Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine: Metropolitan Muse (The History of the Book)

CHARLES LAMB, ELIA AND THE LONDON MAGAZINE: METROPOLITAN MUSE

The History of the Book Series Editor: Ann R. Hawkins

Titles in this Series 1 Conservatism and the Quarterly Review: A Critical Analysis Jonathan Cutmore (ed.) 2 Contributors to the Quarterly Review: A History, 1809–1825 Jonathan Cutmore 3 Wilkie Collins’s American Tour, 1873–1874 Susan R. Hanes 4 William Blake and the Art of Engraving Mei-Ying Sung Forthcoming Titles On Paper: The Description and Analysis of Handmade Laid Paper R. Carter Hailey Reading in History: New Methodologies from the Anglo-American Tradition Bonnie Gunzenhauser (ed.) Middle-Class Writing in Late Medieval London Malcolm Richardson Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation: A Publishing and Reception History Ben P. Robertson

www.pickeringchatto.co.uk/historyofthebook

CHARLES LAMB, ELIA AND THE LONDON MAGAZINE: METROPOLITAN MUSE

by Simon P. Hull

london PICKERING & CHATTO 2010

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2010 © Simon P. Hull 2010 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hull, Simon. Charles Lamb, Elia and the London magazine: metropolitan muse. – (The history of the book) 1. Lamb, Charles, 1775–1834. Essays of Elia. 2. London magazine. 3. Criticism – Great Britain – History – 19th century. I. Title II. Series 824.7-dc22 ISBN-13: 9781851966615 e: 9781851966677

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This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed in the United Kingdom by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Notes on the Text

vi vii

Introduction 1 1 Consuming the Periodical Text: Hunt, Hazlitt and the Anxiety of Cockneyism 19 2 Domesticating the Flâneur: Coleridge, De Quincey and the Forms of Metropolitanism 55 3 The Great Wen and the Rural Gothic 87 4 Utility and Pity: Wordsworth, Blake and Egan, and the Act of Charity 121 5 Lamb, Theatricality and the Fool 149 Conclusion 179 Notes Works Cited Index

187 203 211

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first debt of gratitude is to Professor Timothy Webb at the University of Bristol, who supervised this work in its original form as a PhD thesis. Professor Webb’s diligence, patience, practical guidance and vast knowledge of Romantic essayists and periodicals, always imparted with unstinting and infectious enthusiasm, were invaluable at the time and, I would like to think, have proved influential since. I am also very grateful for the crucial advice and support I received from Professor John Strachan at the University of Sunderland. Professor Strachan not only found me a suitable publisher and guided me at length in the fine art of the book proposal, but re-convinced me in the first place of the viability of translating my thesis into a book.

– vi –

NOTES ON THE TEXT

To underpin and remain consistent to the theoretical premise of this study, as a reading of Elia as a text of the London Magazine, the following policies have been adopted. All quotations from Elia in the London, plus Lamb’s other writings for this magazine, from 1820–4, are taken from the Routledge/Thoemmes facsimile edition (1994). Where ‘n.s.’ is prefixed to the volume number, this refers to the New Series, which ran from January 1825 to the magazine’s demise in 1829. As the Routledge/Thoemmes edition does not include the New Series, any Lamb texts appearing here are taken from the E. V. Lucas edition of Lamb’s Works (London: Methuen, 1903–5), with the London’s references from F. P. Riga and C. A. Prance’s Index to the London Magazine (New York and London: Garland, 1978). Unless otherwise stated, all remaining quotations from Charles Lamb’s works are taken from Lucas’s edition. As the London itself constitutes a primary text, all quotations from other writers appearing in the magazine are also referenced to the Routledge/Thoemmes edition. Following the same pattern for Lamb, the numerous quotations from Hazlitt that do not appear in the London are referenced to P. P. Howe’s edition of The Complete Works (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930). References to writings in the London Magazine are given parenthetically within the main text (as LM, volume, page).

– vii –

INTRODUCTION

In a study that is very much about the essay and its formal effects, I begin with a particularly rich example of the most pertinent of those effects – the power of suggestion. Here is Hazlitt’s description of Lamb’s most successful literary persona, Elia, from the Spirit of the Age essays: Mr Lamb has succeeded not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it. He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction. He prefers bye-ways to highways. When the full tide of human life pours along to some festive shew, to some pageant of a day, Elia would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a tottering door-way, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative of embryo art and ancient manners.1

The first thing to notice is the image of the epochal spirit as the modern metropolis. This indicates that the only recently challenged association of British Romanticism with nature and rural life is linked to a bias towards poetry and against prose such as Hazlitt’s and Lamb’s. Yet even the alternative focus on the city and urban culture which has gathered momentum over the last ten years, through research into spectacle, theatrical culture and consumerism, as well as projects that more directly discuss the theme of literature and the city,2 is lacking in the figure especially of Lamb. If Hazlitt himself does not appear to see Lamb as part of the metropolis, he still perceives him in urban terms. Lamb’s contrariness to the metropolitan spirit is presented as an alternative sense of the city. The powerful and dominant spirit equates to a metropolis defined by the relentless dynamic of fashion and modernity, a circus of spectacular attraction and mass consumption. Lamb’s Elian city is almost pastoral in comparison, defined by the gentle stasis of tradition and antiquity, a living museum of humanistic text that disperses the crowd, and values production over consumption. Furthermore, the vivid impression in Elia of an immediate, corporeal presence within the familiar metropolitan enclosure is insightfully evoked when Hazlitt eventually turns to Lamb’s literal representations of the city: –1–

2

Charles Lamb and the London Magazine With what a gusto Mr Lamb describes the inns and courts of law, the Temple and Gray’s Inn … the avenues to the playhouses are thick with panting recollections, and Christ’s-Hospital still breathes the balmy breath of infancy in his description of it!3

Hazlitt’s sketch is therefore typically astute, his choice of metaphor apt and resonant. Lamb does not steal away from the city altogether but to quieter, unfrequented regions, sequestered areas which enable reflection upon the values of metropolitan life. As an analogy for the genre of Romantic metropolitanism proposed, Lamb is at once detached from that ‘crowd’ and located, by virtue of the insight afforded by such detachment, at the epicentre. Nevertheless, Hazlitt’s sense of Lamb as an oppositional figure is particularly problematic when applied to Elia’s relationship to concurrent literature. The Spirit of the Age suggests that Lamb’s successful deviation from the zeitgeist involves opposition to the metropolis and the cultural values associated with it. Such a reading seems oblivious to the fact that the Elia essays were, in the main, written purposely and primarily for the London Magazine, a quintessentially, consciously metropolitan periodical dedicated to translating into a lively miscellany the dynamism and hurly-burly of London life. As such, under the editorship of John Scott, the London announced itself in January 1820 as a revival of the highly successful eighteenth-century magazine of the same name that had discontinued in 1785. As Josephine Bauer’s still unsurpassed book about the later magazine demonstrates, ‘London itself forms the subject or locale of many of the essays and poems’ that appear, and the reader is never allowed to forget that [quoting from the magazine itself ]: ‘London is the metropolis, not merely of England, but of the whole British Empire; an empire which … considering its wealth, knowledge, intellectual energy, commercial enterprise, and the consequent moral and physical power, perhaps unequalled by any, ancient or modern’.4

Elia is moreover publicly treasured by the London, as ‘Our Elia … the pride of our magazine’,5 a privileged position evidenced by frequent, deferential or affectionate referencing from the magazine’s other contributors. John Clare’s ‘Sonnet to Elia’ (August 1822) provides an obvious example, as do supportive exclamations from John Scott and Janus Weathercock (T. G. Wainwright). Influence is even apparent in essays such as Barry Cornwall’s ‘The Cider Cellar’ (October 1820) and ‘The Memoir of a Hypochondriac’ (September 1822). Both openly reference specific Elia essays in the course of attempting what might be termed an ‘Elian’ style: the familiar, conversational tone, the indulgence in consumerist pleasure and the affective, confessional pose. Far from opposing the metropolitan spirit of the age, therefore, Lamb participates in it. Elia’s unfashionable antiquarianism is reconciled with the modern metropolis through his conception for, and celebrated contributions to, the periodical project of the London.

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More than this, because of the unique extent to which Lamb invests the self in the periodical text, I will argue for his position at the vanguard of a Romantic metropolitanism which includes also Pierce Egan, Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey and Hazlitt himself. Hazlitt’s is perhaps a telling omission, indicative of a prevailing anxiety over authorial identity amid the collaborative enterprise and uncertain cultural status of the new miscellaneous magazine, epitomized by the London. Discussed in Chapter 1, this is an anxiety fundamentally concerned with a self-destructive, elitist hostility to ‘low’ metropolitan culture from within the profession itself, a virulent state of anti-metropolitanism which is defused by Lamb’s self-conscious appropriation of the periodical writer. The traditional bias against the city in Romantic studies is therefore bound up with an equal prejudice against periodical writing, as criticism until the late 1980s uncritically inherited the Romantic’s own sense of unease over the genre. As such, this anti-metropolitan tendency in criticism provides a further example of Jerome McGann’s oft-used notion of the ‘Romantic ideology’, in which: ‘The scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works are dominated … by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations’.6 In her book on Victorian journalism Laurel Brake convincingly rationalizes this critical phenomenon, a prejudice that, as I am arguing, has its roots in Romantic theory and its hostility to the perceived low-culture, metropolitan values of transience, topicality and novelty. These features – plus another, ‘plurality of discourse, including literary and political’ – are, according to Brake, imputed to ‘journalism’, so that ‘it has normally been seen by critics … as “subliterary”’: this has led in turn to the ‘retrospective foregrounding of the novel as the dominant literary form of the nineteenth century’, an emphasis ‘predicated on the exclusion of the nonfictional prose that appeared so prodigiously in periodicals and newspapers in the forms of essays, reviews, leaders, and correspondence’.7 In the case of Lamb, as in that of other periodical writers, because the context of periodical publication does not feature in the studies of Elia that take the collected versions of the essays as their primary text – the Essays (1823) and Last Essays (1833) – these studies by definition preclude a full recognition of the author’s involvement in metropolitan culture. A historicist approach, or sense of immediate socio-cultural or political context, is eschewed for those of the formal or autobiographical variety.8 This is not to say, of course, that these latter studies have proved valuable only by negative example. They have served, on the contrary, to identify the defining authorial traits and literary features of Lamb that appropriate, through Elia, the periodical context: the self-belittling reflex (Frank); the othering of the self (Aaron); the use of an educative reader, part imagined, part implied (Nabholtz); and the habitual translation of peer-group relations into literary discourse (Monsman and McFarland).9 Only by reading

4

Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

Elia as a figure created by Lamb, but for the London Magazine, however, can the full metropolitan implications emerge of this figure’s dual identity as magazinewriter and trading-house clerk. This is the ontological basis which defines Lamb as ‘metropolitan’, as opposed to an author like Blake or Wordsworth who writes, more simply, to a greater or lesser degree about the metropolis. In the London, as in other miscellaneous magazines, literary items – poems, travel writing, traditional tales, essays and reviews – appear alongside business columns on agriculture and other forms of commerce, including reports on new patents, bankruptcies, markets and stocks. Such a proximity of imaginative to material items suggests the commercial exigencies involved in the production and dissemination of all literature, but more specifically reflects the periodical text’s inevitable implication with ‘other’ commercial products: to use the ever reflexive Elia’s own list, ‘indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise’ (LM, 2, p. 365). The work of Lamb’s peers in essayistic prose, Hazlitt, Hunt and De Quincey, is similarly characterized by this periodical mode of metropolitanism. In individual essays from each can be found a microcosm of the periodical text’s capacity for juxtaposing material with transcendent items, or ostensibly high and low subject matter, and also the degree of detachment, verging at times on callousness,10 which is simultaneously necessary to the essayistic persona and life lived amid the city’s intense concentration of humanity.11 As in the discussed essay ‘On Getting Up on Cold Mornings’, Hunt’s earlier essay for the Reflector, ‘Account of a Familiar Spirit, who Visited and Conversed with the Author …’ (1811), evokes the egalitarian, carnival spirit of the city by comically domesticating great artistic and historical figures. Also configuring urban consumerism, Hunt’s great men, potentates and eminent literati alike are reduced to gluttons punished for excessive eating by the ‘spirit’ of indigestion. Ubiquitous in Lamb too, as we shall see, the food motif occurs to similar, carnivalizing effect in Hazlitt’s essays. In ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (Liberal, April 1823), Wordsworth’s gait is comically evocative of his own Peter Bell character, as he enters the room instantly to devour a hunk of cheese lying on the table. ‘The Fight’ (New Monthly Magazine, 1822) is awash with food- and drink-fuelled conversation, congruent, moreover, with Hazlitt’s juxtaposing of the mock-heroic idiom with the slang terminology of boxing, in the author’s unlikely foray into the emergent, popular genre of sports journalism.12 De Quincey’s metropolitanism is identified in the present study in the mutual and reciprocal relationship of narrative and flânerie in the opium-eater’s periodicalized ‘Confessions’, but it exists more subtly in the blasé tone of his 1827 essay, ‘On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. Sympathizing with the same social vogue that he identifies, De Quincey confesses here to a preference for the aesthetic over the moral approach: like a consumer item, murder can be an expression of ‘good taste’, in which ‘Design, gentlemen,

Introduction

5

grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment’13 are deemed necessary to the most affective performance. The very term ‘table talk’, of course, as used by Hazlitt for the title of two collected volumes of essays, conjures the image of a convivial repast of dinner and lively, free-ranging conversation, an ideal site where material consumption, urbane wit and literary criticism harmoniously coexist. The essay-writing – or rather, the essayistic mode – of these four authors, Lamb, Hazlitt, Hunt and De Quincey, is collectively, therefore, sufficient to constitute a genre of Romantic metropolitanism (or metropolitan Romanticism). This genre as such stands squarely as an urban counterpart to the Lake School. Included also is Pierce Egan, an author who on artistic merit seems not to belong with the above company. There would appear to be no more ‘metropolitan’ a text than Life in London, however, both in terms of its subject and a style that exhibits the same essayistic qualities of immediacy and detachment used by Egan’s more illustrious peers. Yet as the discussion in Chapter 3 of Egan’s city-as-theatre aesthetic suggests, his work clearly lacks the penetration or insight of either Lamb, Hazlitt, Hunt or De Quincey, the aforementioned dialogue between the material and the abstract, and the shady or dark areas that offset the ‘light’ of more whimsical moments. Life in London seems indeed to be all light and no shade, hence of inferior quality as literature. But if, as it must be, metropolitanism is applied here as a neutrally descriptive term, concerned with type or kind and not quality, Egan surely deserves to be included, just as Lamb’s placement at the centre of Romantic metropolitanism does not necessarily argue that he is a ‘better’ writer than Hazlitt, Hunt or De Quincey. Then again, it is not so easy to separate quality from kind where metropolitanism is concerned. Lamb warrants his centrality against Egan’s more marginal position by virtue of an appropriation, not a perpetuation, of concepts such as the city-as-theatre and, in relation to all the authors discussed, through a preternatural degree of exchange between self and other that is at once quintessentially metropolitan and the stuff of literary achievement. The question of literary value neatly returns us to periodical writing. For all the problems with studying it, such as how to reconcile it with the concept of the author and handling its sheer miscellaneousness, we can no longer say that it represents a neglected area in Romantic studies. Following Jon Klancher’s seminal study, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832, in 1987, a body of research into early nineteenth-century print culture has developed to establish the importance of a vibrant periodical market to the dissemination and reception of literature, and formation of the canon. This trend has involved, notably in the respective studies by Mark Schoenfield and Mark Parker, challenging the above tendency to read literature initially produced for periodicals – mainly essays – primarily as collected or anthologized texts. But a further problem arises

6

Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

from this theoretical shift, typified as it is by Parker’s approach, of ‘dissolving the figures of Elia and the author of Table-Talk into the ground of Scott’s London’.14 The very idea of a metropolitan author that includes the periodical (con)text is surely a contradiction in terms. Reading Elia as a figure of the periodical text, but one that writes itself in terms of resistance to this ‘historical embedding’, Peter J. Manning argues that ‘resituating Lamb within the pages of the London Magazine’, as do the cited studies by Schoenfield and Parker, ‘risks circumscribing [Lamb’s] effects in the exact proportion that one recovers their original richness’.15 If metropolitanism derives to a large extent from the periodical text, with its ‘plurality of discourse’, or definition by, as Schoenfield’s deconstructive reading of Elia argues, a ‘particularly telling heteroglossia’,16 then how can such a destabilizing feature be attributed to the author? The author and metropolitanism, as periodical text, thus become once more separated, or indeed mutually opposed. Furthermore, a historicist reclamation of Lamb such as Manning’s presents the same opposition from the reverse angle. Focusing on ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’, Manning’s article proposes that Elia associates himself with books rather than magazines – as if in keeping with the aforementioned mood of anxiety pervading the new periodical milieu. However, Elia’s character as an avid reader of books rather than magazines is surely congruent with rather than opposed to periodical writing itself, as part of the literary aspiration of magazines like the London, Blackwood’s and the Quarterly Review. Such an attempt at a historicist approach that still manages to reclaim Lamb from the corporate, collaborative body of the metropolitan text, ironically relies therefore on the author’s elision of that context. For all the above attempts to historicize Lamb, therefore, criticism on this author seems not to have progressed much beyond the cosy, insular image presented by Malcolm Elwin in his introduction to the 1952 Macdonald edition of Elia: ‘There is nothing of religion or politics to inflict the discomforting embarrassment of controversial or speculative thought … This is the abiding charm of Elia. He is the prince of escapists.’17 To thus see Lamb as successfully escaping the world of religion and politics is to ignore his metropolitanism because it is through his knowing engagement with metropolitan culture that Lamb is historically embedded. Still more recently than Manning, however, James Treadwell seems to offer the most balanced study yet, one in which Lamb’s metropolitanism resides not simply in Elia’s patently ‘urban attachments’ and the ‘social space’ he occupies (his ‘comfortably ordinary, middle-class pursuits’), but in a mode of consciousness that simultaneously assimilates the essay form, the periodical text and the city: Elia’s ‘world’, Treadwell notices, ‘is miscellaneous, heterogeneous, ordered not by the sequences of narrative or chronology but by the multifarious accidents of a crowded city’.18 Elia’s desultory observations and fragmentary or disjointed narrative style, as an articulation of the essay

Introduction

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form itself, therefore capture the very dynamic of urban spectatorship. This is an instance of what Julian Wolfreys identifies as the essence of the ‘urban text’, whereby, ‘in its play of images it maps the condition of the city onto the text itself, so that the text assumes in a variety of ways the shape, the contours, the architecture and the “ebbs and flows” of the city’.19 Lamb consequently embraces instead of resists the marginalizing condition of writing for periodicals. Both from within and outside the essays, in skits and correspondence, he ‘plays games … with Elia’s merely pseudonymous being’, games which ‘all depend on the fact that he is literally bookish, a figure of writing (or of print) only’. This notion of an empowering investment of the self in the periodical text contradicts the assertion made in periodical-based readings (including Treadwell’s own) that Elia is ‘subject to readers’ interventions’, and ‘partially overwritten’ by other texts, ‘as part of the overall discursive field which creates Elia’.20 Game-playing implies the empowerment of an elusive presence, the ‘catch-me-if-you-can’ teasing of the player who leaves his desire-creating mark in the place of a real, physical presence. Elia thus emerges as the over-writer, not the overwritten. The clearest example in the present study occurs in the parodic relationship of the ‘Witches and other Night-Fears’ and ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ essays to De Quincey’s concurrent text in both the London Magazine and book-form, the ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’. As indicated at the beginning, moreover, the power of suggestion within the essays creates a volume of meaning which belies their diminutive physical scale, and overall impression of triviality and escapism. Suggestion is the primary function, or the modus operandi, of Elia. As in any text suggestion works through a precise economy of language, and is typically achieved in Elia by the use of fragmentary syntax and the one-sentence paragraph, as illustrated in the following response to the chimney-sweep: ‘I have a kindly yearning toward these dim specks – poor blots – innocent blacknesses –’ (LM, 5, p. 405). Immediately following as it does a highly materialistic, seemingly heartless description of the sweep’s physical characteristics, the reader seizes upon this minimalistic expression of sympathy and becomes aware of the irony of Elia’s metropolitanism, hence the social awareness belying it. Indeed, attention is drawn all the more towards the pregnant remark because of the converse use of an emphatic, comparative style where similes, metaphors and cognates are luxuriously accumulated, as in the descriptions of the Caledonian, the beggar and the poor relation. Sometimes the casual, throwaway phrase, not thus isolated but incorporated into the body of a long, often desultory paragraph, is easier to overlook, but no less important. Such a phrase is used to describe the legless beggar in ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’: ‘a grand fragment, as good as an Elgin marble’ (LM, 5, p. 535). Discussed in Chapter 4, here is an urban appropriation of the Romantic fragment to a practical, social

8

Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

cause, an appropriation which not only questions a value system that treasures classical art over civil liberty, but in the process mocks the trendiness of the fragment as an aesthetic principle. The fragment and other contemporary Romantic ideas therefore play in diverse ways an important role in Elia’s composition. The sense of negative capability which Lamb shares with Keats, and the willingness to suspend disbelief he shares with Coleridge, his general interest in the twilight realm between knowledge and superstition, seem all of a piece with a preternaturally essayistic style in which meaning itself assumes an allusive, phantasmal and ultimately compelling quality. The fragmentary aspect of the periodical text accommodates this metropolitan form to Romanticism, just as the figure of Elia appropriates that text to the self. Lamb’s achievement of metropolitan authorship therefore occurs principally through an appropriation to the self of the very conditions of the periodical text: commodification, fragmentariness and anonymity, conditions that normally undermine such a monolithic concept as author. This ‘return’ of the author is articulated both through a notion of self within the essays that is actually predicated on dialogic exchange with the other, and Elia’s extra-essayistic ontology in the London Magazine. The former is evident most obviously in the occasional references to ‘L’, and ‘Mr Lamb’ in the essays, but occurs on a more sophisticated level in the auto-critical reflex discussed primarily in Chapter 1. Here, the frequent puncturing within the one essay of previously assumed egoistic types such as the hypochondriac and the intolerant or prejudicial figure, argues, in the process, against the tendency to competitive excess in the metropolis, and for the democracy and enlightened cosmopolitanism of the utopian model. This latter, extra-essayistic dimension can be attributed to the agency of ‘paratext’, providing as it does in Elia a ‘threshold … between text and off-text … a privileged place of pragmatics and … of an influence on the public … that is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it’: deceptively peripheral in appearance, the Elian paratext is a ‘fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text’.21 This ontology is both encapsulated and enacted in the mock obituary by ‘Phil-Elia’, who likens his supposedly deceased ‘friend’, ironically enough, to the ‘skilful novelist’, whose curiously inverted ‘egotism’ allows him ‘to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs and affections of another – making himself many, or reducing many unto himself ’ (LM, 7, p. 119). Other extra-essayistic manifestations appear in postscript or correspondence-page dialogue – crucially, always as Elia himself – that assert Elia’s freedom from the corporeal, fixed identity of book authorship, or indeed, the ennui of quotidian life. The freedom of identity variously espoused from within essays such as ‘Recollections of the South-Sea House’, ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, ‘Jews, Quakers, Scotchmen, and other Imperfect Sympathies’ or the ‘old actors’ series is thus supplemented by Elia’s extra-essayistic appropriation of

