of Coleridge : " Nothing ever left a stain on that gentle creature's mind, which looked upon the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, which shines and takes no pollution."* But, on reconsideration, the sentence seemed un-mottoish ; for a motto to a book, like the porch to a house, should be fragrant, — and Coleridge's simile, whatever else it might be, was not that.

I must not, I think, close these introductory remarks without reverting to a subject which I have some delicacy in approaching. Since the sheets of the present volume were worked off, the first instalment has appeared of the long -promised new edition of Charles Lamb's Works and Letters.j To that Edition I supplied gratuitously , and quite apart from my contract with the publishers for the mere editorship of the Works of Lamb, a tolerably large body of notes, and many letters from originals in my own hands, or in the possession of personal friends. The fact is, that the publishers asked for no notes, and only contemplated a reissue of the Letters, &c, with such corrections and additions as were derivable from material belonging to them ; and these were duly utilised by me in accordance with the terms of our agreement. Subsequently, — as I was informed through the columns of a paper in language which is below criticism, — it appeared to the publishers imperative to cancel my work, and to place the editorship in more competent hands : so it was stated and understood.^ The plain truth is, however, that my notes, collations, arrangement, every thing, have been retained (with the exception that I had distinguished between Justice Talfourd's few notes and

* Coleridge, however, has been anticipated by L. Sherling (Daniel Pratt), in his Life of St. Agnes (1677, p. 89), where the author (very probably himself a copyist) puts into the mouth of the saint the allocution to God : " Thou that mak'st the Sun shine on a Dunghill without defiling it," &c.

f The Complete Correspondence and Works of Charles Lamb, Sfc, Vol. i. Moxon & Co., 1868.

J Athenceum for Nov. 2, 23, and 30, 1867.

my own) ; and that the only thing that has been wanting was the opportunity of revising my copy for press. The

printer, to whom the MS. appears to have been (rather too trustingly) left, has in some instances misread my observations, and converted them into nonsense. Still, the admirers and lovers of Charles Lamb have, for the first time, the satisfaction of perusing the ( Correspondence (with very trifling exceptions, and those not of my making) in its genuine form, and in the language actually employed by the writer ; and it is to be hoped that, with a little better care, the printer may give us the remainder of Lamb's Literary Remains, to all of which I applied the same principle of scrupulous adherence to my author's text. Even a cursory comparison between Talfourd's so-called editions of the Works, and that now in progress, will show what has been done ; and the chief, if not the only, singularity connected with .the business seems to be that, after publicly declaring that Mr. Hazlitt's edition was valueless, and that it had been found necessary to call in some one else to do his work over again at four times the price, the " some one else" should have thought proper to leave Mr. Hazlitt's edition just as it stood, and should not have so much as been at the trouble to correct a few obvious slips of the pen of mine (which I should have set right as a matter of course), or to run his eye through the proof-sheets for the purpose of detecting the typographical errors !

The extent to which the text and chronology of Lamb's correspondence have been misrepresented by Talfourd would not, perhaps, be credited upon my personal assertion of the fact, if the proof were not at hand in the edition now in progress of all his works, with the omitted passages supplied, and the garbled passages restored. The original MSS. have been consulted in every case where access to them was feasible ; and I am happy to be able to say that I know of very few exceptions. I hardly think that the extraordinary (and often meaningless) liberties which Talfonrd has allowed himself to take with the writings of his friend, both in his Letters and in his Essays, would have met with that friend's approval.

I have to return my best thanks to several gentlemen who, in the course of my researches upon this favourite subject, have assisted me to the extent of their power with information or material. I may mention W. Tite, Esq., M.P., who enabled me to furnish a facsimile of the first page of Elia on " Koast Pig," of which Mr. Tite owns the original -autograph ; F. W. Cosens, Esq. , of Clapham, who lent me several inedited, or ill-edited, letters of Lamb, and a very interesting MS. in the handwriting of Southey, in which was a poem by Elia ; Lieut. -Col. Cunningham, who kindly lent me his valuable chalk-drawing of Lamb, by Eobert Hancock ;* Theodore Martin, Esq. ; James Yeowell, Esq., the zealous and always obliging sub-editor of Notes and Queries, who handed over to me all his Lamb jottings ; C. W. Eeynell, Esq. ; Thornton Hunt, Esq. ; Alexander Ireland, Esq. ; Coventry Patmore, Esq. ; Tom Taylor, Esq. ; and others,