Introduction

9

the periodical, metropolitan text. Such a pervasive, phantasmal ontology seems indeed to echo the positive, emancipatory model of the city proposed by Iris Marion Young: ‘of relative anonymity, heterogeneity, openness, and change, in which otherness can become unfixed from any totalizing sense of community or self-identity’.22 It is therefore more helpful in this context to refer to ‘Elia’ rather than the ‘Elia essays’, to emphasize the emancipative agency of the essayistic figure over the formal confines of Lamb’s text. Accordingly, the readings of the essays in the present study are highly attentive to any changes in meaning caused by revisions subsequently made for the collected versions. Involving the excision of material from within the main text as well as the paratext of footnote and postscript, these revisions typically remove material considered to be too trivial, too topical – or perhaps too metropolitan – for the relative feature of timelessness implied by the very fact of book publication.23 The postscript to ‘A Chapter on Ears’, for example, playfully castigating Leigh Hunt for suggesting that Elia and Lamb were one and the same, is deemed superfluous and irrelevant, thus a sense of how Elia wryly enmeshes himself in the metropolitan text through such dialogue is either lost entirely, or at least, in annotated editions, greatly reduced. Hardly apparent in the collected essays, such inter-periodical banter enables Elia to become, as Treadwell observes, ‘the focus of a small-scale cult of personality’.24 Discussed in Chapter 3, ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ (October 1820) undergoes the heaviest, most significant pruning, the removal of both footnotes and main text changing the characterization of G. D. (George Dyer) from a problematic and controversial, to a relatively innocuous, sentimentalized figure in the collected version. All of which reinforces the impression of the Elian text as being a literary expression of metropolitan sociability, or the true conversational idiom, in its provocative opinions and sense of immediate, intimate and often argumentative dialogue. The notion of the uncut metropolitan text as being too topical for book publication readily merges with the even more conservative idea of it as tending to be too free with its opinions and allusions, too loose with its formal and narrative cohesion – and ultimately, perhaps, too emancipated altogether. This is emphasized by the minor controversy the Oxford essay stirred in its original form. Some of the above material was allegedly removed by Lamb as a result of complaints about Dyer’s portrayal, both from a correspondent (‘W. K.’), to whom Elia pacifically responds in the December number, and privately from Dyer himself. With a generic discursiveness and desultoriness that correlates with the evershifting scenes observed by the restless flâneur, the essay is itself an essentially urban form. Such a fluent dynamic in turn bespeaks suggestiveness rather than statement, a feature that has unfortunately helped render the essay the poor relation of other, ostensibly more substantial literary forms, but which ironically also serves to empower the metropolitan author. Due in part to its association

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

with periodical writing, the traditional, derogatory notion of the essay is that of sub-literary endeavour, trivial or frivolous writing produced by those, presumably, either incapable or unwilling to set themselves to literature proper.25 With the addition of an idiomatic tendency to self-belittlement, moreover, a sense of the triviality of the essay and the essayist might seem as if redoubled in the case of Elia. Yet this ostensible presentation of ‘lameness’ represents at another level a corporeal vehicle that transforms the dubious, anxiety-inducing conditions of periodical writing into the empowered metropolitan author. Elia’s self-confessed incapacity for deep or prolonged thought encodes the ideal character to exploit the essay’s generically tentative or experimental, indeed its suggestive quality. Similarly, the ‘poverty’ of his dreams that Elia laments in ‘Night-Fears’, against the fantastic visions of Lamb’s peers, Coleridge, De Quincey and Proctor, suggests the reverse image, that of the essay’s staple ingredient, domestic or familiar subject matter, and the appeal of shared, common experience, an appeal which Lamb’s essay-writing contemporaries and predecessors all successfully exploit. Lamb’s comparison of himself with his literary contemporaries is, in effect, between the essay and poetry, two forms of writing so different that his comparison is irrelevant. Comparison would only have been viable, in other words, if Lamb had treated like with like, and discussed his abilities in relation to fellow essayists, such as Hazlitt, Hunt or De Quincey. As it is Lamb’s self-denigration achieves almost the opposite, by suggesting a sense of alternative to what itself becomes subtly mocked as a trend or fashion for poetic genius. For us to compare like with like, however, is to see that Lamb’s appropriative use of the essay marks a significant innovation. Reviewing the first volume of Hazlitt’s Table Talk in an unpublished article of 1821, Lamb’s survey of the essay tradition from which Hazlitt emerges highlights also Lamb’s own interpretation of the genre. Having observed that the ‘fathers of Essay writing in ancient and modern times’, from Plutarch, to Montaigne, to Addison, to Johnson, had established the essay through the affect of the egoist, Lamb turns to ‘Another class of essayists’, who: equally impressed with the advantages of this sort of appeal to the reader, but more dextrous at shifting off the invidiousness of a perpetual self-reference, substituted for themselves an ideal character; which left them a still fuller licence in the delivery of their peculiar humours and opinions, under the masqued battery of a fictitious appel26 lation.

Elia’s characteristic self-belittlement enacts the ‘ideal character’ for parody of the trenchant advocacy of the Johnsonian ego as Lamb describes it. A further, still more insightful parallel emerges for the unique extent of Lamb’s exploitation of a ‘fictitious appellation’. Appropriately from without as well as within the essays, Elia draws attention to his phantasmal existence and the freedom it allows, not

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only to deliver ‘peculiar humours and opinions’, but more than this, to assume or inhabit different selves; indeed to interrogate the binary opposition of self and other. The extra-essayistic ontology of Elia through which the metropolitan text is appropriated, is therefore commensurate with the character’s pluralistic selfhood. Lamb’s review also suggests the importance to a collection of miscellaneous essays of a unifying element or ‘pervading character’,27 otherwise the sheer heterogeneity will override the pleasure of individual essays and spoil the reader’s enjoyment. More clearly than in Hazlitt’s appraisal of Lamb, therefore, in Lamb’s review of Hazlitt’s essay-writing the very attempt at confining his discussion of the essay to the textual register of the book alludes to the cause of authorial anxiety in the periodical writer. The pervading character of the miscellaneous magazine that flourished in Britain after the Revolution, as dictated by the socio-political beliefs and commercial objectives of the editor or owner, who expediently arranges the articles, would presumably present an even greater threat than a collected volume to the autonomy of individual essays. As a selfpluralizing figure, however, Elia himself enacts a sort of ‘pervading’ or unifying character within the London Magazine. Lamb fully exploits the discursive flexibility of the essay form to unite seamlessly within a rounded, instantly recognizable character, abstract Romantic theory and the familiar, material world, in particular the consumerist or ‘low’ aspect of metropolitan culture. Using examples by Hazlitt and Lamb, Uttara Natarajan has challenged the traditional view of the familiar essay as having a ‘fundamental lack of seriousness or purpose’ by arguing that it often contains allusive or indirect expressions of aesthetic and philosophical principles more commonly associated with the high Romanticism of Wordsworth and Keats.28 Natarajan also sees the Lamb essays she selects as singular expressions of Romantic theory in which the domestic or familiar convey these principles. My reading of Lamb similarly takes Elia and the familiar essay seriously as Romantic literature, although the concept of metropolitanism here involves an important degree of alternativeness. Elia takes Lamb some way towards alignment with definitive Romantic preoccupations such as the exalted, negatively capable imagination and the notion of the child as father of the man, yet counterbalances this with the common or human touch, in a mock-heroic propensity for sensory gratification and appetite for consumer goods. Having thus argued the case for Lamb as author of the metropolitan text by defining what Elia is and what are his effects, how and why Elia came into being is equally relevant. Just as Lamb builds into Elia’s character a tendency towards identity play – the autobiographical trickster who borrows from Coleridge’s childhood, or the sincere confessor, the drunkard, undercut by the wry parodist – so the very name ‘Elia’, the anagram of which is ‘a lie’, comes about through an act of appropriation. As he explained in a July 1821 letter to the

12

Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

London’s co-publisher and editor at the time, John Taylor, Lamb took the name from an Italian clerk with whom he had worked in his brief spell at the SouthSea House, in 1791–2. Uncannily, this F. Augustus Elia died in August 1820, the same month that his usurping fictional counterpart came to life in the London, in, appropriately, ‘Recollections of the South-Sea House’. Elia’s contextual and conceptual origins, as I propose them, are just as revealing. Elia emerges in Chapter 1 as a response to an immediate metropolitan milieu, that of the new, ultra-competitive magazine in the years 1817–20. Chapter 2, however, delves further back, to the early 1800s, to trace the germ of Elia in Lamb’s revolt in his correspondence and early essay writing against the sentimental, ruralist image of him projected by Coleridge in ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’, an image informed by the ‘strange calamity’ of Mary Lamb’s killing of their mother.29 Elia here is the climactic embodiment of Lamb’s turning away from the country to the city, from poetry to prose, and, as implied in Chapter 5, from the melancholic figure of sensibility who narrates Rosamund Gray, to the less sympathetic but more resilient figure of the fool, articulated elsewhere by Lamb’s fleeting essayistic personae, Edax, and Suspenserus. The above episodes are both, equally, formative of Elia, and are indicative of the central role of the metropolis in that process. The impression of Elia as something nourished or nurtured by the London is created by the fact that between 1820 and 1825 forty-four of the fifty-three essays, and almost all of those regarded as the definitive and strongest ones, written, or in some cases rewritten, under Elia’s name appeared in that magazine. Realizing by 1825 that the overall quality of the London was in sharp decline, with almost all the regular contributors who had set the high standards of the first four years now departed, Lamb provided a small number of Elia essays for other magazines. The relatively uninspiring quality of these sporadically produced essays indicate that Elia’s name and character were very much established and maintained by the London, and to certain a degree that the reverse was also true. Manifestly ‘at home’, then, in the heterogeneous and fragmentary environment of the London, Elia’s metropolitanism emerges, in the first instance, from an undercutting or overwriting of the spatially and temporally proximate, comparatively monologic texts that also contribute to that magazine. In Chapter 1, Elia’s auto-critical and neutral style debunks the aggressive-defensive posturing of the Cockney dispute, a pervasive anxiety over metropolitan culture ironically (and fatally) infecting even the founding editor of the London, John Scott. In Chapter 3, as previously mentioned, chief among the peer texts against which Elia’s suggestively ‘prosaic’ expression of a domesticated metropolis defines itself are the simultaneous instalments of De Quincey’s ‘Confessions of an English OpiumEater’, in which occurs a conversely pathological encounter with an enigmatic, ineffable environment. In the same chapter, the anxious conservatism of a report

Introduction

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on Queen Caroline’s disrupted funeral centres on the metropolis an acute sense of an overwhelmingly intractable present, to which Elia’s timely use of historical perspective in his commemoration of the centenary of the South Sea Bubble (in ‘The South-Sea House’) calmingly responds. In Chapter 3, the tone of moral indignation set by editor John Scott’s protest against a creeping metropolitanization of children’s literature (through the inclusion of inappropriately adult satire of the vanities and fashions of the town), is immediately undercut by Elia’s testimonial to London’s allegedly corrupt educational institution, Christ’s Hospital. In Chapter 4, an innocent piece of whimsy by Thomas Hood on the pleasures of the panorama at the top of St Paul’s unwittingly prefigures the dangerously disaffected implied reader in the Elia essay, ‘The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers’, which, again, immediately follows. Finally, in Chapter 5, the cult of theatricality articulated by J. H. Reynolds’s rather distracted drama review is transformed, initially in ‘My First Play’ and later in the ‘old actors’ series, into a manifesto for theatre’s capacity to liberate the city-dweller from such mass social conditioning. The concept of metropolitanism from which the notion of an Elian alternative emerges is defined by five themes, as allotted in turn to each of the five chapters. Decided both by the social and cultural preoccupations of the time, and subsequent theoretical debate, these themes are as follows: periodical writing in Chapter 1; the flâneur in Chapter 2; the Great Wen in Chapter 3; the process of social reform in Chapter 4; theatricality in Chapter 5. Elia’s mediation of the immediate text around him is assisted also by the impression the essays create of being validated by a preternaturally literary consciousness, or embeddedness in the collective, accumulated wisdom of literature. The very lunacy of ‘All Fool’s Day’, for instance, is constructed out of an impressive knowledge of examples ranging from Shakespeare’s Aguecheek to Landor’s Gebir. Yet beyond the bookish intertextuality of Elia’s well-read character, this literariness is a richly allusive quality in which subtle inflections of tone and mood are often conveyed by the echoes of contemporary and antecedent voices. These include the prose of Addison, Swift, Goldsmith, Hazlitt, Hunt, Egan and De Quincey, the poetry of Blake and Coleridge, and humanitarian and popular literature. Thus Elia’s ironic, provocative dehumanization of the subject as consumer item in ‘The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers’ recalls the humanitarian objective behind the still more shocking precursor of Swift’s A Modest Proposal, which outlines how poverty can be alleviated by parents cooking and eating their own children. Equally important, however, is Lamb’s more protracted and complex engagement with the Lake-ish principles of Wordsworth’s poetry, notably the depiction of St Bartholemew’s Fair in Book VII of The Prelude, and the contentious figure here and in several other poems of the beggar. Where Elia’s bookish, explicit intertextuality is concerned, it clearly presents a voracious, even obsessive reader of a broad range of literature, from Sir Thomas

14

Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

Browne, to Milton, to the Restoration dramatists, to Fielding. But Elia’s own character as reader plays a relatively small part in the overall importance to Elia of the figure of the reader. As the essays ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ and ‘The Two Races of Men’ suggest, the reader and the act of reading feature prominently, in a preoccupation with reading and readers that is quite literally instrumental in Elia’s metropolitanism. Influenced in part by the continuing growth of newspapers and periodicals from the early part of the century, according to William St Clair, a dramatic late eighteenth-century rise in ‘the number of men, women, and children who read printed texts’ was accompanied by a change in reading habits: this involved the abandonment of ‘the ancient practice of “intensive reading” in favour of “extensive reading”’, in which books were read, comparatively speaking, in rapid succession at a superficial level, and for ‘pleasure rather than instruction’.30 In The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, Leah Price similarly refers to the rapid increase in readers, and the ‘intensive/extensive’ reading dichotomy, in arguing that the simultaneously burgeoning genre of anthology in the late eighteenth century ‘oscillat[ed] constantly’ between the two models, in training readers to ‘pace themselves through an unmanageable bulk of print by sensing when to skip and where to linger’.31 Also in concordance, Richard Cronin sees the magazine in this period as a formal response to an increasingly atomized, urbanized readership who demanded a commensurately miscellaneous kind of text. Having little or no concept of memory, Cronin proposes, magazines ‘were designed to be read in a new way, not from beginning to end but dipped into, and not slowly digested but skimmed’.32 Clearly, the essay and the act of essaying, to proffer ideas and argumentative approaches in the singular or weighed against each other in a spirit of experimentation, ideally fits the extensive reading model. Overall, contemporary comment reveals an awareness of this trend and is clear about its cultural origins. The prominence of the periodical press and the issue of its socio-cultural influence was by Elia’s time a cause of some concern among politicians and the intelligentsia in general. Because the periodical press and periodical writing are, and were, associated with metropolitan culture, the new model of reader becomes a product or symptom of that culture. As periodical text, thus predisposed towards a more intimate and immediate relationship with the reader than is the case with the book, Elia’s implied reader is very much in the ‘extensive’ mode. Simultaneously imagined as the polite ‘dear reader’, the reader here is a manifestly average figure: a reasonably well-read, but rather unimaginative middle-class, middle-aged suburbanite with moderate political opinions and who enjoys, in moderation, the pleasures of the metropolis, a clerk, probably, with the usual aspirations but also the guilt of his class. Similar enough, in other words, for the humble Elia to identify with, yet sufficiently different in the key area of the imagination to perform an educative function. My

Introduction

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reading of Elia therefore proposes an appropriation of the supposedly collaborative, author-submerging periodical text by the author, for the purpose of forming a certain responsive audience out of the middle-class mass. The bulk of the above profile and how it is used in Elia, is crucially established in the first two essays, ‘The South-Sea House’ and ‘Oxford in the Vacation’. The games Elia plays with his own identity in these essays and in other early appearances in the London, before it became common knowledge that Lamb was Elia’s author, are central to the reader’s education. A requirement for the reader to see beyond the material and the empirical is implicit in Elia’s reflexivity over his own phantasmal existence and the freedom from a fixed, oppressive notion of identity that this ludic ontology allows. Lamb is therefore not pandering to the vogue for extensive reading, but is opposing it with an ironically periodicalized version of the intensive model. This is implicit in Elia’s knowing exploitation of his phantasmal existence and the periodical’s absence of memory, by changing his birthplace from one essay to another, then justifying it in paratext to the fastidious reader as fictive license. The reader is thus being asked to forget narrative – to which Elia notably professes an aversion – and retain instead something supposedly deeper: the effect, or affect, that imaginative texts create through a sense of place. An analogy for the reading dichotomy and Lamb’s positioning on it can be found in ‘The Old and the New Schoolmaster’. After lamenting his own desultory reading and piecemeal learning, and describing an uncomfortable encounter with a specimen of the new schoolmaster, Elia’s sympathies lie against this type’s requirement ‘to know a little of every thing, because his pupil is required not to be ignorant of anything’, and in favour of the plodding, deep learning of ‘those fine old Pedagogues’, a ‘breed long since extinct’ (LM, 3, pp. 494–5). In essays such as ‘Detached Thoughts’ and ‘Readers against the Grain’, Lamb may emphatically present himself as a lover of books over magazines, but at a time when books were purportedly being read as if they were magazines, his recourse is, quite literally, to the medium of the moment. In the end, Elia argues that for any imaginative text – be it in a book or a magazine – to achieve its purpose as he sees it of relieving the reader from the pressurized here and now, requires the reader’s active and willing participation. But it is notably the metropolitan text of the magazine, with its intensified sense of immediacy, which Lamb chooses to convey this message. Within such a testing environment, therefore, the triumphal raison d’etre of Elia’s implied reader becomes all the more meaningful. Clearly, then, Lamb presents a highly rewarding subject on which to focus any study of metropolitan or urban writing. The reasons why this has proved not to be the case have already been partially covered: a critical prejudice against the essay, the literary genre at which, with Elia, Lamb excelled, and a congruent bias against periodical literature and towards the book. As discussed, not

16

Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

reading Lamb in the context of the periodical has meant underestimating his metropolitan credentials, whilst doing so has been presumed to undermine the whole idea of authorship upon which depends a book-length study of an author. Yet there seems to be a further reason, to do with an omission in cultural studies of the city itself. Julian Wolfreys’s otherwise excellent book on Romantic-era urban writing is a case in point. On the one hand this study of how writers from Blake to Dickens turn the experience of London into a sort of proto-modernist aesthetic approximates the present concept of a metropolitan text: ‘The London of this book is, if not a sublime site, then at least a hyperreality. The texts … are read in their efforts to inscribe a sense of the city, instead of merely recording a representation.’ Also, the ‘translating and transforming [of ] the real and the everyday beyond themselves’, to which Wolfreys attributes his chosen texts, equally describes the ways in which Elia identifies in the metropolis the very impetus for such acts.33 Lamb would therefore seem an ideal candidate for such a study, yet he is not even mentioned. A possible reason for this is the book’s failure, observed to be typical of such studies in a review by the Times Literary Supplement, to ‘admit 34 that the city is enjoyable as well as ineffable’. When that city is the metropolis, with the added sense of power, scale and influence implicit in the concept – moreover, at a time when the very idea of the metropolis still carries the shock of the new – the ineffable is bound to feature strongly in contemporary responses. Yet conveyed largely by that traditional, and traditionally undervalued, genre of metropolitan writing, the essay, there is an equally significant body of literature depicting the city as knowable and pleasurable. Against what Lees identifies of city writing in general as a ‘perverse and pathological urbanism’,35 and which is found in Romantic texts such as Book VII of The Prelude, the opium-eater’s Prelude-influenced ‘Confessions’ and the depiction of London as a site of corruption and economic instability in Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third, are the fundamentally more positive representations by Lamb, Hazlitt and Hunt. In the second part of the Conclusion, I explore further this tendency towards the ineffable in literature and criticism alike, and project Lamb’s alternative model of effability as long overdue for an equal share of attention. Lamb appreciates the effable, enlightened city for its traditionally democratic, egalitarian values. Prefiguring Elia’s respect for difference in ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ and the carnivalesque May Day feast in ‘The Praise of ChimneySweepers’, even the apparent cruelty of metropolitan life, such as the boxing ring and the crowd at a hanging, convince Lamb, writing as ‘The Londoner’, that ‘the universal instinct of man in all ages has leaned to order and good government’.36 In presenting the metropolis as the catalyst for a democratizing imagination, Hazlitt similarly declares in the essay ‘On Londoners and Country People’ in 1823 that, ‘by having our imaginations emancipated from petty interests and

Introduction

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personal dependence, we learn to venerate ourselves as men, and to respect the rights of human nature’.37 And for all the differences between Hunt’s and Lamb’s style, differences that caused Hunt to be placed at the centre of the Cockney School and Lamb on the outskirts, the self-assuredness of the ‘man about town’ manner that so irked Hunt’s detractors evokes the same sense of the metropolis as a site of cultural vitality and pleasurable sociability. Furthermore, the essayists’ discourse of consumerism, which, of course, De Quincey too contradictorily uses as the opium-eater, tends to work against the ineffable. After all, it is hard to conceive of something indescribable being consumed. Indeed, to express or describe adequately is, in a sense, to consume or at least render consumable. It hardly needs stating that the metropolitan author’s habitual pose of detached sociability is maintained above all by humour. We find it in Hunt’s irreverence, and more darkly in De Quincey’s bland, provoking aestheticism. Even the occasionally embittered Hazlitt indulges in absurd incongruity in his portrayal of Wordsworth in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, and proves highly adept at caricature with his sketches of individual Cockney types, in the essay ‘On Londoners and Country People’. For Lamb, however, humour seems to play a particularly important structural role, one that again places Lamb at the centre of a Romantic metropolitanism. The importance of humour in Elia is indicated by the use of the destabilizing power of laughter to express opposition to the self-importance of the reform movement, and by the template for the emancipatory city suggested by a love of the fool and artificial comedy. As Joseph Riehl has observed, Lamb’s use of humour has consistently made him a problematic subject for criticism, his reputation fluctuating in keeping with shifting trends within literary theory itself. After too great an emphasis placed on the biographical figure at the expense of literary analysis in the Victorian period, proposes Riehl, Lamb’s writing was not taken seriously between the wars due to its general appearance of triviality and insularity, then taken too seriously in the New Critical, post-war era. This latter rehabilitation of Lamb recognizes an intelligent and sensitive writer, yet the overall image emerging, of a sort of closet melancholic, undervalues Lamb’s achievement with the use of humour. Embodied in Elia’s ludic, reflexive ontology, the staple of Lamb’s humour is irony. However, the recurrent stumbling block for criticism, as Riehl sees it, is not so much irony itself – ‘that dangerous figure’ as Lamb calls it – as Lamb’s peculiarly ‘ironic cast of mind’: ‘he [Lamb] is the ultimate eiron, a dangerous figure himself who seems to have courted misunderstanding as others have sought to be understood’.38 By making Lamb instead of irony the dangerous figure, therefore, Riehl reverses Lamb’s own interpretation of the term as something over which the author has no control, to present it as an authorial effect and Lamb as the author of irony. This in turn confirms Lamb as author of the metropolitan text, since the figure of Elia is informed by the irony of a self predicated on the

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

periodical conditions that would undermine the author. Finally, the use in the present title of the term ‘muse’ can be justified, implying as it does the concept of an author; an author for whom the metropolis is a source of inspiration, both in its social form and as the text in which the emancipative possibilities of that form can be fully realized.

1 CONSUMING THE PERIODICAL TEXT: HUNT, HAZLITT AND THE ANXIETY OF COCKNEYISM

Cockney [is a] nick name given to the citizens of London, or persons born within the sound of Bow bell … The king of the cockneys is mentioned among the regulations for the sports and shows formerly held on Childermass Day, where he had his officers, a marshall, constable, butler, &c. Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811)

The Cockney School attacks, as Jeffrey Cox has observed, cleverly invert the elaborate mock court of the Cockney king in order to identify literary affectation and presumption.1 The burlesque pomp and ceremony of the Cockney ritual is generally appropriated to the provincial mindset and egoistic character of the Cockney author. Lamb’s ludic and self-denigrating persona appears closer in spirit to the carnivalesque festival described in the Dictionary than to the derogatory term that appropriates it. The periodical conditions of commodification and the anonymous, corporate identity simultaneously seem to inspire the Elian self, and cause the magazine in which Elia appears to be damagingly embroiled within the Cockney dispute, as an expression of anxiety over metropolitan culture. Both of Lamb’s metropolitan peers in this chapter, Hunt and Hazlitt, identify what are essentially Elian characteristics in their respective attempts to find a mode of periodical writing which is not synonymous with the all-pervasive, demonizing Cockney label. Because Lamb’s former editor and fellow periodical-writing Londoner Hunt is derided as the archetypal Cockney author he represents the prime agent of this anxiety, yet this is a position from which he offers a perceptive analysis of Lamb’s timely qualities as an antidote to Cockneyism. Responding in more ambivalent fashion to the rise of periodicals than the protagonists of the Cockney dispute and complicating the demonized figure of the Cockney itself, the foremost critic of the age, Hazlitt, tentatively gestures towards the irony-based defusion of metropolitan anxiety uniquely engineered by Lamb. Lamb writes not against Cockneyism or Hunt, therefore, – 19 –

20

Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

but the virulent anxiety that gathers around the Cockney figure. In addition to the proselytizing of nature by the Lake School, Lamb’s periodical writing responds to the divisive, and ultimately implosive, forces within metropolitan culture itself. In addition to the ones in which the terms of ‘Cockneyism’ are disputed, a number of self-reflexive articles in the London and concurrent magazines testify to this sense of uneasiness over periodical authorship. Such anxiety relates in turn to the new magazine’s ambiguous role within metropolitan culture, whereby periodicals such as the London attempt to capture the vibrant, dynamic spirit of the city, whilst exhibiting an uncomfortable sense of complicity with the more dubious features of novelty and consumerism. It will be argued in this chapter that an Elian mode of metropolitanism emerges in response to the ‘anxious’ image dramatized by the Cockney dispute. The circumstantial evidence for such a reading is compelling. Elia first appears in the London in August 1820, when the Cockney attacks on Hunt and his radical circle had persisted for almost three years. Founded in January of that year, the London itself was about to become embroiled, an involvement culminating in February 1821 with the utterly wasteful death of its most talented editor, John Scott, in an infamous duel with a Blackwood’s ally, John Christie. With poignant timing, therefore, the ostensibly gentle, whimsical Elia is born into a highly competitive and often bitterly aggressive, literary environment. It might be added that Lamb’s literary career prior to the beginning of the dispute is characterized by a chequered assortment of occasional, short poems, a few acclaimed critical pieces, some co-written children’s literature, the odd short story, and failed attempts at playwriting. In contrast, the hiatus of Cockneyism and the new magazine coincides with the moment of Lamb’s eventual maturation as a writer, with what was to be his only conceptually sustained, and perhaps fully realized, body of work. And with the demise of Cockneyism and the periodical milieu it articulates, comes, fittingly, the end of Elia too. The fact, finally, that Elia appears predominantly in one of the key periodicals of the dispute, the London Magazine, makes it still more viable to interpret Elia as a response to Cockneyism. However futile, Scott’s violent end does seem ironically appropriate. That is, if one views Scott as a named and corporeal casualty in a war of words fought out over the identity and role of the phantasmal ‘body’ of the pseudonymous periodical author.2 Yet a sense of the wastefulness of Scott’s death is unavoidable, not least of all because his defensiveness over Cockneyism was self-defeating. Worthy though Scott’s attempts might have been at redefining Cockneyism in order to distance his writers from its stigmatizing label, his efforts achieved almost the opposite by expanding the term to inescapable proportions – to the extent that it threatened, potentially, to signify all periodical writing. It is perhaps an

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uncomfortable consciousness of this possibility that informed both the intensity of the dispute and the longevity of the term. I will argue that Elia represents a parodic engagement with the anxiety-ridden figure of the periodical writer. A pseudonymous phantom himself, Elia’s characteristic self-deprecation and ‘othering’ of the self together embody a critique of the dispute’s paradoxical meaninglessness, and of the defensive egoism from which it grows. The first of the essays on which this reading is based is ‘Jews, Quakers, Scotchmen, and other Imperfect Sympathies’ (August 1821), which, in the light of the attacks of Blackwood’s suggestively begins with a discussion of the Caledonian mindset and casts its perspective through the example of an overtly critical figure who self-contradictorily confesses to the prejudicial nature of his own judgement. Following this are two essays that offer wryly alternative, non-confrontational models of, in the first case, reading, and in the second, writing. The first essay is ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ ( July 1822), in which Elia describes a democratic taste in literature paradoxically arrived at through materialistic or non-literary criteria. The second is a much later essay, ‘Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago’ (October 1831). As a retrospective on the turbulent history of the periodical press since 1796, this essay effectively circumscribes Lamb’s entire journalistic career – from his position on the fringes of the Jacobins to the periphery of the Cockneys – within an intrinsically Elian style of writing. Moreover, as usage of the Cockney label prevailed until the early 1830s, the essay reminds us that Elia’s ‘life’ roughly spans the era of the new miscellaneous magazine. First, however, the fraught self-image in the early 1820s of both the new magazine and the periodical author needs to be established.

The New Magazine and Professional Anxiety In recent analyses of the magazine market of the early 1820s, the image emerges of a confused or contradictory sense of authorial identity. Discussing Hazlitt’s notion of ‘literary Cockneyism’, Gregory Dart argues that a predominantly ‘selfreflexive writing style’, as evidenced also in examples from P. G. Patmore and John Scott, manifests a ‘troubling self-consciousness’ among magazine writers working within a revolutionized profession.3 This ‘periodical revolution’, according to Dart, had begun serenely enough in the early 1800s and 1810s, with the rebirth of the review essay as a ‘prestigious and influential cultural form’ due to the prominence of the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews. With the arrival of literary monthlies such as Blackwood’s, the New Monthly and the London Magazine, however, in the revolution’s ‘second phase’, came an anxiety-inducing attempt to mix high and low cultural forms: the education and erudition of ‘critical reviews, travel accounts and analytical essays’ were combined with the popular, sensationalist material of ‘gothic tales, city sketches, crime stories and satirical squibs’.4 The

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

crux of Dart’s model of anxiety, therefore, has less to do with written style than textual register. Although not, apparently, entailing a compromise of literary principles in terms of what they actually wrote, in other words, the aspirational kind of writer that Dart identifies nevertheless occupies an ambiguous, sub-literary register. It is a sense of this position of cultural dubiety that causes writers from all participants in the dispute, Lockhart and Wilson from Blackwood’s, Hunt from the Examiner, and Patmore and Scott from the London, to make the subject of periodical writing itself dominate periodical writing. The issue of how and to what degree the above authors, and others, can be said to aspire to ‘high’ literature remains problematic, nevertheless Dart’s hypothesis on the new magazine’s split identity and its effects on the author seems otherwise credible. It perhaps equates to another instance of the timeless conflict between tradition and modernity: an established, monolithic concept of authorship attempting to reassert itself within and against the new, destabilizingly plural text of the miscellaneous magazine. If so, then Elia’s appropriation of, instead of resistance to, those conditions defines this apparently nostalgic figure as surprisingly modern. By the 1830s, as I will discuss, the periodical veterans Lamb and Hunt were already historicizing the magazine revolution in terms of the above thirty-year period. The protracted Cockney debate in which both were very differently but equally involved, arose not simply out of market competition but from a broader cultural source. The Blackwood’s attacks ultimately represent, in Dart’s analysis, ‘a series of misgivings’ about periodical literature and its role in ‘modern urban culture’, an ‘anxiety … displaced onto a variety of London writers and publications’, epitomized by Hunt and the Examiner.5 As will be the practice in the present study, ‘Cockneyism’ can therefore be said to refer to any or all such expressions of professional anxiety, and not simply a defensive, geographically localized term of abuse. The fear behind the disputation was that the new magazines, even the more literary ones, mindlessly mirrored the transience and ephemerality of the city that spawned them, by reproducing the city’s degrading predilection for spectacle and fashion at the cost of the supposedly timeless, humanistic products of fine art and canonical literature. That the rise of periodical writing at this time is fearfully associated with a wen-like metropolitan culture is supported by David Higgins’s proposal that the notion of ‘original genius’ in the 1820s and 1830s was deemed to have been ‘swallowed up or stifled by the anonymous, teeming mass of periodical writing’. As a figure, in a sense, ‘consumed’ by the corporate mass of the periodical text the very concept of author was among the established traditions perceived to be under threat from the all-devouring metropolitan monster. Higgins indeed associates the periodical with that other, highly prevalent form of ‘press’, the crowd: ‘Like the urban crowd the periodical press was imagined as being both dangerously various and fragmented, and disturbingly amorphous and uniform’.6 It

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might be added that Mark Parker’s notion of how the miscellaneous items of a magazine are arranged according to the politico-cultural agenda of the editor parallels the way in which the crowd absorbs the individual into a social, political or religious collective.7 Periodical writing thus becomes a subtle example of John Plotz’s claim of the 1800 to 1850 period, that ‘literature records features of the era’s crowd’s that no other historical sources can supply’.8 The crowd appears only fleetingly and occasionally in Elia: as the ‘high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry’ (LM, 5, p. 533) who pause for the beggar, or, as discussed in Chapter 4, the ‘mob’ for whom Elia makes himself a spectacle in the essay on chimney-sweeps. With the notable exception of the reader himself – in the guise of the preoccupied, ‘lean annuitant’ who passes by the South-Sea House, or the unimaginative ‘connoisseur’ – public figures in Elia are eccentric or aberrant individuals who, like Lamb’s persona itself, are defined by exclusion or deviation from the crowd. Such exaggeratedly individual figures are Bridget and John Elia, George Dyer (‘G. D.’), Jem White, Bigod ( John Fenwick), Captain Jackson, or any or all of the South-Sea clerks, old benchers and old actors. Jon Klancher is perhaps the first writer to associate periodicals with the crowd, but although the Hogarthian sweep and the Elgin Marble beggar discussed in Chapter 4 could be described as social types identified from amongst the crowd, these disenfranchised non-readers clearly do not qualify, in Klancher’s terms, as potential subjects for audience-making. Drawn from the crowd, it is specifically and explicitly the periodical reader him or herself to whom Lamb appeals, thus immediately pre-empting or overwriting a discourse which would transcend the author. Elia indeed resists the above correlation between the periodical and the crowd, particularly where the latter pertains, in accordance with how John Plotz defines the crowd, to orchestrated demonstration rather than random street aggregation.9 As will become apparent, although the crowd seems to inform in general the coalescent ethos of Elia’s extra-essayistic figure, the genius of Lamb is, to once again use Hazlitt’s ‘Spirit of the Age’ analogy, his deviation from the anxious ‘press’ of the periodical. How the consciousness of an uncertain cultural identity is manifested in the magazine author is also explored in Margaret Russett’s analysis of De Quincey as a ‘“minor” author’: ‘neither a canonical figure nor a disenfranchised marginal author’. According to Russett, the prostitute Ann in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which first appeared in the London, allegorizes a ‘professional dilemma’ for the magazine writer: namely, ‘how can anonymous “articles” and standardized “characters” be imprinted’ with a ‘traceable identity’, as the predominant requirement of literary discourse? Ann’s prostitution represents the ‘burgeoning and “promiscuous” readership’ of the London, and the absence of her surname the writer’s anonymity.10 With an anonymous and corporate form of authorship, but one which produces widely read – or perhaps consumed –

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

texts, the magazine writer’s position is inherently ambiguous. This is to say that as a new social entity, the magazine writer: occupies not only an alien work ‘environment’ but a defamiliarized body. His disproportion of cultural capital and circulating capital gives rise to that cluster of anxieties about prestige, continuity, and the legibility of identity that may collectively be called professional.11

The collaborative nature of magazine writing implicitly renounces, in Russett’s terms, the ‘properly named individualism and relative prestige of the book market’.12 This issue of prestige is taken up by Higgins, with ‘anxiety’ once again cropping up in reference to periodical writing, in an ‘anxiety and tension’ identified in the marginalized magazine writer’s often embittered treatment of the relatively enfranchised poet.13 The writer’s precarious material circumstances, moreover, could only have added to an uncertain sense of cultural worth. Russett points out that in 1820, the year the London was founded, the very idea of magazine-writing as a paid job was still relatively new, having been introduced in 1802 with the Edinburgh Review’s compulsory payments for its editors and writers. But, as with the London, contributors usually had no guaranteed salary and were expected to contribute exclusively to the one magazine on a ‘fee-for-work basis’, even though the basic rates were barely enough for writers who subsisted wholly on such work, while any ‘profit or surplus value’ from the magazine naturally went to the publishers.14 Even Lamb, the London’s highest-paid contributor, was required to continue toiling at the East India House up to the age of fifty. Yet at the same time, the submersion of the writer’s identity within that of the magazine conferred a kind of power, by allowing critics to attack their targets without danger of incrimination. Critical clout compensated for a dubious relation to the literary establishment, even as it represented to a degree the cause and effect of that relationship. Arising thus from professional anxiety, it is the embittered abuse of this power to which Elia responds. The tone of Elia’s response is established almost immediately with an assertion of ‘literary dignity’ at the start of the second essay, ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ (October 1820). As discussed more fully in Chapter 3, Elia’s wry self-justification here suggests that an indeterminate and elusive identity is in itself a valuable commodity within the otherwise restrictive world of urban wage-labour. Elia makes great play in this essay of retrieving a measure of emancipation from the fixed, corporate identity, ironically dramatizing in the process the magazine writer’s dubious identity. Indeed, his wittily strenuous attempt at obviating the ignominy of a clerking day-job serves to satirize rather than empathize with professional anxiety. Lamb expresses a similar attitude through ‘Lepus’, an alternative persona more or less contemporary with Elia. In the New Times of 31 January 1825, the essay ‘Mortifications of an Author’ sees Lepus sidestep the ostensibly

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more serious matter of ‘unfair and malignant reviewing’ to describe the merciless tormenting of friends who feign ignorance of his real identity whilst discussing the magazine for which he writes: I have sifted, I have pumped them (as the vulgar phrase is) till my heart ached, to extort a pittance of acknowledgement. I have descended to arts below any animal but an Author, who is veritably the meanest of Heaven’s creatures, and my vanity has returned upon myself ungratified, to choke me.15

This is an anti-Cockneyist manoeuvre akin to Lamb’s Elian approach, aided, moreover, by the self-undercutting significance of the Lepus pseudonym. As Latin for hare, Lepus is a melancholic creature the flesh of which, when eaten, is purported to bring about a similar state of mind in the consumer: Lepus vainly hungers after the prestige of a ‘real’ author yet, denied the bodily (or fleshly) presence of book authorship, as he sees it, and railing against his own phantasmal existence as periodical writer, Lepus himself ends up ‘consumed’ by the selfloathing of the melancholic. Professional anxiety is thus mocked as little more than the vanity of the periodical writer’s typically fragile ego, yet the aggressivedefensive stance of Cockneyism is avoided by Lamb’s disarming placement of such a foible within the self. Two examples from the London’s pages will serve to establish the ‘troubling self-consciousness’ of the magazine in which Elia appears. In December 1820, two months after ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, Hazlitt affects an apology for the delayed publication of his drama review: Punctuality is ‘the immediate jewel of our souls.’ We leave it to others to be shrewd, ingenious, witty and wise; to think deeply, and write finely; it is enough for us to be exactly dull. The categories of number and quantity are what we chiefly delight in; for on these depend (by arithmetical computation) the pounds, shillings, and pence. We suspect that those writers only trouble their heads about fame, who cannot get any thing more substantial for what they write. (LM, 2, p. 685)

Hazlitt archly expresses the magazine writer’s humiliation at being forced to manufacture the abstract items of the literary imagination as if they were material, consumer products, such tyrannous conditions producing instead commensurately dull, insipid writing. Whereas Lamb uses the persona of Elia to mock authorial egotism, Hazlitt, by affecting defensiveness over literary dignity with no such ironic layering of the self, achieves the opposite, his wounded ego conveyed by mock humility. Appearing in the same issue as Elia’s ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’, in July 1822, is another example of professional anxiety in which P. G. Patmore similarly identifies as a generic trait of periodicals a tendency to manufactured, formulaic writing. ‘On Magazine Writers’ refers to the ‘reviews and magazines, those foundling hospitals for the bastard progeny of

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

prurient imaginations’ (LM, 4, p. 22). Patmore darkly jokes that an ‘automaton writer’ will soon be patented, in which, ‘after being wound up it is only necessary to fling into it a certain number of pages of Johnson, or any other vocabulary, and they come out completely formed into the shape of an article’ (p. 25). The humour again belies the uneasy sense of a generic link between magazine-writing and consumerism, or the writer’s consciousness of occupying an ambivalent position between a traditional concept of literature based on moral utility rather than economic profit,16 and a modern metropolitan culture which threatens to render such a model obsolete. Of equal significance, Patmore’s periodical essay against periodical essays suggests that the only way for the genre to redeem any literary credibility is for it to attack itself. Such implosive reflexivity implies the futile boundary marking between self and other that characterizes the Cockney dispute. It might be argued, however, that if Elia is self-reflexive then this figure is just as expressive of professional anxiety as the Cockneyistic texts to which Elia responds. Yet there are surely different kinds of reflexivity, some more anxious than others. Lamb’s Elian periodical writings are only anxious if anxiety and reflexivity are made synonymous. There is a significant difference between periodical writing that discusses the nature of periodical writing, like Patmore’s essay, and that, like the serialized, essayistic figure of Elia, in which is constructed the character of a periodical writer. The former implies self-consciousness, the latter, self-detachment: the one a desire to escape the self, and the other an actualization of that escape through irony and the othering of the self.

The Cult of Criticism and Lamb’s Neutralizing Style The consumerist aspect of metropolitan culture involves in turn the jostling and manoeuvring of competition, and this, of course, had a part to play in the Cockney dispute. The very conception of the London epitomizes the highly competitive ethos of the new magazine, and equates this value with two more terms of metropolitan connotation, immediacy and miscellaneousness. Scott’s Prospectus in the first issue of January 1820 promises a magazine that will meet the challenge of the ‘now strenuous competition of Periodical literature’ through being ‘entertaining by the variety of the contents, and conspicuous for its alertness in noting matters of immediate interest’ (LM, 1, p. iv). The banter and bustle of Thomas Hood’s editorial ‘The Lion’s Head’, the deceptively astute art criticism of T. G. Wainwright’s eccentric, frenetic persona, Janus Weathercock, literary and dramatic criticism from Scott, Hazlitt and Reynolds, the rural quietude of John Clare’s poetry, Elia’s whimsy and nostalgia, commercial reports, and news items from home and abroad, were all featured. As a celebrant of metropolitan

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culture, therefore, no magazine could have been more explicit than Scott’s new venture: one of the principal objects of the LONDON MAGAZINE will be to convey the very ‘image, form, and pressure’ of that ‘mighty heart’ whose vast pulsations circulate life, strength, and spirits, throughout this great Empire … Opinion now busies itself with more venturous themes than of yore; discussion must start fleeter and subtler game; excitements must be stronger; the stakes of all sorts higher; the game more complicated and hazardous. (pp. iv, v)

In the light of the London’s impending, disastrous involvement in the Cockney dispute, the boldness of Scott’s words in the Prospectus ominously image the periodical press in terms of a brutal, ruthless sport spiralling out of control, or a market of precipitously accelerating competition. Announced by the mocking of literary dignity in ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, immediately apparent with Elia is a figure precisely opposed both to the fragile ego of the magazine writer and the hyper-competitive ethos of the magazine milieu. This disarming effect is achieved through a characteristic pose of selfbelittlement. Robert Frank observes that the Elia essays inculcate a relaxation of the reader’s critical faculties and a commensurate sense of reading for pleasure or ‘sport’: to this effect Elia ‘repeatedly refers to his unimportance’, ‘depreciates his own activities … defers quite often to the opinions of another’ and generally ‘appears as an ineffectual presence in the daily affairs of men’.17 This is not to say that Elia’s is an abnegated but rather an inverted self, to which the response of a frequently identified reader is paramount. The terms ‘sport’ and ‘pleasure’ are also integral to Elia’s modus operandi, in that they highlight the playful way in which the imagined reader’s sympathies are manipulated. The importance of harmless play, as opposed to Scott’s ultra-competitive ‘game’, to Elia’s approach is clearly illustrated in ‘Mrs Battle’s Opinions on Whist’ (February 1821). The indomitable matriarch insists that the card game should only be played in a highly competitive spirit, with no quarter given or taken. Although Elia agrees in principle he makes a telling exception for ‘sick whist’: he recalls wishing that, on spraining his foot, a game with his cousin Bridget could have ‘gone on in that idle folly for ever’ (LM, 3, p. 165). The sense of pleasure taken in play as a non-competitive end in itself is evoked by Elia’s concluding wish, that ‘Bridget and I should be ever playing’ (p. 165), and with poignant timing, the ‘strenuous competition’ of the periodical milieu claimed Scott’s life in the same month as this essay appeared. The non-competitive ethos of play also appears in Elia’s New Monthly Magazine essay in the ‘Popular Fallacies’ series, ‘That my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple are Models of the Genteel Style in Writing’ (March 1826). Here, the latter is appreciated for his sense of all humanity as being ‘like a froward child, that must be played with, and humoured a little,