* Colonel Cunningham writes to me: "I think you do right to select the Hancock portrait of Lamb. Cottle speaks of it as a ' masterly likeness/ and adds, that ' Mr. Coleridge used often to look at this image of his old friend and schoolfellow, and express his warmest approbation of its accuracy.' Southey, too, wrote to Moxon (February 2, 1836): 'Cottle has a good likeness of Lamb in chalk, taken about 1798: it looks older than Lamb did at that time; but he was old-looking.'" The drawing, which is very poorly engraved in a recent publication on Lamb, was left by Joseph Cottle to Colonel Cunningham's niece, of whom the Colonel purchased it, with the likenesses of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, from the same pencil.

who helped me in a variety of useful ways. Nor can I omit to acknowledge the assistance afforded to me by my printers, Messrs. Levey & Co., who favoured me with many serviceable suggestions during the revision of the work for press.

For the pictorial illustrations given in this work the reader is indebted to Mr. Camden Hotten, the publisher, who has taken no small pains to secure original sketches of old houses and places associated with the memory of Charles Lamb. The facsimiles, too (with the exception of the Roast-Pig page), have been supplied by him, together with various anecdotal memoranda which have been used in the text.

Kensington.

LETTERS AND POEMS

OF

MARY LAMB.

CORRESPONDENCE OF MISS LAMB WITH MISS S TODD ART (AFTERWARDS MRS. HAZLITT), ETC* (1803-27.)

A~irvHE existing remains of the following correspond- -*- ence supply, perhaps, the most ample and valuable information that we have upon the domestic and fireside life of the Lambs ; they are equally admirable, whether we look at them as pictures or as compositions; and, heretofore, they have been passed over in complete silence, for the simple reason that they have never been printed, and still remain in private hands. They do not, of course, tell us all that we might like to know; but they tell us much, and they suggest to us much. Nor should it be forgotten that the years they illustrate are years as to which a biographer is likely to feel grateful for an accession of light, f

* This section is reprinted (with large additions and improvements) from a paper contributed to Macmillan 's Magazine for April, 1867. To secure the utmost exactness in the text, all the letters have been collated in proof with the originals: the orthography and punctuation have been in the main preserved.

f Here, for the first time, they are printed entire from the originals in my possession. In the Memoirs of William Hazlitt, I introduced, indeed, such passages as were relevant to the immediate object there in view, the illustration of my grandfather's personal history ; and,

C

An entirely inaccurate account is given by Barry Cornwall of the origin of the friendship between Miss Lamb and one of her most intimate and valued friends, Miss Sarah Stoddart, who afterwards became the wife of William Hazlitt. The fact is, that Miss Lamb and Miss Stoddart had become acquainted some time before the year 1803, and that in that year the two ladies were in active and affectionate correspondence. Lamb had met Miss Stoddart's brother, Dr. Stoddart, at Godwin's, and at William Hazlitt's elder brother's, in Great Russell Street ; and in this way the friendship must have sprung up. Miss Stoddart and William Hazlitt were not married till 1808; and, in the intervening five years (1803- 1808), a series of letters passed between the future Mrs. Hazlitt and Miss Lamb, of which a few have been preserved. They are those written by Miss Lamb. Miss Stoddart's letters seem to have perished.

In September, 1 803, Miss Stoddart was fluctuating

between one of two gentlemen who were paying her

attentions, and to both of whom she appears to have

extended a certain share of encouragement. She took

Mary Lamb entirely into her confidence, and reported to

her from time to time how her love-affairs sped. Now, it

was Mr. wdio was in the ascendant ; and at another

time, Mr. Somebody else.* Miss Lamb took occasion

to tell her correspondent candidly that she could not

enter so completely into her feelings as she would have

wished, for that her ways were not Miss Stoddart's

exactly. But there was one point in which Miss Lamb

found serious fault with Miss Stoddart, and it was the

again, to the pages of Macmillan I contributed other portions which helped to supply certain missing links, and certain new light towards a complete picture of the lives and characters— I had nearly said life and character — of the Lambs.

* See the Memoirs of William Hazlitt, i. 128 et seq., for further particulars.

want of confidence she displayed towards her brother the Doctor, and Mrs. Stoddart, and her failure to acquaint them with what she was about.

We are obliged to plunge a little in meclias res ; for the correspondence begins abruptly and imperfectly, and the earlier portions might be sought for in vain.

The first article in the series is, in fact, of the 2 1st September, 1803 ; and here Miss Stoddart is "my dear Sarah," and the relations are evidently most intimate and cordial. There had been, we may be sure, many previous interchanges of thoughts and gossip. Miss Lamb here says, in reference to Miss Stoddart's, in her opinion, most injudicious reserve :