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

to keep it quiet till it falls asleep …’.18 Purposive activity in general is treated with scepticism, as, in ‘The Superannuated Man’ (May 1825), Elia declares that a man ‘can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him NOTHING-TO-DO; he should do nothing’ (LM, n.s. 2, p. 73). Yet whilst the inverted self might be ascribed to a notion of authorial quintessence, there appears to be something more at stake in Lamb’s use of what was already the well-established trope of the ‘dear reader’. This ‘embodiment of interpretive correctness and enthusiastic patronage’ originates, according to Trevor Ross, sometime around the late-sixteenth century, ‘when writers began to sense the extent of the alienation that print imposed between them and their readers’. Ross traces a shift in ‘literary value’ from ‘production to consumption, invention to reception, writing to reading’ to a specific moment in history, 22 February 1774, the day that the House of Lords ‘elected to defeat the notion of “perpetual copyright” so long claimed by the London bookselling monopoly over works of the English canon’: from then on, ‘the canon became a set of commodities to be consumed; it became literature rather than poetry’.19 In the ‘dear friend’ of The Prelude, and in the very intimacy of the addressee of Coleridge’s conversation poems, is expressed a rearguard hostility to the idea of an increasingly unknowable, mass audience for whom literature was becoming, or had already become, it must have seemed, just another consumer product. But there is perhaps a renewed sense of alienation being expressed by these Romantic poets, from an awareness also that the consumer demand of the mass audience is at once being met and generated by an alternative, sub-literary form, the threateningly metropolitan phenomenon of the new magazine. Such an image chimes with Higgins’s earlier association of the periodical press with the urban crowd, and Wordsworth’s response to both phenomena indeed seems to confirm the notion of the periodical press as a cultural manifestation of the crowd. The continuity by which spontaneous response is converted into poetry and the slow contemplation required of the reader, of a ruined cottage or half-finished sheepfold, implicitly opposes Wordsworth’s poetry to the immediacy, fragmentariness and desultoriness of the periodical text,20 just as the poet in Book VII of The Prelude is profoundly disconcerted by the topsy-turvy disunity and disjunction of the London crowd. As I will argue, however, the reader-in-the-text belies the appearance of nostalgia in Elia to function as a purposive and educative, implied model of response, in contrast to the Lake poets’ relatively passive version. If Cockney disputation demonstrates the truism that competitiveness tends to manifest itself more in critical negation of the other than in projection of the self, then Elia correspondingly complicates or deconstructs the act of criticism. An established critic himself, Lamb does not suggest that literature should be above criticism, but that, as the principle feature of a teeming periodical mar-

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ket, it is in danger of losing a sense of perspicacity to an indiscriminate, mass assimilation. Through Lepus again, Lamb directly associates this cult of criticism with the new magazine. In ‘Readers against the Grain’ (13 January 1825), Lepus laments the engendering of pseudo-analytical reading habits: If I hate one day before another, it is the accursed first day of the month, when a load of periodicals is ushered in and distributed to feed the reluctant monster. How it gapes and takes in its prescribed diet, as little savoury as that which Daniel ministered to that Apocryphal dragon, and not more wholesome! Is there no stopping the eternal wheels of the press for half a century or two, till the nation recover its senses? Must we magazine it and review at this sickening rate for ever? Shall we never again read to be amused? But to judge, to criticise, to talk about it and about it? 21

The essay blames the situation on the periodical press’ parasitic relationship with the city’s flourishing book market. Lepus asserts that ‘No one can pass through the streets, alleys, and blindest thoroughfares of this Metropolis, without surprise at the number of shops opened everywhere for the sale of cheap publications … fair reprints of good old books’: the cult of criticism therefore presents a downside to the welcome fact that ‘Fielding, Smollett, the Poets, Historians, are daily becoming accessible to the purses of poor people’. Lepus ends by claiming he would rather perform any number of demeaning jobs than contribute via his own writing to the ‘insatiable monster of modern reading’, thus identifying a reading nation satiated with a pleasure-killing diet of critical reviews.22 Regency gluttony is therefore deemed to have permeated literature itself, in the guise of the cultic voracity of criticism. Again, Lamb is not advocating uncritical reading, only that criticism not be devalued by indiscriminate, mass appropriation as the principal or sole purpose of reading. His Elian approach, as we shall see, is to pre-empt and disarm the pseudo-critical reader as conditioned by the new magazine. In this way criticism becomes a secondary, hence less reactionary, response, one which is in keeping with the importance, as discussed later, of preserving in sceptical adulthood a degree of childlike credulity. For Lamb at his most Romantically metropolitan, the nurturing of credulity and the leavening of the critical faculty amount to one and the same thing: the enabling of the transcendent power of literature within a materialistic world epitomized by the metropolis. What Lepus’s complaint about the glut of critical reviews does not mention, however, is any notion of a predominant style or tenor. With the Anti-Jacobin attacks in 1797–8, reviews had become increasingly politically motivated and often highly personal. Along with Lloyd, Coleridge and Southey, Lamb himself had been ridiculed for his poetry by both the Anti-Jacobin and the Monthly Magazine,23 while William Gifford’s remark about Lamb being incurably insane in the Quarterly Review in 1811 demonstrates just how personal periodical criticism could be. By the 1820s, prior to the Blackwood’s attacks on Hunt, Lamb had

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

witnessed Wordsworth’s poetry being savaged by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review. Central to Jeffrey’s attack is the term ‘Lake School’.24 Similar in function to the Jacobin label, it suggests an out-of-touch clique of nature-loving idealists, and is principally applied to Wordsworth but also includes Coleridge and Southey, with Lamb again on the fringe. Although politically a Whig, Jeffrey thus demonizes a stylistically disparate group of poets whose shared egalitarian principles offend his Burkean sense of conservatism: Jeffrey’s criticism is, as Marilyn Butler has observed, politically rather than aesthetically based, in that he recognizes Wordsworth’s poetic genius but fears its potential when misapplied to ballads about peasant life, for upsetting the status-quo at a time of Luddite unrest and war with France.25 Carried on the tide of the new magazine, the rightwing reviewers would have readers believe that literary folly currently existed to an unprecedented and dangerous degree, and their condemnation represented the normative and imperative voice of common sense. Lamb was not alone, of course, in expressing concern about the role of the periodical press in instilling in the reading masses a reactionary critical consciousness. Coleridge, in both the Biographia Literaria (1817) and in his lectures, is similarly worried about the effect on the reader of the volume and quality of critical reviews. Coleridge fears that the value of literature in general is becoming debased, due mainly to the ‘dirty passions and impudence, of anonymous criticism’ and its damaging effect on the public’s ‘powers of judgement and evaluation’: also in the Biographia, Coleridge is perplexed at ‘that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against the author, in favour of the critic’.26 Lucy Newlyn’s article on Coleridge sees the term ‘anxiety’ used yet again in reference to current attitudes to periodical writing, the above and similar comments indicating that the periodical press exacerbated the author’s career-long ‘anxiety of reception’.27 Lamb’s similar concern suggests, however, that Coleridge’s anxiety is more than simply characteristic. Newspaper and magazine reviews really had proliferated, and the tenor often was of a highly personal and political nature. Lamb’s ‘Lepus’ fears over the pre-eminent critical reader likewise appear to be more than the whim of a caricatured egoist when read alongside Hazlitt’s Edinburgh Review essay of May 1823, on ‘The Periodical Press’. In answering the question, ‘Whether Periodical Criticism is, upon the whole, beneficial to the cause of literature?’, with the deadpan assertion, ‘That periodical criticism is favourable to – periodical criticism’, Hazlitt wearily acknowledges the cultural primacy of what he sees as a narrowly self-serving, hence sub-literary phenomenon.28 By the time of Hazlitt’s essay, the venom of which periodical criticism was capable had been demonstrated by the Cockney School attacks, instigated in October 1817 by the essentially Tory magazine Blackwood’s. From behind the anonymity of ‘Z’, J. G. Lockhart devised a neat urban correlative to the rural Lake School against a group of radical London-based writers which included

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Keats and Hazlitt, and who were associated with Leigh Hunt and his magazines, particularly the Examiner. Like their anti-Jacobin and Lake School predecessors, these attacks were fundamentally political, or, rather, they politicized style itself. Jeffrey Cox emphasizes the relevance here of ‘the urban nature of the Cockney School’ poets, in contrast to ‘the Lake District’ poets: ‘The Cockney style is witty, allusive, intelligent, and it also possesses an urban and at its best urbane arrogance’, and with its ‘diction shifts’ and ‘odd juxtapositions’, and in general a ‘new-fangled’ appearance, it was an attempt, says Cox, ‘to capture the pulse of modern city life’.29 As the defining context to Elia in this chapter, a similar aesthetic can be identified in Hunt’s prose. Occasionally linked with the Cockneys, Shelley responded to the reactionary critical climate in 1819 with an attempt at parodic satire, in Peter Bell the Third.30 This is not simply an attack on Wordsworth’s politico-poetical apostasy, but equally the hard-line conservatism of reviewers like Jeffrey who are deemed to have induced it, in addition, of course, to the wild scurrility of reviews endured by Shelley himself. As with Cockneyist anxiety, moreover, Shelley associates the work of such periodical writing with the city: the ‘Hell’ of corruption and economic instability that the poem presents as London is also imaged, once again, as an environment hostile to literary endeavour. Peter is first vilified by reviewers in the devil-king’s pay for his egalitarian principles, and is later lauded to the same extent in order to seal his apostasy. The reviewers pressurize the suggestible poet, disfiguring his genius and pushing him towards harsh religious orthodoxy and reactionary principles. For the radical circle around Hunt, therefore, periodical criticism had become predominantly a political weapon of the right, less concerned with literary merit than with the writer’s purported affiliations. In the periodical figure of John Wilson, moreover, we find a parallel narrative to that of Shelley’s Peter Bell. Although Lockhart has been credited with the bulk of the attacks,31 according to Richard Woodhouse’s Cause Book De Quincey maintained that Wilson was the main perpetrator. Keats’s close friend and champion Woodhouse wrote the Cause Book diary in the autumn of 1821, and in it relates De Quincey’s comments on the recent dispute between Blackwood’s and the London. De Quincey had originally been hired by Blackwood’s only to fall out with them over terms for the publication of his ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, which subsequently appeared in the London that autumn. De Quincey is reported by Woodhouse as considering Lockhart to be an awkward, diffident character, quite incapable of such attacks, in contrast to the spiteful and envious Wilson. However factual or otherwise, the Cause Book description of Wilson significantly echoes Shelley’s model of the scurrilous reviewer in Peter Bell the Third:

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine He was originally possessed of much feeling & enthusiasm. He published some earlier works under the impression of such Sentiments. And it was the reception these works met with that completely turned his Soul. He was laughed at, ridiculed & mocked for these productions … Wilson became jealous of every one who trod in the same path with himself, & vindictive towards the world. He strove to attack & pull down the reputation of all other poets whom he thought he could safely assail – while on the contrary, he was submissive & crouching to all whom the world had marked with its approbation, or whom he thought it was beyond his power to lower. He changed his enthusiasm for hypocrisy.32

Also of relevance is that the Cause Book attributes Wilson’s vitriol to his own experience of scabrous criticism. This image, of the poet of feeling twisted by mocking reviews into a critic of bitterness and ‘hypocrisy’, parallels the process of Peter Bell’s manipulation from radical to reactionary poet. Wilson, whose own poetry owed much to his idol Wordsworth, is depicted in the Cause Book as forsaking his Lake-ish principles to turn into the same kind of reviewer that Shelley to a large extent blames for Peter-Wordsworth’s apostasy. With the publication of Shelley’s elegy for Keats, Adonais, in July 1821 – including a Preface in which the criticism levelled at Endymion by the Quarterly Review is claimed to have been sufficiently brutal to carry fatal consequences for the consumptive author – a literary backlash to the cult of criticism is much in evidence. For all its competitive zeal the London also set itself against this perceived malaise. In December 1820, as the Cockney dispute was being reignited by the magazine’s recent involvement, Scott felt it necessary to emphasize its dedication to promoting ‘a free, independent, and honest tone to literary discussion; – to introduce into it a spirit of candour, and to expel from it the common-place severities, as well as the maudlin praises that degrade criticism’ (LM, 2, p. 395). The London demonstrates its impartiality by criticizing both Hunt on the political left, and Blackwood’s on the right: Hunt is taken to task by Scott in October for ‘just as great a deficiency in real candour as is apparent in the bitter spite of the Quarterly or the merry ruffianism of Blackwood’s’ (p. 315). The London’s impartiality, then, is a correlative of its competitiveness, these founding principles together enabling the magazine to criticize any writer or other magazine regardless of political allegiance. Elia accordingly tends to occupy politically neutral territory. In the consecutive essays on sweeps and beggars, for instance, he is equally sceptical over the ethical premises of humanitarian and utilitarian reform, espousing instead personal agency and individual responsibility.33 However, in contrast to Scott’s forthright, bullish editorial and critical character, Elia’s impartiality is of a playful, non-confrontational nature. Within the context of the London and its participation in the new magazine’s competitive game, therefore, Elia’s whole character takes on a weightily pacific significance that belies the self-representa-

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tion of triviality or inconsequence. The concept of ‘neutral ground’ is used by Elia himself in ‘The Old Actors’ (April 1822), to describe the relief afforded by artificial comedy from another assault on the pleasure principle, melodrama and its moral territory, the ‘diocese of the strict conscience’ (LM, 5, p. 305). Of equal significance, neutrality is recognized as Lamb’s chief asset by his contemporaries, most notably Hunt. First published in the two-part Examiner review of Lamb’s Works, in March 1819, and reappearing in the Indicator in January and February 1821 – just as Elia’s part in the London’s early success had become established, and the feud with Blackwood’s was reaching its dramatic climax – Hunt claims of Lamb’s ‘anti-critical’ style that ‘[it] 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’. Hunt is quick to deny that such opposition to the dominant critical trend makes Lamb bland or insubstantial, and takes issue with ‘a flimsy criticism in an orthodox review, which mistook the exquisite simplicity and apprehensiveness of Mr. Lamb’s genius for want of power’: Lamb’s anti-critical manner is indeed apparent even in his ‘criticisms’, which are ‘chiefly tending to overthrow the critical spirit’. Anticipating in particular Elia’s self-representation of plain-speaking honesty in ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ two years later, moreover, Hunt elaborates to identify a critic of individualistic taste and integrity: ‘while he likes from sympathy, he dislikes with generosity and sincerity’.34 In thus recognizing the understated substance, or the suggestiveness, of Lamb’s writing Hunt’s astute review offers a contemporary paradigm (largely overlooked in the intervening years) for Lamb’s cultural signifance. The review helped ensure that by 1820 Lamb was known above all as a critic of disarmingly anti-critical style, with the essays on Shakespeare and Hogarth – previously published in Hunt’s Reflector – especially praised.35 Although first published respectively in 1811 and 1812, these essays were not reviewed until the Works appeared in 1818, and the generally favourable response possibly gave Lamb the confidence to launch Elia soon after. In a review appearing in John Scott’s earlier venture, the Champion, Thomas Noon Talfourd also singles out the criticism for praise in his review of the Works, essentially, again like Hunt, for Lamb’s understated manner: ‘In some measure he has stopped the progress of that love of mere strength in writing before which the humanities of poetry were declining, by delighting us with glimpses of new and fresh beauty’.36 Lamb’s style is described by Talfourd as a welcome and innovative alternative to a more aggressive mode of criticism, the predominance of which is threatening to produce poetry of a timid or a cynical tenor. In other words, Talfourd joins Coleridge, Shelley and Lamb in voicing concern over ‘readers against the grain’, but like Hunt finds the answer solely in Lamb’s writing. Hunt’s and Talfourd’s reviews, with their common appreciation of Lamb’s anti-critical manner, together project Elia’s stylistic appropriateness for the periodical milieu of the 1820s.

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

Like Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age portrait of Lamb, Hunt valorizes the author for being out of step with the times. Hunt’s criticism of Lamb takes on added significance, however, because of Hunt’s catalytic role within the Cockney dispute, as the principal ‘author’ himself of the anxieties over metropolitan culture around which the dispute revolved. But Hunt is referring to the pre-Elian Lamb, as a timely example of how to write periodical literature which, unlike Hunt’s own, eludes the stigma of low metropolitan culture. Therefore this image of Lamb from around the start of Cockney disputation is implicitly non-metropolitan. With his deliberate, thematic self-representation as periodical author, the succeeding, Elian Lamb presents, of course, a quite different response to Cockneyism. The anti-critical style remains, but it is now framed within an approach characterized by an alternative instead of effaced metropolitanism.

Disputing Cockneyism, Defining Elia From Lamb’s peripheral position on the Cockney circle, Elia is introduced into the new magazine milieu with the implosive dispute at its height. Yet Lamb himself suffered relatively little. As with his brief membership of the Lake School, Lamb’s was perhaps more a case of guilt by association. A favourable review of Elia in the more typically venomous British Critic, in March 1823, attributes what few faults there are to the influence of Lamb’s peers. Despite alarm that in the ‘Essay on Munden’ the ‘cacodaemon of cockneyism appears suddenly to have seized his imagination’, and the reviewer admitting to a hypersensitivity to ‘the least touch of the Rimini School’, he finds that ‘it seldom taints [Lamb’s] pages’.37 Even Wilson’s ‘Christopher North’ gives a generally positive review of Lamb’s Works, and, after publication of The Essays of Elia in 1823, jokes ironically that Lamb should acknowledge the astuteness of Blackwood’s in being one of first magazine’s to notice his work.38 As a subject himself of periodical criticism, therefore, Lamb emerges from the reception of the Works onwards as occupying the neutral ground that is integral to Elia’s alternative metropolitanism. The climax to the Cockney dispute came when Scott, infuriated by Blackwood’s ‘downright system of terror’ (LM, 2, p. 496), resorted to an antiquated test of honour by challenging Lockhart to a duel. A farcically bungled affair resulting in a fatal wound for Scott from Lockhart’s second, Jonathan Christie, the event took place at Chalk Farm on 16 February 1821. Keats had died of consumption only four days earlier. Whereas the young poet was mythologized by Shelley as an admonitory case of death by review, Scott was an all too real victim of the cult of criticism, in which action replaced insult, and body, word.39 The dispute had been instigated by the attacks in Blackwood’s on Hunt and his circle a little over two years prior to the launch of Scott’s magazine in January 1820. William Blackwood’s magazine, to which the conception of the Lon-

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don was largely a response, was itself forged in 1817 out of the white heat of new-magazine competition. Located in Edinburgh, Britain’s other literary city, Blackwood’s was intended initially to challenge the declining Scots Magazine, the stately Whiggishness of the Edinburgh Review and the polite old Toryism of the Quarterly Review, and, armed with established writers such as John Wilson, J. G. Lockhart and James Hogg, ‘Maga’ immediately made its name with ‘a highly marketable blend of slander, sensationalism, erudition, buffoonery, and truculent high Toryism’.40 The first issue alone saw Wilson deliver a personal attack on Coleridge, Wilson, Lockhart and Hogg combine for the ‘Chaldee Manuscript’ (an allegorical assault on Constable and other prominent Edinburgh Whigs), and the first of the Cockney School articles. The attacks provoked two notable essays devoted to redefining and in the process eluding Cockneyism. Scott’s outraged defence of his tarred contributors in ‘On Cockney Writers’ appeared in the London in January 1821, just before the dispute’s tragic denouement. Hazlitt’s ‘On Londoners and Country People’ appeared in the New Monthly Magazine in August 1823, as the cultural currency of the Cockney persisted. First, however, the article that started it all. In the Blackwood’s essay of October 1817, the ‘King of Cockaigne’, Hunt’s social pretensions are equated with his poetic ones: He is the ideal of a Cockney Poet. He raves perpetually about ‘green fields,’ ‘jaunty streams,’ and ‘o’er arching leafiness,’ exactly as a Cheapside shop-keeper does about the beauties of his box on the Camberwell road. Mr Hunt is altogether unacquainted with the face of nature in her magnificent scenes; he has never seen any mountain higher than Highgate-hill, nor reclined by any stream more pastoral than the Serpentine River. But he is determined to be a poet eminently rural, and he rings the changes – till one is sick of him, on the beauties of the different ‘high views’ which he has taken of God and nature, in the course of some Sunday dinner parties, at which he has assisted in the neighbourhood of London. His books are indeed not known in the country; his fame as a poet (and I might almost say, as a politician too) is entirely confined to the young attorneys and embryo-barristers about town. In the opinion of these competent judges, London is the world – and Hunt is a Homer.41

Unlike Hunt’s effete, metropolitan nature-lover in the Blackwood’s representation, Lamb – who had more genuinely been acquainted with nature through his friendship with Coleridge and Wordsworth, but had cured himself of a poetic ‘addict[ion] to groves and meadows and purling streams’42 – recognized his true muse to be in prose and the city. Discussed further in the next chapter, Lamb advertises his own metropolitan aesthetic through the ironically apologetic terms of Elia’s ‘prosaic’ dreams of cities in ‘Witches and Other Night-Fears’ (October 1821). Although unacknowledged as such in this essay, De Quincey’s fantastic, opium-conjured city is among the examples of a poetic vision supposedly wanting in Elia. Not simply a rejection of the Wordsworthian aesthetic of nature and

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rural life, therefore, Lamb’s prose equally defines itself through dialogue with other metropolitan writing, including Hunt’s. As Gregory Dart observes of the respective reception of the two authors, in social and literary standing alike, the presumptuous Hunt is deemed to be out of his depth in contrast to the modest, self-effacing figure presented by Lamb, one who appears to know his place better. For all the snobbery of the attacks, then, Hunt’s position at the centre and Lamb’s on the edge of the Cockney circle makes good sense. Hunt’s prose style is deemed just as irksome as his poetry, due to its apparent glorification of the mundane minutiae of his metropolitan life, from a hatred of cats to getting up on cold mornings. Such subject matter and its treatment must have seemed to the Blackwood’s critics an abuse of the essay’s traditional license with the familiar, with a gratuitous, low interest in domestic trivia for its own sake. Related to this materialism is the seemingly casual and indecorous manner with which Hunt bandies about the canonical names of art and literature. This is amply illustrated in ‘Getting Up on Cold Mornings’ (Indicator, 1820), where the figures of great men are seemingly trivialized through a discussion of the inconvenience of shaving: The Emperor Julian never showed the luxuriancy of his genius to better advantage than in reviving the flowing beard. Look at Cardinal Bembo’s picture – at Michael Angelo’s – at Titian’s – at Shakespeare’s – at Fletcher’s – at Spenser’s – at Chaucer’s – at Alfred’s – at Plato’s – I could name a great man for every tick of my watch.43

All that most galled Blackwood’s seems to be captured in the rapid-fire syntax of the last line, with its evocation of brash, urban cockiness. Conversely, there is an attitude of deference or at least conciliation in Elia’s use of artistic and literary models such as Hogarth, Sir Thomas Browne and Sir William Temple. This lends the essays, in Dart’s words, ‘an air of whimsical gentility, so much so, indeed, that they often seemed delightfully, even poignantly out-of-touch’.44 Also, of course, ‘Mr. Examiner’ Hunt does not invest in the mediating presence of a persona anywhere near to the extent that Lamb does with Elia, who, as the reading of ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ demonstrates, ensures that any characteristic foibles are implicitly ironized. As Elia pre-emptively warns the reader in ‘New Year’s Eve’ ( January 1821), ‘if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia’ (LM, 3, p. 6). Perhaps emanating from a consciousness of Cockney disputation, Elia pointedly reminds his reader that, however provokingly imperfect, his sympathies ultimately belong not to a sample but a characterization of a certain mindset. The egocentric reflex attributed to Hunt’s criticism is equally suggestive: Hunt

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pretends, indeed, to be an admirer of Spenser and Chaucer, but what he praises in them is never what is most deserving of praise – it is only that which he humbly conceives, bears some resemblance to the more perfect productions of Mr Leigh Hunt.45

In another attack, the carnivalesque figure of the Cockney king ironically satirizes Hunt’s vanity and the sycophancy of his ‘vulgar’ coterie: to similar effect, Hunt is elsewhere portrayed as King Arthur at the Round Table, an obvious allusion to the Hunt/Hazlitt critical vehicle.46 In summary, then, the Cockney writer presumptuously reduces everything to its relation to the self and a provincial London world. As if in lieu of defending himself, almost immediately following the negative criticism of Hunt by Blackwood’s comes Hunt’s positive criticism of Lamb, in which Lamb’s style emerges as an antidote to Cockneyism. Hunt’s praise for Lamb seems to be informed by the Blackwood’s attacks on his own writing as much as by any sense of Lamb’s intrinsic worth. Whereas Hunt’s prose is seen by Blackwood’s as arrogantly opinionated, Hunt himself praises Lamb’s anti-critical style: where Hunt’s London comprises the universe, according to Hunt himself Lamb’s Londoner inverts provinciality by reconciling the reader ‘to all that is in the world’. When Blackwood’s do, later, label Elia – but significantly not Lamb – as a Cockney, Scott’s repudiation in the London in January 1821 reasserts Lamb’s non-Cockney credentials. In doing so, however, Scott contradictorily effaces the fact of Lamb’s identity as periodical writer, and thereby his metropolitanism, with a notion of bookishness. In ‘Cockney Writers’ Scott concurs with Blackwood’s over the subject’s egoism, in strenuously refuting that charge against the London’s principal writers. Having defended Lamb and Hazlitt, Scott attempts to redefine Cockneyism with a lengthy disquisition on how the Cockney character ‘sublimates’ into the ‘Cockney author’ (LM, 3, p. 70). Faced with the sublime ice-islands of the Arctic, for example, the Cockney character is impressed only because he himself is there to see them, and by how much colder they are than Cheapside in winter: similarly, the Cockney author ‘will seem to want actual experience, and be inclined to make up the deficiency by egotism’ (p. 70). The very fact of Scott’s attempt at redefining Cockneyism testifies to the threat of stigma attaching to it. Yet the shared generic origins of the two miscellaneous new magazines, of which the dispute stands in denial, is reflected in Scott’s earlier appreciation of Blackwood’s as ‘one of the cleverest periodical works of the day’ (LM, 1, p. 495). What Scott objects to, therefore, is the carrying of that cleverness too far, or that the rival magazine has somehow behaved too much like a periodical, through Z’s ‘mean insincerity and vulgar slander’ (LM, 3, p. 69). For Scott, Z’s personality-led attacks and fake retractions over the London’s identified Cockneys (chiefly Keats and Hazlitt) were inimical to the cause of discriminating, impartial criticism. However, in his own article Scott’s attempt

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at shrugging off the demonizing label ironically achieves the opposite, due to his acknowledgement that the dispute is a direct consequence of a periodical revolution in which the principal magazines are in the vanguard. Effectively sealing the term’s critical potency, Scott dedicates his article to defending Cockneyism from the blundering usage of Blackwood’s. Among the ways he does this is by pointing out the contradiction of praising Lamb but attacking Elia, before defending Elia on the basis of possessing non-periodical, bookish qualities: Our ELIA, too – the pride of our Magazine, and the object of the praise of their’s under his real name – he is set down as a ‘Cockney Scribbler!’ This gentleman, in his capacity of acknowledged author, they have never mentioned but to eulogize; as, indeed, who does not eulogize his writings for displaying a spirit of deep and warm humanity, enlivened by a vein of poignant wit, – not caustic, yet searching, – and recommending a shrewdness of judgement on men, books, and things which seem to revive the old times when Magazines were not, and literature and knowledge were the better for it. (p. 69)

The confusion of Blackwood’s indicates that the ironic distance between Lamb and his persona, through which a mode of egoism such as the Cockney’s can be subtly undercut, was not fully appreciated. But in the process of praising Elia’s anti-critical manner as belonging to a golden age, free from the corrosive presence of the modern magazine, Scott exhibits professional anxiety by implicitly questioning his own periodical’s cultural credibility along with that of Blackwood’s. In the previous issue, Scott had accused ‘The Mohock Magazine’ of abusing the periodical tradition of authorial anonymity by attacking a writer under one pseudonym and defending him under another: this he saw as a scurrilous tactic for contriving with impunity the cheap sensationalism of a literary squabble. The shared tradition of pseudonymity undermines the strength of Scott’s objection, however, by making the issue one of degree or interpretation rather than actual difference. By the same token Elia emerges against Scott’s description as, again, an alternative expression and not a rejection of metropolitan culture. Hazlitt’s later, more detached and sophisticated discussion of Cockneyism, ‘On Londoners and Country People’, in the New Monthly Magazine of August 1823, highlights the argumentative structure of Elia’s approach. Egoism and provincialism are again attributed to the Cockney, although unlike Scott Hazlitt begins by stating his disagreement with the Blackwood’s definition. Theirs, he asserts, refers to anyone with radical sympathies who ‘has happened at any time to live in London’, whereas his refers to ‘a person who has never lived out of London, and has got all his ideas from it’. Hazlitt then launches into what appears to be a straightforward condemnation of the Cockney character: The true Cockney has never travelled beyond the purlieus of the Metropolis, either in the body or the spirit. Primrose-hill is the Ultima Thule of his most romantic desires;

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Greenwich Park stands him in stead of the Vales of Arcady. Time and space are lost to him. He is confined to one spot, and to the present moment. He sees every thing near, superficial, little, in hasty succession. The world turns round, and his head with it, like a roundabout at a fair, till he becomes stunned and giddy with the motion. Figures glide by as in a camera obscura. There is a glare, a perpetual hubbub, a noise, a crowd about him; he sees and hears a vast number of things, and knows nothing. He is pert, raw, ignorant, conceited, ridiculous, shallow, contemptible. His senses keep him alive; and he knows, inquires, and cares for nothing farther.47

Elia’s inverted ego and exaltation of the Goshen-like enclosure over the streets without, as an emancipatory site of imagination (to be discussed further in Chapters 2 and 3), ideally reverses Hazlitt’s depiction of the Cockney’s mindless, sensory absorption in show and spectacle. But equally important is the autocritical structure of the essay itself, as a parallel text for the essayistic figure of Elia. Hazlitt gradually moves away from condemnation towards a more sympathetic position, a process effected through a change from abstract generalization to individual sketch,48 of the loud ‘imperturbable vanity’ of the critic Dr Goodman, the know-it-all Richard Pinch whom Goodman criticizes, and finally Mr Dunster, the fishmonger with tedious recollections of his Clapham schooldays. A degree of affection is implied by this more intimate treatment, which includes an apology to Dunster for the sketch having probably ‘delivered thee into the hands of these Cockneys of the North, who will fall upon thee and devour thee, like so many cannibals, without a grain of salt!’ Mitigating circumstances are offered for the Cockney’s behaviour, Hazlitt conceding that confinement to a shop all day is enough to make anyone’s conversation dull, and the failures of country living offset those of the city: ‘If familiarity in cities breeds contempt, ignorance in the country breeds aversion and dislike’.49 Moreover, Hazlitt’s jocular reference to the Blackwood’s writers as ‘Cockneys of the North’ suggests that Cockneyism exists no more or less in the periodicals of Edinburgh than of London, hence potentially in all periodical writing. This, in turn, represents a tacit acknowledgement of the anxiety-inducing universality belying the term’s local etymology and satirical-critical appropriation, as the edifice of superiority constructed by the normative critic against the aberrant Cockney, and with it the very boundary between self and other, crumbles. Such undermining of a critical position previously taken up within the same essay is a pattern found earlier in Elia’s ‘Imperfect Sympathies’, between the Caledonian and anti-Caledonian types. In both essays a fundamentally anti-Cockneyist act of self-deconstruction is enacted, with the pose of petty bourgeois superiority adopted in the first part working to parody Cockney selfaggrandizement. Dart reads the critical dispute between Goodman and Pinch as an allusion to the one between Blackwood’s and the Examiner, and proposes of Hazlitt’s essay that it implicitly criticizes the futility of Scott’s and Lockhart’s self-

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defensive attempts at ‘othering’ Cockneyism: unlike them, Hazlitt suggests that contemporary periodicals are never more ‘Cockney’ in character than when they are engaged in polemical squabbles – that the ‘Cockney School debate, in other words, might itself be the prime example of literary Cockneyism’. The Elia essays similarly seem to unpick or dismantle the implosive, polemical intransigence of literary Cockneyism. Like Lamb, Hazlitt creates a mode of ‘auto-critique’, in this case with an imperious contempt for the Cockney character followed by a ‘self-reflexive turn in which he calls his own critical position into question’, in the process highlighting ‘the name-calling concomitant with [Cockneyism] as a form of “bad” abstraction, adrift from the world of particulars’.50 For the usually trenchant Hazlitt, however, this auto-critical reversion represents an intriguingly rare moment of indecision, whereas in Lamb an ostensibly similar reflex is the bolder, deliberate product of a wholesale or corporeal investment in the essayistic character. This figure of inverse egoism and crowd-merging selfhood inhabits both the text of the essays themselves and, through paratextual incarnation, the otherwise circumscriptive (con)text of the London. As such, Elia represents a literal embodiment of anxiety-free metropolitanism.

Imperfect Sympathies and Detached Thoughts Appearing in the London in August 1821, six months after Scott’s death, Elia’s essay ‘Jews, Quakers, Scotchmen, and other Imperfect Sympathies’ offers a typically wry, oblique comment on the above event and the dispute which caused it. Another Elia essay, ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’, from July 1822, suggestively appears in the same issue as Patmore’s anxiety-ridden piece, ‘On Magazine Writers’. Read together, the two Elia essays challenge the authority of critical discourse as constructive of professional anxiety: the one essay through an auto-critical structure, the other by ironically ‘detaching’ books and reading from criticism altogether. ‘Imperfect Sympathies’, as mentioned, offers a prime example of Elia’s habit of assuming a certain voice only to undercut its authority with a different one, as a device for manoeuvring the implied reader of judgemental tendencies into corrective self-reflection. In ‘Poor Relations’ (May 1823), for example, Elia affects genteel embarrassment over the subject, only to end the essay with a personal anecdote that exposes the narrow-mindedness of this attitude. Also, in ‘The Convalescent’ ( July 1825), the domestic tyranny of the self-pitying hypochondriac is gently mocked before Elia reveals himself to have been the egoist just described. In the above essays, according to Jane Aaron, Elia takes upon himself the role of one who aggrandizes the self through projecting its shadow parts onto a scapegoated other, and then turns the tables against that persona to reveal the ‘thing of darkness’, as lodged in his own breast.51

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Self-aggrandizement, in other words, is accompanied in these essays by a deflating counteraction, in a pattern that implicitly opposes the Cockney disputants’ anxious boundary-marking of self against other. This habitual auto-critique exemplifies Elia’s propensity for ‘making himself many, or reducing many unto himself ’ (LM, 7, p. 119). Fittingly, the mock obituary in which this assessment appears, ‘A Character of the Late Elia’, is supposedly written by his friend, PhilElia. The pluralized, dialogic self is thus designated an integral part of Elia’s character, and by, moreover, a figure itself that blurs the distinction between self and other. Elia begins ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ by disagreeing with Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, in which Browne claims ‘I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathizes with all things; I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy in anything’. Browne’s acquiescent sentiments blandly disregard for Elia the ‘impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as mankind’ (LM, 4, p. 152). Like the individual Londoners in Hazlitt’s essay who serve to expose an initial position founded on abstract generalization, Elia’s experiential sense of the individual highlights the weakness of Browne’s position: while the latter is ‘mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction’, Elia is ‘earth-bound and fettered to the scene of [his] activities’. Elia follows this by offering his own character as an example of such idiosyncrasy: ‘I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or individual, to an unhealthy excess … I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices – made up of likings and disliking – the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies’. A lengthy footnote elaborates on ‘individuals born and constellated so opposite to another individual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them’ (p. 152). The essay thus argues that individual sympathies arise not from any system of belief but from the supposedly ineluctable source of astrological destiny. As the word ‘sympathy’ relates to feeling rather than reason, all issues of opinion are, moreover, deemed irrational. Elia’s fascination with superstition and the notion of a residual primeval being (as discussed further in the next chapter) therefore suggests that to censure criticism is to repress an innate human trait. In the ‘Popular Fallacies’ essay, ‘That my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple are Models of the Genteel Style in Writing’, Elia quotes at length from Temple and implicitly concurs with his idea that human life even at its noblest is to be patronized as a ‘froward child’, needing to be played with until it falls asleep.52 As a similar expression of the froward child of humanity, then, imperfect sympathies like critical opinions must be humoured or indulged. It seems significant in the context of the London’s recent squabble with Blackwood’s that Elia’s opinion of the Caledonian type contradicts the ordering in the essay’s title by appearing before the others, and being rather longer and more emphatic. Moreover, in such use of geographical locality to identify a certain socio-cultural type, the Caledonian passage suggestively parallels use of the

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Cockney label. Here is a sample of Elia’s protracted description of the Caledonian character, a brilliantly sustained barrage of wit that stylistically anticipates Hazlitt’s account of the Cockney: His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in their growth – if, indeed, they do grow, and are not rather put together upon principles of clock-work. You never catch his mind in an undress. He never hints or suggests any thing, but unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness … He has no falterings of self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain, or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. (p. 153)

But for all this elaborate wit, the sting is largely drawn by the fact of Elia’s diametric opposition as a self-confessed ‘anti-Caledonian’. Where this flighty mind contents itself with odd fragments of knowledge and whimsical notions, its scrupulous counterpart will only present whole and complete ideas and assert empirical truths: where the anti-Caledonian mind works in metaphor and figurative expression, the Caledonian’s is ruled by metonymy and literal description. Both are therefore equally flawed or competent as critics: the one of a lightweight but amenable intellect, the other of a formidable but inflexible intellect. This inverse symmetry suggests that although their differences may be irreconcilable, a fact of life, they also offer a state of equilibrium. The sense of difference between the anti-Caledonian and his counterpart seems more real than that anxiously contrived between Blackwood’s and the London, yet here, as elsewhere with Elia, difference suggests harmony, not hostility. Discussed further in Chapter 3, in ‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’ the support effected for Lamb’s maligned old school through Elia’s counter-testimony to ‘Mr. Lamb’s’ earlier ‘eulogy’, presents but one notable example. That the reader is expected to recognize Elia’s idiosyncrasy along with that of his target becomes more apparent after the Caledonian passage. Elia is both admiring of and intimidated by the ‘stubborn antiquity’ and intellect of the Jews, finding them ‘least distasteful’ in the City where ‘the mercantile spirit levels all distinctions’: he is enchanted by the Negro’s appearance of an ‘image of God cut in ebony’, but is dissuaded from socializing for no other reason than ‘because they are black’ (pp. 154, 155); the Quaker’s frugal lifestyle and impassive self-control impresses but alienates him through the sense of stark difference presented to Elia’s obsessive consumer appetite and quirky tastes. Although perhaps shocking to today’s multicultural sensibilities, Elia’s honesty about the imperfection of his sympathies implies a fundamental truth: that bias or prejudice is inevitable in the act of criticism. Of more specific relevance, however, is that by drawing attention to the personality of the critic, as an inevitably flawed specimen of humanity, Elia reverses the Cockneyistic trend of ad hominem criticism, in

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which a depersonalized and disembodied voice invests the subject with personality to destructive effect. Furthermore, if Elia challenges the human tendency to contrive otherness or difference, the contrived erasure of difference is deemed equally deplorable. Elia declares of attempts by the Church and the Synagogue to merge that the ‘reciprocal endearments’ are ‘hypocritical and unnatural’ (p. 154). The essay’s message therefore appears to be that, while contrived difference must be eradicated as a destructive force, genuine difference must be preserved as a vital component of the cosmopolitan life of the city. Such an ethos presents again, of course, a natural extension of Elia’s propensity for ‘making many unto himself ’. Elia’s taste in books almost a year later, in ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’, provides an interesting correlative to his taste in humanity. Like ‘Imperfect Sympathies’, the essay is headed with an epigraph from one of Elia’s favourite literary sources, the sentiment of which Elia, again, disagrees with. The superficial Lord Foppington in Vanbrugh’s comedy The Relapse advocates dispensing with reading books altogether on the basis that they smother original thought, influencing an eccentric friend of Elia’s to give up reading altogether. Elia, on the other hand, reads books precisely because of his fascination with ‘other people’s thoughts’: ‘I dream away my life in others’ speculations. I love to lose myself in other men’s minds … I cannot sit and think. Books think for me’ (LM, 6, p. 33). This time echoing Browne’s cosmopolitan sentiments, Elia happily admits to having ‘no repugnances’ among books, with no fiction or poetry being either too ‘genteel’ or too ‘low’ for him (p. 33). Books allow Elia an essentially pacific form of emancipation, in accordance with Phil-Elia’s representation, that of identifying and merging the self with the other.53 In contrast to the divisive cult of criticism, Elia’s acquiescent model of reading therefore allows him to become detached from his imperfect sympathies, to find instead within the republic of books a state of perfect empathy. Yet having thus proclaimed the empathizing agency of literature, instead of citing examples as a critic might be expected to, Elia discusses the book in terms of a consumer artefact or possession. A broadly democratic literary canon curiously ensues. After dismissing non-fiction as ‘books which are no books’ (p. 33), Elia sidesteps the expected follow-up discussion of his taste in fiction, by dwelling instead on extrinsic, cosmetic and material criteria such as the peculiarities of reading habits, technicalities of binding, the kinds of reader evoked by the smell and condition of a book, or simply the sound of a poet’s name. Milton and Shakespeare thereby rub covers with the lesser likes of Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden and Cowley, simply because the latter are more pleasing to Elia’s idiosyncratic ear. The focus on binding above all illustrates the highly suggestive avoidance of literary discussion created by Elia’s democratic canon. Here, Elia does exercise critical discernment in deciding that the book

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deserves hard-back binding as a minimum requirement, while a volume of magazines warrants merely the ‘dishabille, or half-binding’ (p. 34). This otherwise customary subordination of periodical to book, however, has the complex and contentious issue of literary merit replaced by the safer one of individual preference, and that issue seemingly concerned with everything about books except for their literary substance. As so often, the periodical text which is deemed extraneous for book publication emphasizes or adds another dimension to the essay’s meaning. A passage appearing only in the London version pushes the essay’s evasiveness further and analogizes a solution to Cockneyism. Elia recalls taking ‘pleasure in affecting affectation’ (p. 36) by reading a Johnson and Steevens edition of Shakespeare while waiting in the crowd outside the theatre to see the celebrated William Betty (the ‘Young Roscius’), in Hamlet: the crowd turn on Elia, one man threatening to knock the book out of his hand. Like the unimaginative Caledonian type – who is related in turn to the ‘wary connoisseur’ reader-type in ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, and the ‘fastidious’ reader in Elian text and paratext elsewhere – the crowd has no concept of parody or ironic performance. Elia’s affectation therefore antagonizes his uncomprehending audience in a manner analogous to the effect of Hunt’s presumptuous style on his Blackwood’s detractors. The anecdote implies that theatrical imposture, or knowing irony, is the way to defeat Cockneyism, but only if the reader plays his part by avoiding the hypercritical literal-mindedness of the crowd. In keeping with the rest of the essay, the Shakespeare text, both as performance and octavo volume, remains provokingly un-discussed, thus again the material circumstances of reading replace the abstract, imaginative product of reading itself, and Lamb’s own performance as Elia replaces the act of criticism. This suggestive side-stepping of critical discourse echoes Elia’s other book-featuring essay, ‘The Two Races of Men’ (December 1820). Here Elia deflects attention from critical discussion by describing his beloved books in terms consistent with his democratic tastes in ‘Detached Thoughts’, those of an eclectic library. This library functions as a homogenizing or unifying entity, which is thus rendered incomplete when individual volumes are ‘borrowed’ from it. Casting his eye over the shelves to notice a ‘foul gap’ here and a ‘slight vacuum’ there (LM, 2, pp. 624), Elia’s books are curiously noticeable for their absence, creating the impression that they cannot be discussed as individual texts, only as critically negated components of a library. The irony undercutting the notion of a democratic canon in ‘Detached Thoughts’, then, is that aside from a preternaturally acquiescent mind such all-embracing taste is only achievable quite literally through judging a book by its cover. It is an irony informed by the desire to gently deflate the cultic balloon of periodical criticism, just as ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ seeks to humanize and de-fang the demonic figure of the critic himself.

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The End of an Era, and Elia Appearing in the Tatler in April 1831, Leigh Hunt’s appraisal of the recent history of periodical criticism, in the essay ‘Success of Periodicals’, is interesting for its timing as well as insight. In justifiably claiming that periodical criticism had for some time been dictated more by political than literary principles, Hunt sees impartiality as having been further eroded since the turn of the century by market forces: Party criticism had run so high, that everybody began to doubt both the praise and the blame of the cleverest reviews: it was discerned that the bookselling proprietors of those reviews had benefited by the partisanship: their brethren set up periodical publications of their own, in self-defence: the public, disgusted with the previous unfairness, were seduced by the fairer pretences which were then made: booksellers and authors gradually came to play into one another’s hands: and hence arose what might be styled the accommodating system of criticism, which consisted in giving a good word to all the connexions of the reigning parties, and being as iniquitously bitter or timidly silent upon writers, who were out of the pale of worldly influence.54

This modifies Hazlitt’s earlier comment on the self-serving nature of periodical criticism; in addition to the periodical press it is Lepus’s London booksellers who benefit, from a manipulation of public sympathies through politically expedient praise or censure. The city’s commercial gain from the success of periodicals is in other words the literary establishment’s loss, as Hunt, showing the magazinist’s archetypal inferiority complex, condemns periodical reviewers for typically being ‘not of the first order of literati, otherwise they would be better occupied’, and ‘often of the very worst order, and therefore perniciously occupied’.55 What makes Hunt’s damning retrospective really interesting, though, is that it was written just after the Cockney jibes by Blackwood’s had finally ceased, with other magazines having followed suit. Indeed, under Wilson’s editorship Blackwood’s more or less changed its tune in the 1830s and turned to lauding Hunt, who now became an increasingly respected man of letters.56 Hunt’s essay welcomes the end of an iniquitous era and the cynical tenor of criticism it produced. The corrupt, ‘accommodating’ system of criticism which has ‘flourished for the last thirty years’ is over, and Hunt can now look forward to establishing with the Tatler an ‘honest but not ill-natured’ brand of criticism, appropriate to the ‘diviner times which liberality is producing’.57 Later that same year Lamb has Elia look back more nostalgically and with greater political circumspection to the beginning of the passing era, and the coincident start of Lamb’s journalistic career, in the essay ‘Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago’. This essay effectively traces the genesis of Elia as Lamb’s response to Cockneyism, to an earlier but kindred historical moment: that of 1800–2, and the continued persecution of certain ‘Jacobin’ authors by the right-wing press.

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Therefore, Hunt’s and Lamb’s historicization of the periodical press in terms of a thirty-year period from the early 1800s to the early 1830s is justifiable, as Blackwood’s Cockney attacks on the London politically parallel the conservatism of the Anti-Jacobin’s assault on the radical tendencies of the Morning Post, for which Lamb worked in 1801. As a critical term, moreover, ‘Jacobin’ performs a similar demonizing role to that of both the Lake School and Cockney School attacks: indeed, as a pernicious ‘New School’ is how the Anti-Jacobin identifies its weekly target of Jacobin poetry. Originally a more specific referrent for the club of Revolutionary leaders who convened at the Jacobin monastery in Paris from 1792 to 1794, the term was expanded to encompass, like its labelling successors, a broad spectrum of liberal humanism. In the aftermath of the Terror, aside from the peripheral Lloyd and Lamb, Southey, Coleridge, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Maria Williams and Thelwall were variously and collectively parodied in verse and caricatured by Gillray for holding anti-royalist or radical views. In June 1801, Lamb was sufficiently exasperated by the prevalence and injustice of the term to go on the offensive in the Albion. This is accurately identified in the ‘Newspapers’ essay as a highly seditious paper, run by John Fenwick, an impecunious radical and friend of Lamb. In his earliest known published essay, ‘What is Jacobinism’, Lamb’s delineation of how such ‘names’ become fatally detached from their signifying ‘things’, describes also the process by which all such terms come to prominence: These men have set up an universal idol, or idea, under that name, to which they find it convenient to refer all evil, something like the Manichean principle. To define the boundaries and natures of human action, to analyse the complexity of motives, to settle the precise line where innovation ceases to be pernicious, and prejudice is no longer salutary, is a task which requires some thought, and more candour. It is an easier occupation, more profitable, and more fitted to the malignant dispositions of these men, violently to force into one class, modes and actions, and principles essentially various, and to disgrace that class with one ugly name: for names are observed to cost the memory and application much less trouble than things … Names often associated with hostile and unpleasant feelings, in turn engender and augment those feelings, and the thing Jacobinism began to be disliked for the name of Jacobin.58

Coleridge says much the same thing in a Morning Post essay from October 1802, ‘Once a Jacobin, Always a Jacobin’, claiming that the term either has no meaning, or at best a vague one, because ‘definite terms are unmanageable things, and the passions do not readily gather round them’.59 Together, therefore, the Jacobin, Lake and Cockney labels illustrate the seductive convenience yet unreliability of signs, in their assumed natural, but in reality arbitrary relationship to things. According to the ‘Manichean principle’ to which he refers, the younger Lamb lives in an age when politics has taken full advantage of semiotic slipperiness, one in which the signs of good and evil are confusingly exchanged (that is, until

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a new age of stable signification returns): ‘innovation’ is treated with suspicion, and ‘prejudice’ deemed a virtue. The later, Elian Lamb is also sensitive to the indiscriminate use of critical terms, as expressed in his rejection of the term ‘genteel’ to categorize the writings of both Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple: ‘The man of rank is discernible in both writers’, acknowledges Elia, ‘but in the one it is only insinuated gracefully, in the other it stands out offensively’.60 Although hardly a demonizing label, the mildly derogatory ‘genteel’ represents an example of the same sort of bad abstraction that spawned the term ‘Jacobin’. This, like ‘Cockney’, began as a neutrally descriptive term of specific or local reference, but became used invariably as one of almost unmanageably broad abuse, a reactionary catchword for aberrant, even anarchic tendencies. These parallels between Jacobinism and Cockneyism reinforce the impression given in the ‘Newspapers’ essay that Lamb, like Hunt, recognizes in 1831 the passing of an era in periodical writing, more or less at the very moment of that passing. But only Hunt, of course, would live to contribute to a succeeding era, however that might be defined. As if both essays were not only stylistically typical but written in foresight of their authors’ respective fates, however, Hunt’s is as positive and forward-looking as Lamb’s is nostalgic and wistful. In Hunt’s essay, survival of the age of accommodating criticism occasions a fresh periodical venture suited to a brave new era of liberalism. In Lamb’s, the fondness of recollection – in what was appropriately collected as of one of Elia’s Last Essays – implies that the passing of an era beginning with Jacobinism and ending with Cockneyism is hastening with it the departure of an intrinsically congruent figure. ‘Newspapers always excite curiosity’, Elia remarks in ‘Detached Thoughts’ before adding: ‘No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment’ (LM, 6, p. 35). Yet however vacuous their pandering to the city’s propensity for spectacle may be, the curiosity value of newspapers proves highly rewarding in the essay ‘Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago’. The newspaper provides the text in which Elia’s ‘established name’ first (anonymously) appears and an apprenticeship for the sophisticated, mature author of the narrative present. Moreover, illustrating Elia’s capacity to appropriate other texts and selves – on this occasion from Lamb himself – the essay did not initially appear under Elia’s name. Published in October 1831 in Edward Moxon’s short-lived Englishman’s Magazine with the title ‘On the Total Defect of the Faculty of Imagination Observable in the Works of Modern British Artists’, it was the second (and, as it turned out, the last) in a series entitled ‘Peter’s Net. By the Author of “Elia”’. Essentially a digression on its titular subject, the essay was collected under its more relevant title for Elia’s Last Essays in 1833, and seems to draw on two principle features of Elia’s essays for the London. It combines nostalgia for a bygone age in the

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manner of ‘Recollections of the South-Sea House’, with the formative-period, autobiographical recollections found in ‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’, ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’ and ‘My First Play’. Elia begins by inviting the reader back in time, ‘some thirty years or more’.61 Although not in the order Elia places them, Lamb indeed worked for the papers mentioned, the Morning Post, the Morning Chronicle and the Albion, between January 1801 and February 1802, between twenty-nine and thirty years prior to the narrative present. The place in London where Elia takes his imagined reader is still more specific. In doing so, he introduces Daniel Stuart, the editor of the Morning Post, as someone whose apparent lack of interest in art led him once to claim that he had never been to the Royal Academy exhibitions at Somerset House. From here, the reader’s attention is guided towards the building immediately opposite, in which is the office of the Morning Post. At the end of the essay, it emerges that there is more than simply philistinism to Stuart’s disregard for Somerset House. For now, though, it offers a neat parallel: by entering the offices of Stuart’s paper to embark on a career in journalism, Elia has failed to produce a similar ‘abstinence’ to that of Stuart. Elia’s first fatal entry into the Morning Post building marks the moment he becomes involved in, or rather addicted to, a journalistic milieu of fast wit, relentless deadlines, seditious agenda and precarious employment. With recurring instances of both gleeful and guilt-ridden consumption, from roast pig to the shows of London itself, the reader familiar with Elia and Lamb’s other writings would find such a confessed lack of willpower hardly surprising. Elia’s regret is therefore disingenuous: although vexing and unstable, this is evidently a compulsive metropolitan environment that has formed his natural habitat ever since. The Morning Post building, along with the South-Sea House, the Inner Temple and the Old Drury theatre, works to invest the metropolitan enclosure with a sense of Elia’s personal history. In this account of his formative years in journalism, however, Elia is required to change locations within the city, as a consequence of the precarious circumstances of his employment. The stated purpose of the essay is to recreate the experience of the ‘pleased and candid reader’ who attempts, through seeking out the ‘inexperienced essays’, to find ‘the first callow flights in authorship, of some established name in literature’.62 The essay’s ultimate destination, of Elia’s mature style in the narrative present, has its source in his early experience of defeating censorship via the contrived omission of a signifying name. Elia’s first callow flights are as a joke-writer for the Morning Post, in which mock-heroic sketches on the fashion for ladies’ pink stockings lead him onto the still more risqué topic of exposed ankles; here, his anti-Caledonian, negatively capable talents are even better suited, enabling him to escape censure by ‘balancing betwixt decorums and their opposites’, ‘hovering in the confines of light and darkness, or where “both seem either;” a hazy, uncertain delicacy’, and

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conjuring ‘shrewd conceits, and more than single meanings’.63 Although of course a far cry from genius, Elia’s skilfulness contrasts with that of the inept joke-writer Bob Allen, whose harmlessly witless sketches get him dismissed from the Oracle because he was foolish enough to name the local council official whom he had targeted. By avoiding such censorship, Elia’s joke-writing enacts a reversal of the epidemical demonization of critical naming. The historical context of the narrative present merges with that of the narrated past in the essay to insinuate Elia’s presence in Hunt’s and Lamb’s notion of a passing era. Elia describes the employment of a ‘regular wit’ as a regrettably outmoded practice in the modern morning paper, implying that he lives now in more serious times. Yet, as Lamb’s earlier article on Jacobinism suggests, the political climate of the early 1800s could hardly have been more serious. The use of humour in the papers would have served not just for the purposes of subversion, but, more innocently, as with Elia’s jokes, to afford relief from postRevolution paranoia and the gloom of impending war. Elia’s early use of humour therefore occupies the same pacific, neutral ground later identified by Hunt and Talfourd as a dominant feature of Lamb’s work, a position signified in the essay by the need for Elia to compose his jokes in the intermediate space between rising and breakfast, in ‘No Man’s Time’. But harnessed to the relentlessly commercial environment of the metropolis, Elia’s resources of wit are tested to the limit. He composes his jokes in No Man’s Time because the pressure of keeping up with newspaper trends and deadlines, plus the need to hold down a day-job, drives him to drink in the evenings. Even more so than magazines, of course, newspapers are transient or ephemeral, at once compelling and forgettable: their jokes come and go almost as quickly as fashions for stockings, just as the joke column itself passes away. Thus defined by novelty and commodity, journalism becomes for Elia a dreary manufacturing process like any other in the metropolis: ‘The craving Dragon – the Public – like him in Bel’s temple – must be fed; it expected its daily rations; and Daniel, and ourselves, to do us justice, did the best we could on this side bursting him’.64 Elia asks the reader to try for himself writing jokes every day for a whole year, implying that without the understanding such an exercise would bring the unsympathetic reader becomes a monstrous consumer in the image of Lepus’s reading public. Daniel Stuart becomes Daniel of the Apocryphal book, who, with Elia’s help, almost destroys the reading-dragon worshipped by the press, ironically by over-feeding it. Elia thus adds to Lepus’s reading monster the notion of a false idol, the every whim or taste of which dictates the content of newspapers and magazines. Because of Elia’s success as a joke-writer, therefore, at this early stage his disposable mode of writing enslaves him to the machine of metropolitan consumerism. But despite the nature of the subject, there is again a complete absence of professional anxiety. This Grub Street world of hack labour

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is about as far across the literary spectrum from the Romantic idea of the genius poet as it is possible to get, and yet Lamb blithely presents it, without a hint of the embarrassed, embittered and insecure periodical writer, as the very genesis of his most accomplished work. A change of ownership in the Morning Post forces Elia to take up a position with the highly seditious Albion, in its dingy offices on Fleet Street. This position is unstable due both to the editor John Fenwick’s extreme radicalism, and the parlous financial state of any business venture connected with Elia’s impecunious friend. Appearing also in ‘The Two Races of Men’ as one of the ‘great race’ of borrowers, Fenwick borrows money to pay the paper’s stamp duty because credit is refused by the government to such radical publications. The Morning Post is seen as the epitome of good taste and conservatism next to the crudely seditious style of the Albion, where the reluctant Elia’s job is now to write political opinion. All the more reason, therefore, for Elia’s style to be indirect, a capability instilled in him, he suggests, by the aftermath of the French Revolution: Recollections of feelings – which were all that now remained from our first boyish heats kindled by the French Revolution, when, if we were misled, we erred in the company of some, who are accounted very good men now – rather than any tendency at this time to Republican doctrines – assisted us in assuming a style of writing, while the paper lasted, consonant in no very under tone – to the right earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was now to insinuate, rather than recommend, possible abdications. Blocks, axes, Whitehall tribunals, were covered with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis – as Mr. Bayes says, never naming the thing directly – that the keen eye of an Attorney General was insufficient to detect the lurking snake among them.65

The recurring theme of peripherality in Lamb’s work is evedent here, in Elia’s tentative inclusion of himself among those whose idealistic expectations of the Revolution were cruelly exposed by the Terror. The assertion that some of these ‘misled’ sympathizers have since been deemed ‘very good men’ alludes to Wordsworth and Southey, the pilloried radical poets who later became establishment figures only to be attacked for their apostasy by the new radicalists, Hunt, Shelley and Byron. As a consequence of the demonizing Jacobin label, therefore, the politicized names of Wordsworth and Southey prove as unreliable as that of the Revolution itself. Yet as a journalist, with his editor’s fanaticism adding to the precariousness of his profession and to the lessons learned from the Revolution, the politically circumspect Elia adopts a playful, suggestive, never-naming style. With skills honed by his stint at joke-writing, Elia inverts the damning use of the Jacobin name in order to meet F.’s requirement for polemical material. The metropolis ideally facilitates such writing: movement within this environment equates to a change of identity, the desired anonymity fundamental also to the collaborative enterprise of periodical writing and the crowd-merging life of the city-dweller.

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In the narrative of his journalistic career, however, Elia’s subversive writing, like the joke-writing before it, is simply another evolutionary stage. With some of the Albion’s articles already arousing government suspicion, Elia’s brinkmanship eventually causes the paper’s demise. Another of the ‘very good men’ with a radical past, James Mackintosh, is the subject of a corruscating epigram by Elia, attacking his apostasy. Mackintosh was the erstwhile friend of Godwin and a fellow critic of Burke, who had infamously defected and attacked Godwin in 1799. In August 1801, Lamb joined the radicals’ chorus of disgust when Mackintosh’s government appointment in India was confirmed. The epigram to which Elia alludes reads as follows: Tho thou’rt like Judas an apostate black, In the resemblance one thing thou dost lack; When he had gotten his ill-purchased pelf, He went away & wisely hang’d himself; This thou may do at last; yet much I doubt, If thou hast any bowels to gush out!66

In keeping with Elia’s idiomatic neutrality, however, the initiating circumstances of which are related in this very essay, the visceral sense of betrayal in Lamb’s epigram is entirely absent. The accusation of apostasy is attributed solely to Fenwick, and the whole episode parenthetically dismissed as ‘hardly worth particularising’.67 Elia’s own apolitically expedient rewriting of Lamb’s history has it, therefore, that, driven on by his editor’s rather than his own radicalism, he eventually went too far and incurred the inevitable consequences. The paper’s main patron, Lord ‘Citizen’ Stanhope – a politically suggestive example of renaming – is shocked enough to withdraw his support, finally killing off the Albion and leaving all ongoing concerns to the Crown lawyers. This concludes the essay’s paradoxically defining digression on Elia’s evolution, bringing the narrative full circle to the ‘curious confession’ of Daniel Stuart with which it started. Here, the historicized and the contemporary Elia converge, in exposition of the same indirect style that the essay has just been describing. The answer to Stuart’s cryptically framing statement seems to lie in the fact that, in addition to the Royal Academy exhibition, the offices of the Inland Revenue were located at Somerset House. The real reason, therefore, for Stuart’s aversion to entering the building is the fiscal irregularities of his own paper, irregularities that, in turn, hint at the radical tendencies of the Morning Post which the essay has otherwise omitted to mention. Indeed, up to this point the impression is created that the Morning Post was, unlike the Albion, a polite publication, quite the reverse of its true character.68 Elia’s capacity to exploit of the power of suggestion, where the political implications of Stuart’s avoidance of Somerset House reso69 nate from the absence of a direct explanation, evidently remains undiminished

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in the narrative present. Moreover, the entering and not entering of the metropolitan enclosure becomes a metaphor for Elia’s journalistic style. Whereas entering the Morning Post building signifies Elia’s introduction to the partisan, volatile world of post-Revolution journalism, the remaining of his editor outside of Somerset House appropriately initiates the narrative of Elia’s circumnavigatory style within that milieu. Indeed, that the whole essay is itself a digression is entirely appropriate to the art of indirection which it espouses. Appearing next in Last Essays in 1833, therefore, ‘Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago’ reflexively and retrospectively configures Elia’s presence in the London as a response to the anxious metropolitan environment of the new magazine in the early 1820s. The essay’s autobiographical fiction, in other words, historicizes the Elian self within an era of politicized journalism stretching back to the turn of the century. His peers’ reference to Lamb’s as a ‘neutral style’, therefore, describes an indirectly political as well as critical approach, and not of course an avoidance of politics and criticism, those ineluctably related concepts that seem by 1820 to have become almost interchangeable. Modern criticism needs to recognize that which Lamb himself must have realized: that simply to write for periodicals at this time was to be involved in political dialogue, and that this was reason enough to develop a persona that renders such writing as non-incriminating as possible, that perhaps seeks to remove the concept of incrimination from writing altogether. In summary, Elia expresses Lamb’s desire to free periodical writing from the destructive egoism of professional anxiety, by appropriating the pseudonymous ‘body corporate’ of the periodical author to an ethos of non-competitive interplay between self and other, in which a sense of mutual difference is still preserved. Lamb’s writing of the self into recent cultural history therefore projects an image of that self as being, through both nature and nurture, ‘made’ for the periodical, metropolitan milieu. We recall that the metropolis characterizes the zeitgeist to which, according to Hazlitt, the anomalously successful Lamb marches in the contrary direction. The ‘Newspapers’ essay expresses Lamb’s own sense of a more organic relation to metropolitan culture. Elia’s own age is conducive to this relationship. The Elia of the narrative present in ‘Newspapers’ has inevitably exchanged the experience of a restless, precarious youth for a middle-age predilection for domestic enclosure – and, indeed, nostalgia itself – that connotes stability and security. Idealism, too, has largely given way to worldweariness, as an equally natural consequence of age. Yet it is through such an apparently comfortable, settled figure, that the identity-play of those dangerous early days is taken to a more sophisticated level, one that is fundamentally metropolitan in its responsiveness to the cultural politics of Cockneyism. This emphasizes that Lamb’s metropolitanism defines itself from within the city as much as it does against the ruralism of the Lake School. The unashamedly urban

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Hunt provides the catalyst for an anxiety over metropolitan culture represented by Cockneyism: this is an anxiety to which Hazlitt responds with uncertainty or ambivalence, evidenced both in the betrayal by bitterness of an attempted pragmatism over the primacy of the periodical press, and in first attacking then defending the Cockney in the essay ‘On Londoners and Country People’. The deciding factor in Lamb’s centrality as metropolitan author is, as ever, the unique extent of his investment in the marginal figure of the pseudonymous essayistic persona, and its potential for dismantling otherness. Lamb develops both the auto-critical structure of Hazlitt’s essay on Cockneys and the brazen urbanism of Hunt into the ironically ‘bodiless’ embodiment in Elia of the cosmopolitan and commercial city.

2 DOMESTICATING THE FLANEUR: COLERIDGE, DE QUINCEY AND THE FORMS OF METROPOLITANISM

Not all men have the gift of enjoying a crowd-bath. Luxuriating in the throng is an art of its own, and the only man who can embark on an invigorating trip at the expense of the rest of mankind is he whose good fairy endowed him, in his cot, with a bent for disguises and masking, hatred of domestic humdrum, and wanderlust. Charles Baudelaire, Poemes en Prose (1862)1

Lamb’s metropolitanism emerges in this chapter through dialogue with two kinds of Romantic pedestrian, Coleridge’s countryside rambler and De Quincey’s opium-induced wanderer of the London streets. The sentimentality of Coleridge’s representation of Lamb in 1800, as a pathetic figure incarcerated in and by the ‘great city’ in ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’, provokes an uncharacteristically angry response from Lamb, which in turn informs an ebullient rejection of the Lakes for the metropolis in several letters and an early essay eulogizing life in the city. Thus is the seed of Elia sown, a London-loving figure for whom the dual motifs of lameness and enclosure are seemingly predicated against the Lake School’s liberalist association of freedom with walking in the country. Elia finally arrives in 1820, sometime after the demise of the Lake School and just as an urban version of the supposedly emancipated pedestrian is about to emerge. A concurrent persona in the London Magazine, the compulsive night-time wanderings of De Quincey’s opium-eater suggest a prototype of the strolling, idling observer of city life, the flâneur, a metropolitan figure to which Elia bears a more complex relationship than he does to the demonized Cockney in Chapter 1. Whereas Lamb is defined more or less by a sense of difference from the Cockney author, his relationship with the flâneur seems to embody at the same time the antithesis of its most obvious characteristics, and an affinity with its emancipatory spirit. A paradoxically domesticated mode of flâneur ensues. The literally and figuratively lamed figure within the enclosed, domestic space, as opposed to the incessant rambler of the seemingly infinite, labyrinthine streets without, – 55 –

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becomes a means of engaging with the city as a site both of socio-political drama and mundane, quotidian life. After serialization in the London in September and October 1821, De Quincey’s ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ was published by the magazine’s editors Taylor and Hessey in book form in August 1822. The three Elia essays which appear in the London on these dates – respectively, ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’, ‘Witches and other Night-Fears’ and ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ – work in several ways to define Lamb’s persona and its relation to the city against De Quincey’s equivalent.2 ‘Recollections of the South-Sea House’, Elia’s debut essay for the London in August 1820, establishes the motifs of lameness and enclosure, which are instrumental here in imposing a calming sense of perspective on an immediate and disturbing historical moment. In ‘The Old Benchers’ and ‘Night-Fears’ essays the dual motifs are established in formative, autobiographical terms, while in the latter, Elia’s predilection for metropolitan enclosure is further emphasized by the contrast which the ‘lame’ cities of his dreams present with the fantastic visions of the opium-eater and other peer-texts. Finally, with its obvious generic similarity to De Quincey’s text, Elia’s ‘Confessions’ suggests that, just as the act itself of an opium-induced flânerie shapes narrative style and literary form, the opposite effects of alcohol on Elia’s drunkard configure Lamb’s own essayistic mode of writing the city. The lameness and enclosure that inform Elia’s engagement with the city deny the ‘wandering’ of escapism, even while the phantasmal ontology of Lamb’s persona approximates the flâneur’s ethos of emancipation. Before discussing the essays in which lameness and enclosure convey Elia’s metropolitan vision, however, their conceptual origins within Lamb’s life and earlier work need to be located.

From ‘Strange Calamity’ to ‘Sweet Security’ With prior knowledge of the ‘day of horrors’3 in the Lamb’s London home, of Elizabeth’s death at the hands of her deranged daughter Mary on 22 September 1796, it is perhaps all too easy to read dark resonances into Charles’s metropolitan domicilia. This temptation only increases with an awareness of the onerous duty of care for Mary that Charles took upon himself from that day onwards. Mary’s psychotic condition ensured that, whatever spiritual ties he had to the city of his birth, Charles was also attached to London out of necessity. His letters from around 1800 express anxiety over public attitudes towards his sister’s illness, with only the very ‘midst of London’ capable of providing the anonymity their circumstances demanded. Even here Charles still felt as if they were ‘in a manner marked’, a feeling surely connected to their moving house eleven times between 1796 and 1833.4 Eight of those moves were made within London, a fact in itself suggesting a painfully uncertain sense of belonging for the Lambs,

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a feeling ‘at home’ in the impersonality of the city yet still of being alienated by circumstance. But for all this, Lamb would appear to have remained at heart a home-lover. His author’s attachment is perfectly expressed by Elia in ‘New Year’s Eve’ ( January 1821), the irony of Elia’s incorporeal existence, for the moment, notwithstanding: ‘Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood’ (LM, 3, pp. 6–7). Although also acknowledging that moving house might involve ‘a rejuvenescence’, a letter to Thomas Hood from 18 September 1827 similarly reveals the painful wrench of each move: ‘To change habitations is to die to them, and in my time I have died seven deaths’.5 However, the image has generally prevailed of Lamb being dutifully and self-sacrificially confined to his successive London homes when not otherwise confined by his day-job at the East India House. This pathetic image surely owes something to Coleridge’s poetic meditation on lameness and mobility, or enclosure and freedom, ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’. First published in 1800 and subtitled ‘A Poem Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London’, the physically incapacitated speaker refers to his friend, who is off rambling with other guests (the Wordsworths), in terms which imply that he, Charles, is the true prisoner: My gentle-hearted Charles! For thou hast pined And hungered after Nature, many a year In the great City pent, winning thy way With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain And strange calamity!6

As the prefatory note to the poem tells us, the speaker’s domestic imprisonment is only temporary, whereas the passive, delicate Charles seems doomed to endure indefinitely the ‘in … pent’ confinement of his desk-job and London life in general. Of the poet’s guests, who ‘wander on / In gladness all’,7 therefore, Charles’s need for a country ramble is deemed the most urgent. Implicit in Coleridge’s poem is the belief that wandering or walking more or less aimlessly is in itself synonymous with freedom. Charles is imprisoned therefore not simply by a calamitous home life and the drudgery of his workplace, but because the only walking he does in the city is purposive, or necessitated by travelling to and from those two confining enclosures. Unlike the poet and his other guests, Charles is starved not only of nature’s purifying properties, but also of leisure time for the act of aimless wandering. In this way Coleridge’s poem articulates Celeste Langan’s theory of how Wordsworth’s poetry upholds the liberal ideals of ‘social mobility and free speech’ against such immediate, practical obstacles as rural enclosure and private property ownership.8 This act of Roman-

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tic elision is achieved by the conversion of actual ‘geographical’ into abstract ‘aesthetic space’: Thus it is not only the activity, but also the domain, of freedom that the Romantic text pathologically misunderstands and misrepresents. For most of us, the freedom to go and return would seem to suggest an intention relative to origin and destination: I am here, I wish to go there as a consequence of some interest or antipathy; if I am allowed to pursue my project, I am free. In the Romantic patois, coming and going becomes, in itself, the pure form of freedom, an absolute unmarked by origin and destination, by interest or antipathy.9

This liberalist association of vagrancy with freedom, as Langan notices, is found in Wordsworth’s valorization of the ‘Old Cumberland Beggar’. But not, of course, in Elia’s metropolitan model in ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’ ( June 1822), even though Elia claims of the beggar that he ‘is the only free man in the universe’ (LM, 5, p. 533). This is because the metropolitan beggar is, by definition, a stationary or fixed figure, due to his lamed physical condition (being often blind or crippled), and his inevitable assimilation, as spectacle, to the cityscape. Significantly, in Elia’s city it is fixedness that is synonymous with freedom. Flânerie on the other hand, as the urban equivalent of rambling, is of a similarly leisure-oriented and self-justifying nature. ‘To be a poet’, as Keith Tester observes of the flâneur, ‘is the real truth of the idler and the observer; the poetry is the reason and the justification of the idling’.10 Tester uses the terms ‘poet’ and ‘poetry’ in their broadest or most abstract sense, as again almost synonymous with freedom, thus describing the flâneur as a free spirit, or at least one who aspires to such an emancipated state. Through Elia, the habitually lamed or enclosed prose essayist, suitably enfeebled for middle age, Lamb implicitly rejects as illusory both these rural and urban promises of ‘poetic’ liberty. That Elia represents from one angle a means for self-empowering play upon a previously established, ‘lame’ image of Lamb’s incarceration in and by the city is suggested by his strong reaction to Coleridge’s poem. The ‘strange calamity’, of course, alludes to Mary’s matricidal act, and, tellingly, it is the mawkish depiction of ‘gentle-hearted’ lameness – three times the poem refers to Charles thus – about which Lamb vehemently protests to Coleridge in two successive letters. On 6 August 1800 he implores: ‘For God’s sake (I never was more serious) don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses’, and equates Coleridge’s phrase with weakness by asserting that ‘gentle’ is ‘equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited’; then, on 14 August, Lamb again attacks the mawkishness of gentle-hearted and suggests replacing it with rugged terms of abuse such as ‘drunken dog, ragged head, seldshaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which properly belongs to the

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gentleman in question’.11 As if in belated literary response Elia not only exploits such self-denigration to disarm the critical reader, but he also displaces the disturbing metropolitan domicile into a rural setting, a manoeuvre the commercial implications of which are discussed in the next chapter. Sealing Lamb’s fate as a pitiful figure in Romantic myth, the dreaded word ‘gentle’ is reapplied alongside the unmitigating ‘frolic’ in 1835, in Wordsworth’s reference to the recently deceased Lamb in another cloying poem, ‘Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg’. Also deceptively suggestive of Lamb’s incarceration in and by the city is an early article by Lamb himself for the Morning Post (1 February 1802). As ‘A Londoner’, Lamb celebrates the remedy that the London crowds supply for a natural inclination to hypochondria. In London this condition ‘vanishes, like all other ills’.12 Unlike the later and less youthful figure of Elia, the domestic metropolitan enclosure represents a stifling confinement that often fills the Londoner with ‘a weariness or distaste’, relieved only once he has: rushed out into her crowded Strand, and fed my humour till tears have wetted my cheek for inutterable sympathies with the multitudinous moving picture, which she never fails to present at all hours, like the shifting scenes of a skilful pantomime.13

The Londoner escapes a tyrannous domicile for the freedom of the city without, thus anticipating Baudelaire’s ‘hatred of domestic humdrum’. This quite literally escapist use of a phantasmagorical London derives from Lamb’s letter to Wordsworth on 30 January 1801, in which a catalogue of the city’s various and ambiguous attractions finishes with: ‘the pantomimes – London itself a pantomime and a masquerade’.14 Yet if flânerie implies ‘dissatisfaction’ and a ‘quest for the Holy Grail of being through a restless doing’,15 the Londoner’s pose differs greatly. Far from suggesting the hunger of dissatisfaction, his relationship with the city is that of a dining observer, heartily gorging himself at a feast at which he can look about and ‘gladly behold every appetite supplied with its proper food’.16 In gluttony is another of Lamb’s sedentary motifs, one widely manifested, from ‘Edax on Appetite’ to Elia’s ‘Dissertation on Roast Pig’, and well documented.17 Indeed, if late Regency London saw early signs of the hungry flâneur then Lamb reminds us that the prevailing image was still of the gourmand, with the corpulent Prince Regent, as satirized by Lamb himself, leading by example.18 For Lamb’s insatiable Londoner as for Elia, therefore, it is the city itself that assumes the role of domestic enclosure, with the experience of the streets curiously evocative of sitting indoors, more specifically in a theatre or restaurant. The Londoner’s domestication of London extends to placing himself in the role of helpless infant: the pleasure of the city’s plenitude is imaged as ‘suck[ing] at her measureless breasts without a possibility of being satiated’, and being ‘Nursed amid her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke …’,19 echoing Spenser’s ‘mery London, my most

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kyndly Nurse’.20 In describing his passing youthful interest in nature as a sort of ‘fit’, moreover, the more typically healthy country life is associated with mental illness, with London as its cure. Lamb’s use of a medicinal metaphor for London has a more recent precursor, in Boswell’s series of essays under the persona of ‘The Hypochondriack’, which appeared from October 1777 to August 1783 in the London’s previous incarnation. Although most of Boswell’s essays do not actually mention hypochondria, they implicitly offer a model exercise for fellow sufferers in how a cure can be found in essay-writing itself, due to its license for light-heartedness and digression, or diversion. Integral as it is to Lamb’s playing of the fool, Elia’s extra-essayistic ontology in the later London seems to take Boswell’s essayistic medicine a theatrical, leavening stage further. Another representation of the city as domestic enclosure appears in a letter to Manning from September 1802, which contains, moreover, the most compelling source among Lamb’s early writings for his later, Elian version of flânerie. The letter describes the Lambs’ holiday at Coleridge’s place near the Lakes, with Charles enraptured by the scenery. They arrive at Keswick in the evening, to be greeted by ‘gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the mountains into colours’, and Charles recalls their both feeling as if transported ‘into fairy land’.21 At dusk they enter Coleridge’s ‘comfortable’ study, from where Lamb is again awestruck by the mountains, now shrouded in dark clouds: Glorious creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, &c. I shall never forget ye, how ye lay about that night, like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed for the night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing fire in his study, which is a large, antique, ill-shaped room, with an old fashioned organ, never play’d upon, big enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an Eolian harp, and an old sofa, half bed, &c. And all looking out upon the fading view of Skiddaw, and his broad-breasted brethren: what a night! 22

For all its natural grandeur, however, Skiddaw is circumscribed by Lamb’s domesticating vision. This is evidently far from the sublime experience of nature in the Wordsworth’s overwhelming sense of the black, rearing mountain-peak in Book I of The Prelude. The personified mountains, ‘Glorious creatures, fine old fellows’, seem descriptive instead of the larger-than-life characters who amiably haunt Elia’s metropolitan enclosures at the South-Sea House and the Inner Temple. Indeed, instead of a disturbing presence the black clouds around the mountains evoke the comforting image of bedtime slumber, and the whole scene – already given the innocuous charm of children’s literature – is safely framed as if in a print or painting by the window of Coleridge’s study, where the party are cosily ensconced. Furthermore, this snug, cluttered enclosure, with its warming fire and quaint, donnish artefacts, attracts Lamb’s attention almost as much as the scenery, as the very impact of the mountains owes to the contrast they

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present with the cosiness of the study. Even that classic instrument of Romantic transcendence, the Eolian harp of Coleridge’s poem, lies in a distinctly unmusical, material state, between some scattered folios and an old bed. Such a domestic framing of the wild, natural landscape recalls another letter written to the nonliterary outsider, Manning, on 28 November 1800, in which, after declaring ‘I am not romance-bit about Nature’, Lamb adds: ‘The earth, sea and sky (when all is said), is but a house to dwell in’.23 But indicating a real belligerence to Lamb’s rejection of the Lake School fraternity, if not entirely their principles, Manning’s invitation to dine on snipe, a marsh bird notably found in the Lake District, is aptly received with gusto: ‘Hills, woods, Lakes and mountains, to the Eternal Devil. I will eat snipes with thee Thomas Manning.’24 Like the city in which one can heartily gorge oneself on everything from consumer goods to the motley of metropolitan life itself, the gourmand becomes for Lamb a means of rebelling against the embarrassingly feeble, forlorn figure he cuts in Lake School mythology.25 Even within the very expression of awe at nature there lies the germ of a character quite literally at home among domestic comforts, consumerist trappings and bookish pursuits. When the city does appear as a restrictive enclosure towards the end of the letter, with Lamb mournfully reflecting on a sense of reconfinement on his arrival back in London, this again curiously anticipates his later, Elian aesthetic: But I am returned (I have now been come home near three weeks – I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degradation I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controul’d by any one, to come home and work. I had been dreaming I was a very great man.26

This at first glance suggests that Charles’s attachment to London owes more to the grim necessities of his guardianship of Mary and his job at the East India House, than to any natural affinity for the city. That indeed Lamb, in Thomas McFarland’s assessment, had no real choice but to live in the city because his commitments denied him the Romantic ideal, ‘proselytized by Coleridge and Wordsworth’, of an ‘escape into nature’.27 And yet despite, or rather through, this exclusion of Lamb from one mode of Romanticism McFarland admits him into another, in that the very ‘charm’ of Elia’s whimsy ‘aris[es] from the abyss’ in accordance with the Romantic essayists’ (Hazlitt and De Quincey are the others) motifs of ‘incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin’.28 This is, however, an implicitly lesser model because Lamb’s incompleteness includes a profound sense of inferiority to the genius of Coleridge: expressing the traditional prejudice against the supposed triviality of the essay, as well as taking at face value the suggestion of underdevelopment and insignificance in Elia’s name – ‘Lamb’s initial, L, with a diminutive ending that indicates heterogeneous fragmentation,

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as in juvenilia or trivia’ – McFarland claims that the Elia essays were ‘conceived as residue, they were what the dazzling Coleridge did not pre-empt’.29 However, Lamb clearly does not fit this second, and secondary, Romanticism either, simultaneously precluding as it does his achievement as metropolitan author. The metropolitan Romanticism which I am proposing makes Lamb, in a sense, complete and whole, and moreover, as a reflexive investor in the periodical text, an appropriator of fragmentation instead of a sort of living fragment whose writing merely reflects that anguished condition. Lamb’s letter to Manning is in any case not as mournfully anti-London as it at first appears. ‘After all’, Lamb concludes in mitigation, I could not live in Skiddaw. I could spend a year, two, three years among them, but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine away, I know.30

Instead of signifying a heroic capacity to restrict or confine his art to meet the straitening demands of his life, however, in accordance with the Victorian image of Lamb’s life as one of sainted self-sacrifice,31 the sense of feeling ‘very little’ in London might just as easily and more innocently indicate an innate aptitude or affinity with the diminutive and quintessentially metropolitan form of the periodical essay. It is perhaps as Elia himself suggests in ‘New Year’s Eve’, whilst avowing equal love for ‘town and country’, Lamb finds the ‘rural solitudes’ to be ‘unspeakable’ – or unwriteable – in contrast to the inspirational ‘sweet security of streets’ (LM, 3, p. 6). The conflation of diminution with insignificance is an error which more than any other seems to explain Lamb’s persisting position on the fringe of the Romantic canon. His habitual pose of self-belittlement tallies all too easily with a traditional prejudice over the literary status of the periodical essay, a prejudice emanating from the essay’s typically casual, amateurish style, its artlessness, and experimentalist negation of any deep or thorough analysis. In the present study, however, the essay achieves parity with the poem not only through the alternative presented by Lamb’s use of the form to established notions of Romanticism (including Coleridgean ones), but, furthermore, by an extra-essayistic figure which as periodical text both exploits and transgresses the essay form. In this chapter, Elia’s gestures of self-confinement are read as an inverse act of empowerment, in that they work towards a distinctive metropolitan aesthetic.

The View from the South-Sea House With the South-Sea House and its ‘lay-monastery’ of eccentric, almost imbecilic, employees, Elia’s dual motifs are established in the very first essay. Fittingly, the essay commemorates the centenary of the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 by focusing on the decline instead of the heyday of the old trading

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house. In the opening paragraph Elia addresses the ‘lean annuitant’ of a reader as he moves from one building, the bank where he collects his pension, to another, the Flower Pot inn, where he books his coach home to north London: READER, in thy passage from the Bank – where thou hast been receiving thy halfyearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself ) – to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat northerly, – didst thou never observe a melancholy looking, handsome, brick and stone ediface, to the left – where Threadneedle Street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare say thou hast often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters, and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out – a desolation something like Balclutha’s. (LM, 2, p. 142)

As in ‘Newspapers’, ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ and other essays, Elia identifies himself with an educable reader-type from amongst the crowd. This reader’s purposeful, mechanical, movements across the city are arrested, as Elia asks him to ‘observe’ what he should have noticed before, the imposing external appearance of a certain building.32 Encapsulated thus is the Elian anomaly whereby purposeful walking, like aimless rambling, is replaced as an emancipative reflex in the city by a converse state of immobility or stasis. The reader is cast as a middle-class inhabitant of London’s rapidly expanding suburbs,33 the kind of person usually too busy to linger outside let alone enter the building. Halted or hailed by Elia, however, he is now guided inside this desolate place of once frenzied commercial activity to participate in an altogether more leisurely and imaginative engagement with the metropolis. The entering of the South-Sea House therefore represents a departure from the crowd and its superficial spectatorship. With this one moment the essay recalls Hazlitt’s urban metaphor for Elia’s antithetical style: ‘He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction’. The step with which Elia walks away from the city’s novelty and modernity towards the ‘architecture … of embryo art and ancient manners’ is, moreover, the casual ‘stroll’ of the flâneur.34 Yet in keeping with Lamb’s ambivalence towards this figure, Elia empathizes with semi-imaginary characters enclosed within a historic, derelict building, in illuminating contrast to the flâneur’s detachment from the real and contemporary humanity that he encounters outside, in the streets. The switch in the opening paragraph to ‘an internal, integral view’ from ‘an external comparative glimpse’ of the House, as John Nabholtz notices, is climaxed with a ‘resonant imaginative allusion’ to Ossian’s Balclutha which is apposite in two ways: for the ‘mock-heroic’ parallel between the Bubble’s speculating ‘hoax’ and Macpherson’s literary version, and for the imaginative tie to the past that this helps establish. The various impostures practised by the House’s eccentric employees, followed by the revealed dubiety itself of Elia’s recollec-

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tions, confirm the hoax theme and its function to lead the reader into adopting a perspective ‘radically different from the mundane, unimaginative concerns of the first sentence’.35 But the reference to Macpherson does something more than convey a hoax theme. In the Ossianic poem to which Elia refers the desolation of the town of Balclutha (Clyde) is indeed very much like that of the South-Sea House. ‘Carthon’ includes the recollections as told to Fingal of an ageing Celtic warrior, Clessammor, who is exiled from Balclutha and who has mourned for his wife, Moina, since she died there in childbirth. Balclutha is later burned in a campaign against the Britons by Comhal, father of Fingal. The passage from which Elia misquotes in a footnote – ‘I have passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate’ (p. 142) – appears in a rousing soliloquy by Fingal in which he proposes that the devastation of the town and its royal hall be immortalized in song. Like Elia and his reader with the South-Sea House, therefore, Fingal does not pass by the walls of Balclutha: his imagination fills Balclutha’s empty hall with the heroic spirit of its erstwhile inhabitants, just as Elia conjures a motley assortment of mock-heroic figures to fill the desolate South-Sea House. Elia also shares with Fingal a sense of the transience of glory and of buildings as monuments to human vanity: ‘Peace to the manes of the BUBBLE! Silence and destitution are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial!’ (p. 143). Macpherson’s heroic text perfectly complements Lamb’s mock-heroic versioning, with Ossian being instrumental in Elia’s valorization of the man-made enclosure over the boundless natural world. He does this not, however, as a means of transcending the present and its often disturbing realities, but for engaging with it as a moment contextualized within a historical continuum. The sheer physical scale of the items in Elia’s prolonged description of the House’s interior adds to this impression of perspective, by conveying the size of commercial enterprise and magnitude of its decline. The ‘stately porticos; imposing staircases’, palatial offices, ‘massy silver inkstands’, ‘huge charts’, ‘long passages’ and ‘vast ranges of cellarage’, are all contained within the House’s ‘magnificent relic’ (pp. 142–3). A scornful sense of contrast is apparent with the diminished scale of all things contemporary: the ‘tremendous hoax’ of the Bubble is envied by the ‘petty peculators of our day’; the ‘great dead tomes’ are almost too heavy to be lifted by the ‘degenerate clerks of the present day’; the ‘heavy, odd-shaped ivory-handled penknives’ indicate that ‘our ancestors had everything on a larger scale than we have hearts for’ (pp. 142–3). The essay’s nostalgically enlarged sense of the past derives also from its temporal layering, as captured in the anomalous image of stillborn antiquity in the term ‘superfoetation’, used to describe the dust accumulated on the ledgers and day-books. Although Elia confines himself to a personal and more recent historical setting, this in turn dwarfs that of the contemporary world. Therefore, unlike the ‘Newspapers’ essay, in which the shorter time span dictated by the autobiographical subject describes a single-scale con-

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tinuum between a past, an intermediate past and the present, ‘The South-Sea House’ effects a telescopic scaling of these three temporalities. Historical enlargement emanates, moreover, from the contrasting diminution inherent in the essay form itself. Because the description of the House is not from the momentous time of the Bubble itself but from sixty years on, Elia’s plea for the names involved in that historic event to be allowed to rest in peace implies that its magnitude is too great for discussion in the present humble format. At least, that is, for explicit discussion: at once typifying the essay genre and Lamb’s self-belittling reflex, the very power of suggestion in the text springs from its ostensible inadequacy. Such enlargement of the past suggests the familiar, comforting message that, however alarming the present may seem, recourse to history will always keep things in perspective. The national crisis instigated in 1720 by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble places any current issue in a reassuring historical context. References also to the ‘Titan size’ of the Gunpowder Plot and the mass persecution of the Huguenots, against the belittled ‘small politics’ of the more recent support for American independence, reinforce this effect. The issue dominating public attention in August 1820, a drama like that of the Bubble a hundred years earlier, played out in the metropolis, was the Queen Caroline affair. Caroline’s return to England in June 1820 after six years of selfimposed exile, to claim her rights as the wife of the new King, caused a political struggle which, according to John Stevenson, ‘brought the Ministry near to resignation or dismissal more than once and even seemed at times to threaten revolution’. Since being exonerated in 1805 from charges that she had borne an illegitimate child Caroline had garnered strong Whig and radical support, with her home at Kensington Palace taking on the image of a ‘rival court’, and the friends who visited her small Bayswater house including Canning, Byron and Sir Francis Burdett.36 Following the uncovering of the Cato Street conspiracy in February, this affair introduced the possibility of a more fervent public unrest than at Peterloo: Caroline’s return and the new King’s determination to pursue divorce stimulated opponents of the Ministry in politics and the press to use the Queen’s case as a ‘rallying point’, while the government itself feared that divorce proceedings against the popular Caroline would irreparably damage the King’s reputation.37 Not least perturbed by these events was the London’s editor John Scott, whose editorial and critical input casts Elia’s sense of perspective in a politically conservative light. As Mark Parker’s reading of Elia within the political context of the Caroline affair argues, the London’s self-advertisement as a highly literary miscellany free of party affiliation should not obscure Scott’s reversion over this crisis to a position of conservatism. Parker traces in Scott’s articles in 1820 a hostility to ‘popular movements’, a despair over the cynical ‘manoeuvrings of

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each political faction’, and echoes of Burke’s and Coleridge’s earlier fears of civil unrest.38 In July, the month preceding Elia’s ‘South-Sea House’ essay, Scott’s current affairs column claims that the Queen’s return from Italy has thrown into question ‘the very existence of the state’ (LM, 2, p. 100). As if challenging Lamb, who was ironically a supporter of Caroline, to deliver with Elia a calming sense of proportion, the magnitude or scale of the affair all but overwhelms Scott: ‘We have no interest now to lavish on secondary subjects of debate, for we have become familiar with the language of life and death, and live in the near approach of an inevitable crisis’ (p. 100). Then, in the August issue in which Elia’s essay also appears, Scott’s attitude to the current situation finds expression in literary criticism, through his ‘Living Authors’ appraisal of Godwin. Scott favours Godwin’s later works for being more likely to ‘repress presumptuous dissent, and angry opposition, than to provoke them’ (LM, 2, p. 166). To similar effect, in the September issue Scott dismisses Keats’s dissenting sentiments with the ‘elegant reproof ’ represented by Elia’s first essay, all of which indicates that, according to Parker, a desperate Scott finds in Elia a timely element of escapism: ‘It is this intolerable political present to which the warm, domestic recollections of Elia answer’.39 It is easy to imagine how the enshrined peacefulness of the South-Sea House may have appeared to Scott as a sweet palliative to the troubled times on which, as editor, he felt obliged to comment. The building’s incongruous setting, in ‘the very heart of stirring and living commerce’, suggests such a calming imperative. The old House’s implicit mockery of the current ‘fret and fever of speculation’ (LM, 2, p. 143) relates, reassuringly indeed, to that other feverish speculation in the city, on the future of the constitution. Therefore, if Elia represents a conservative triumph of escapism in accordance with editorial dictates, it is not only achieved through the quotidian and the domestic, but, still more ironically, history itself. Indeed, if escapism is about the denial of history and politics, then Elia’s essay is clearly not an example. Instead of walling-out an intolerable present, ‘The South-Sea House’ renders the present palatable by setting it within an ongoing chronological narrative. The present only becomes intolerable, in other words, if it cannot be thus accommodated to the continuum of history. The essay’s mode of historicism is conveyed by the ostensibly insular domesticity of the erstwhile house of business, which assumes in its very desuetude the features of house and home. It is a ‘poor neighbour’ to the surrounding commercial houses, and the ‘better library’ of its accounting ledgers – far from recalling to Elia the drudgery of his own clerking work – appear harmlessly as the ‘defunct dragons’ of outgrown fairytales (p. 143). The employees’ relationship to the House, furthermore, is described in terms of domestic attachment. Eccentric, non-utilitarian ‘humorists’ or ‘odd fishes’, ‘full of chat’ and idiosyncratic hobbies, cloistered within the House in ‘ripe or middle-age’, they are

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likened to ‘domestic retainers in a great house, kept more for show than use’ (p. 143). These all-but useless figures in worldly terms are far from being so in Elia’s world. Their utilitarian inefficiency belongs to the lameness-enclosure motif, in that it encodes a capacity for the emancipative act. The cashier Evans is an anachronistic macaroni afflicted with a dread of defaulting which contrasts with his transformation outside the House into an eloquent London historian, who relates how ‘the sheltering obscurities of Hog Lane and the vicinity of the Seven Dials’ provided religious asylum for the persecuted Huguenots (p. 144). Evans expresses the idea of the metropolis as being involved in seismic historical events, but again in a reassuringly pacific way through the urban traditions of tolerance and democracy, as well as its sheer capacity for ‘losing’ or hiding people. There is also Thomas Tame, whose self-delusion of noble ancestry belies a state of poverty and intellectual lameness – ‘a sucking babe might have posed him’ (p. 144) – while ‘rattleheaded’ Plumer repeats Tame’s blithe appropriation of aristocratic identity, as their pseudo-nobility together enacts a harmless alternative to Caroline’s genuine, incendiary claim to monarchical status. The final character sketch of relevance is of the deputy-secretary and part-time ‘man of letters’, Henry Man, suggestively described as ‘the author of the South Sea House’ (p. 145). A redundant joke-writer himself in the ‘Newspapers’ essay, Elia appreciates Man’s ‘terse, fresh, epigrammatic’ wit, ‘staled’ though it is by current ‘fastidious’ tastes (p. 145). Man’s kindred, out-of-step spirit accords with the essay’s calming sense of history: such championing of the anachronistic, or love of things fresh-butstaled, is simply another way of projecting the past into the present. The educative purpose of the Elian type is confirmed at the end with the revelation that the old clerks owe more to imagination than historical fact. Elia likens himself to Christopher Sly, the drunken name-conjurer in The Taming of the Shrew, to suggest that ‘the very names’ of the clerks are ‘fantastic – insubstantial – like Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of Greece’ (p. 146). The hurrying, preoccupied reader identified at the beginning is addressed again, and asked to consider the possibility that Elia has been thus far ‘playing’ with him. The reader has indeed been taken in by the historically enlarged SouthSea House and its semi-fictional inhabitants, in a blurring of history and fiction that serves to direct him towards not simply the convenient Romantic cliché of transcendence, but a more socially relevant conception of the metropolis which literally places in perspective a troubling present. However, Elia’s challenge to that other kind of city-walker, the flâneur, is less about education than aesthetics. Everything about Elia’s connection to the House and its inhabitants seems as if defined against this figure. Removing himself from the crowd, Elia establishes a self-defining kinship with ostensibly lamed individuals from the past, who are enclosed by a decayed monument to commercial enterprise standing in the present at poignant odds with the dynamism

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of the modern metropolis. The reverse of this image is surely the claustrophobic, crowd-bathing and egoistic flâneur, whose rambles over the metropolis embrace its modernity whilst detaching him from its humanity. The third and final challenge posed by the Elian figure is to the enclosing text of the London Magazine itself. Confirmed later in the ‘Newspapers’ essay, the sense of historical perspective in ‘The South-Sea House’ indicates that Elia’s political suggestiveness is an innate, characteristic feature rather than the effect of pressurization by the immediate (con)text of the London. The essays’ appearance in this periodical undoubtedly lends them a contemporary relevance or politicizes them in certain ways, as Mark Schoenfield and Mark Parker have both argued. Yet, as I hope to have demonstrated, this politicization is pre-empted by the essay, or rather, the essay politicizes itself through the resonance of the South-Sea House’s desolation in the midst of the metropolis. As a relic of the same commerce that it mocks in the present the House implicitly opposes the self-importance of modernity, just as the essay itself places the London’s anxiety over Queen Caroline in historical perspective. Such an engagement with life at one remove is symbolized by the emancipatory yet domestic figure of the South-Sea clerk, for whom escape is paradoxically possible only through attachment to the House. Context is therefore as much a part of Lamb’s metropolitan vision as it is the critical reading that would deconstruct that vision. Put another way, if suggestiveness connotes to playfulness then Elia’s playfulness engages with rather than avoids the political.

Educative Enclosure: The Inner Temple In September 1821, just over a year after his South-Sea House recollections, Elia recalls his early childhood inside the Inner Temple. Again Queen Caroline is making disturbing news, and again Elia features an inspirational metropolitan enclosure. The London reports Caroline’s death in August and a controversial rerouting by popular demand of the funeral procession, from a relatively obscure suburban route to a high-profile path through the city. The appalled editor John Taylor reports that an altercation over this decision is followed by several scuffles as the impassioned populace lead the corpse on its long journey, and on the subsequent shooting and killing by the militia of two men at Hyde Park. The ‘Abstract of Foreign and Domestic Occurrences’, in which this incident is reported, appears as usual towards the back of the magazine. Scott’s death earlier in the year does not appear to have altered the London’s political tenor, as the front part of the magazine is loaded with articles of an implicit conservatism and instilled with a mood of sombre reflection. In a piece on ‘English Eating’, for example, ‘the appeasing properties of a dinner’ are linked to the nation’s unique record of civil liberty and domestic peace, and the enduring success of the monarchy: ‘Our liberties and our dishes are placed on a permanent basis’,

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it asserts, ‘they mutually preserve each other, and are allied in the superstitious regard of the worshipful people of England’ (LM, 4, p. 249). The banquet at the recent coronation is pointedly credited with being so generous that it ‘would have inoculated the severest Republican with loyalty to George IV’, as the essay builds to a triumphal close: Happy England! secure alike from hunger and from slavery; may the spirit of eating and of freedom never forsake thy sons! May glory in arts and arms be theirs – an uncorrupted taste – keen appetite, and the huge sirloin, in which they may With desperate knife The deep incision make, and talk the while Of England’s glory ne’er to be defaced, While hence they borrow vigour. (p. 249)

The very fear of revolution, it seems, reinterprets the gluttony and corpulence of late Georgian society into a dynamic spirit of nationhood. Next, inculcating a pacific sense of respect for the Queen’s passing, there is a mournful poem by John Clare entitled ‘Farewell to Mary’, followed by an unattributed piece on the ‘humble, unpretending kind of poetry’ of the graveyard epitaph (p. 274). In similarly soothing vein, a review of the ‘Poetical Meditations’ of a French diplomat favours the examples in which his ‘unpremeditated thoughts and spontaneous feelings’ are nevertheless expressed ‘without forcing himself into a state of excitement for the occasion’ (p. 277). Immediately after this review comes ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’. Appropriately for the mood thus generated, the first part of the essay establishes the elegant tranquillity of the Inner Temple amid the hurly-burly of the metropolis. The name ‘Temple’, derived from the site’s original function as the ancient seat of the Knight’s Templar, denotes a hallowed, cloistered recess dedicated to the worship of a particular faith. Yet it becomes apparent that an altogether more liberal agenda is served by the role the Temple plays in Elia’s unofficial education, as the place where he claims to have been born and lived the first seven years of his life. The Inner Temple’s enclosure is expanded to mythological proportions not simply by the adult’s sense of nostalgia, as with the South-Sea House, but at the same time an attempt at recapturing the vision of a child. An educative potential attaches to this reflective-regressive combination, and the adult-child figure personified in the eccentric old benchers. Like the ‘lean annuitant’ enticed from his usual business into the anomalous calm of the South-Sea House, the country tourist happens upon the Temple by ‘passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green recesses!’ (p. 279). Inside, the Temple exudes a liberating sense of spaciousness with buildings that present a harmonious set of contrasts. The distinctive blend of ‘cheerful, liberal’, with ‘older, more fantas-

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tically shrouded’ buildings, opposes the corporate ‘gothicizing’ lamented later in the essay. So too do the since-removed ornaments, the sundials and artificial fountains, the winged horse over the entrance to the Temple, and the ‘frescoes of the Virtues’ at the end of the Paper Buildings. To Elia’s apparent anguish these practical alterations remove the man-made artefacts which nurture the metropolitan imagination. Yet even without these utilitarian intrusions, the Temple’s place within a fallen modern world is acknowledged. The replacement of the chivalric Knights Templar in 1346 by the more mundane inhabitation of students and law practitioners is alluded to in lines quoted from Spenser. To similar effect the quoted Marvell poem, ‘The Garden’, with which the Temple’s gardens are pastoralized, includes the lines: ‘Stumbling on melons, as I pass / Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass’. The imagery of the Fall is shared by the marble cherubs’ ‘innocent-wanton lips’ in Elia’s text (p. 280). Edenic enclosure is also precluded by the Paper Buildings’ frescoes: providing as they do a ‘first hint of allegory’ (p. 280), they initiate Elia’s development from a child’s to an adult’s consciousness. In Elia’s typically deceptive fashion, therefore, the Temple’s educative function only belatedly emerges as a more balanced or compromised enclosure than the utopian opening image suggests. Nevertheless, the Temple has still suffered violation by the outside world. Characterized as an overbearing adult male, the intruder is the spoiling pragmatism of the present age: The fashion [for ornamental fountains], they tell me, is gone by, and these things are esteemed childish. Why not then gratify children, by letting them stand? Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. They are awakening images to them at least. Why must every thing smack of man, and mannish? Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the child’s heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments? (p. 280)

However deeply buried in the present-day ‘mannish’ times, the indelible potential for childishness in all men, which will be grotesquely dramatized in the old benchers, provides an unlikely opportunity for redemption. Elia indeed builds childishness into a socio-historical template, as the idea of relating childhood to primitive civilization and adulthood to a modern, post-enlightenment society is more comprehensively taken up in the following month’s essay, ‘Witches and other Night-Fears’. But his lament at the removal of the Temple’s ornamentation is undercut, in Elia’s auto-critical style, by an implicit acknowledgement that the fallen metropolitan world is inevitably reflected in the real, worldly business of the Temple. Elia’s knowledge of the ‘recondite machinery’ (p. 279) operating the fountains, with which he fools his credulous playmates, foreshadows his passage into adulthood and a demystifying knowledge of the experiential, adult world behind the Temple’s Edenic facade. It is this very knowledge that makes

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it imperative for apparently obsolete or indulgent ornamental features such as the fountain and the frescoes to be retained, so that through their remoteness from the world of utility they stimulate in adulthood what remains of the child’s power of imagination. The old benchers themselves, as proposed, have childlike qualities that belie an appearance of ‘mannish’ authority. Like mental patients as much as children, they seem as if cocooned by the Temple, and, again like the South-Sea clerks, they form an odd assortment of characters united by ‘coeval’ employment. The imperious Thomas Coventry, terrifying children with his booming voice and accompanying ‘clouds of snuff ’, moves cumbersomely across the terrace with a ‘massy and elephantine’ gait (p. 280). When rarely seen outside the Temple this miserly enclosure-loving figure still remains indoors, neurotically ‘standing at his window in [a] damp, close, well-like mansion’ in Fleet Street, safeguarding his treasures (p. 282). Pacing the terrace beside this ‘staunch tory’ is the conversely mild, pensive Whig, Samuel Salt, whose anaemic personality belies a reputation as a brilliant lawyer and successful ladies’ man, and takes the form of social lameness: ‘He was a shy man; a child might pose him in a minute – indolent and procrastinating to the last degree’ (p. 281). Salt’s false image owes much to the real capability of his energetic, chivalrous and multi-talented assistant Lovel, a character based on Lamb’s father John. Yet even the manliness of Lovel subsides into childishness when he is reduced in old age to a ‘palsy-smitten’ senility or ‘sad second-childhood’ (p. 283). Other childlike benchers include Daines Barrington, who mimics Coventry’s lumbering gait and intimidating appearance, and petulantly orders the poisoning of noisy sparrows in the garden, and Wharry, with his peculiar, intermittently skipping gait, his ‘steps … little efforts, like that of a child beginning to walk’ (p. 283), and a cruel habit of pinching his cat’s ears. As with the old clerks’ reflex for palliating the mundane reality of their metropolitan lives, the old benchers provide an Elian template or type. Their childishness, or lamed adulthood, captured in and by the Temple, articulates Elia’s own enclosure-loving ‘boy-man’ in Phil-Elia’s mock-obituary. Elia is similarly presented here as a character indelibly marked with the ‘impressions of infancy’, along with a conscious resentment of ‘the impertinence of manhood’ (LM, 7, p. 21). Entirely in keeping with this self-representation, the Temple enshrines a desirable equilibrium between child and adult perception which is mirrored in Elia’s narrative of recollection and regression. Elia experiences frustration not at the more common and modest failure of memory, but of almost the opposite, a failure to effect an almost complete or uncompromised regression into childhood: Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled? Or, if the like of you exist, why exist they no more for me? Ye inexplicable, half-understood appearances, why comes in reason to tear away the preternatural mist, bright or gloomy, that enshrouded you? Why make

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In Elia’s plaintive rhetorical questioning is the sad realization that such vivid regression, unalloyed by adult memory, is only possible in pathetic psychiatric cases such as Lovel’s. To regress thus would indeed involve becoming very much the ‘sorry figure’ of which Lamb was at such pains to rid himself. Therefore, instead of advocating an uncompromising re-creation, through Elia’s ‘childish eyes’, of a mythological Temple inhabited by ‘Gods … walking upon the earth’ (p. 284), the essay’s message is ultimately one of harmonious balance. However absurd the childlike old benchers may appear, they carry the Temple’s function as an educative enclosure in which notions of innocence and experience ideally coalesce. Elia’s frustration dramatizes a commensurate desirability in the modern metropolis, as a site of supposed enlightenment, for the indulgence of a primeval state as represented by the imaginative faculty. To this effect, Elia reverts at the end to the rhetoric of treatise: Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish, – extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary fabling, – in the heart of childhood, there will, for ever, spring up a well of innocent or wholesome superstition – the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital – from every-day forms educing the unknown and the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will be light, when the grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and materiality. While childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth. (p. 284)

Elia espouses a necessary, occasional palliation of the metropolitan environment through its own architecture, in an ethos of anchorage as opposed to escape which is established through the dual motifs of lameness and enclosure. The coveted ‘little Goshen’ is therefore not the adult-erated Temple itself, but the redemptive imagination as nurtured by such places. Surrounded by the city’s banal visual plenitude, the Temple’s enclosure functions as an unofficial and ‘liberal’ school for developing a mode of vision to dispel the ‘darkness of sense and materiality’. A seemingly unrelated postscript to the essay actually supports this reading. Elia defends a factual inaccuracy in his representation of Samuel Salt by invoking the essays’ generic distance from historical fact: ‘They are, in truth, but shadows of fact – verisimilitudes, not verities – or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history’ (p. 284). Paralleling the proximity of the SouthSea House and the Inner Temple to the metropolis without – and moreover analogizing the empowered peripheral figure of Elia himself – Elia’s defence of his fictive art yet describes the reality-based premise of that fiction. Before discussing another example of childhood recollection in Elia, we need to explore further the implications of Lamb’s use of the child figure for a reading

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of metropolitanism. Judith Plotz includes Lamb within a concerted Romantic idealization of childhood, a ‘recoil from the actual child of history’ and ‘calm resignation to widespread institutional abuse of real children’.40 The issue of Lamb’s attitude to such abuse, in relation to the city as a site of humanitarian concern, is covered in Chapter 4. Of immediate relevance, however, is the concurrence of Plotz’s notion of the enclosure motif in Lamb as a principal agent of such denial, with Parker’s sense of Elia’s gentle whimsy as being appropriated to a conservative ‘recoil’ from another disturbing historical reality, that of the Queen Caroline affair. Again it seems that Lamb is being reductively read through treating Elia as the sum of the essays instead of the more slippery, dialogic entity of essayistic figure. Lamb’s supposedly Edenic childhood recollections, which invariably involve enclosure of one sort or another, as Plotz observes, are far from characterized by the purported kindliness or benignity. As discussed in Chapter 3, a telling distinction appears between the enclosures of the country and the city. The Gothic motifs of death, decay and the unheimlich mark the several appearances in the essays of the country house, rendering childhood and recollection alike a deeply disturbing experience. For all Elia’s elegiac rhetoric the Inner Temple, as discussed, is all about balance, moderation and the unavoidable tensions in life between the respective attractions of forgetting and remembering, stasis and growth, and innocence and experience. In its notion of an adulterated paradise and restrained sense of pleasure as palliation, both symbolized in the idea of a metropolitan Goshen, ‘The Old Benchers’ belongs to the same rus in urbe genre as Matthew Arnold’s ‘Lines Written in Kensington Gardens’. Indeed, the Temple’s Spenserian and Marvelesque peace and tranquillity derive from the pastoral, a tradition describing an essentially urban response to the country. Like the desolation of the South-Sea House, the Temple’s fragile beauty paradoxically owes its power to the modernizing threat of the metropolis, without which it could not exist in the first place. The metropolis, likewise benefits from the essentially humanizing properties of the South-Sea House and the Inner Temple. Together, these mediatory enclosures analogize the knowing interplay in Elia of escapist whimsy with the commercial, corporate exigencies of the periodical project. Again discussed in the next chapter, the deceptive effect of insularity in individual essays like ‘The Old Benchers’ is created by the affect of Lamb’s exploitation of autobiographical discourse. By the time ‘The Old Benchers’ appeared in the London, regular readers would already have been introduced to Lamb’s ability in this regard, through Elia’s shiftiness over his author-cum-clerk identity in the first two essays, and the dialogue contrived in the third essay between Elia and ‘Mr. Lamb’ over respective recollections of their old school, Christ’s Hospital. Chapter 3 details how Elia moreover reasserts through the extra-essayistic vehicle of the correspondence page the freedom to reinvent himself according to

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the affective requirement of the moment. Enclosure too, in Elia is therefore the emancipatory product of affect, and not the confining effect of recoil.

Night-Fears and Prosaic Dreams Elia’s next essay in the London, ‘Witches and other Night-Fears’ in October 1821, again seems to lament the loss to adulthood of the child’s power of imagination. However, this self-representation of lameness as usual encodes in irony its opposite. Whilst Elia’s supposed incapacity appears once more to fit him ideally for the London’s conservative agenda, the motif enables Lamb’s empowerment as metropolitan author in distinction to the ostensible superiority of his peers. Appearing just a few pages after the essay is a generally dismissive evaluation of Madame de Staël. De Staël’s impressive reputation in England was at its height at the time of her death in 1817 and for about three years after, with publication in 1820–1 of Ten Years of Exile and Complete Works, following Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution in 1820.41 The recent death of Napoleon compels the critic to present his as a timely common-sense revaluation: de Staël’s popularity in Britain is attributed to nothing more than the convenience of her opposition to Bonaparte, and the force of a dynamic, charismatic personality aided by feminine charm. From the presupposed vantage point of a more sceptical age, the writer describes de Staël’s style as a kind of confidence trick, effected by: that sort of intellectual dexterity, improved by habit, and acquired probably in the first instance by early exercise in the gladiatorial rhetoric of ambitious conversation, which sometimes carried her successfully through subjects, that in their extent and combination were equally beyond the grasp of her talent, and the sphere of her knowledge. (LM, 4, p. 395)

The fear behind the claim that the nation was beguiled by de Staël’s liberal populism is made apparent later in the same issue in John Taylor’s report on Queen Caroline’s final resting place at Brunswick. Before heralding the success of the King’s recent visit to Ireland, Taylor ends his brief coverage of Caroline’s funeral by drawing a firm historical line under her inflammatory life in declaring: ‘Thus ends the eventful history of Queen Caroline!’ (p. 446). Alongside Napoleon’s, therefore, de Staël’s death is implicitly linked to Caroline’s in signalling the welcome end to a chaotic, volatile age. Although her concept of civil liberty was based on obedience to law, de Staël’s purported presumption and revolution rhetoric is ironically presented as having posed almost as much of a threat to Britain’s peace and stability as the despotism of Napoleon himself. As Taylor does with Caroline, de Staël’s critic emphatically draws a line under her life, claiming that her popularity within a modish liberal clique in the metropolis will conveniently fade along with the death of the emperor:

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Bonaparte is dead. The cord of sympathy is snapped asunder that bound the Baroness with the circle of political fashion in London … Poor Madame de Staël is also at rest … Her ‘magnificent eyes’ can no longer enlist retailers of immortality, nor her fleurettes effect a thaw in the temperament of a Scotch professor. (p. 394)

Like the Cockney School attacks on Hunt, the sense of contrast this portrayal of de Staël presents with the humility of Lamb’s Elia is highly suggestive. Elia is posited as conservative simply by a stylistic difference to de Staël. While her reputation as a powerful libertarian is belittled as simplistic theory delivered with blithe presumption, Elia’s tentatively expressed views on domestic, non-political topics and readily confessed inadequacies neatly fit an implicit requirement for deferential writers who know their place. The presence of the lameness-enclosure motif ensures, however, that the ‘knowing of one’s place’ in ‘Witches and other Night-Fears’ proves a conversely self-empowering trait. Elia begins by developing his previous hypothesis that the period of childhood credulity and imagination equates to that of primitive civilization and superstitious belief. He questions the self-assumed authority of a modern, supposedly more enlightened age for too hastily dismissing ‘our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies … involved in their creed of witchcraft’, when ‘there is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised’ (pp. 384–5). Then, like the ‘first hint of allegory’ from the Temple’s frescoes, a pivotal moment is identified in Elia’s own evolution from childhood simplicity to adult sophistication. It occurs when his father’s imposing Stackhouse edition of the History of the Bible indoctrinates Elia with a systematic, hypothetical way of thinking in which the quashing of doubt is imperative. Recalling this loss of wonder at the ‘purity and sincerity’ of the Bible stories, hence of innocence itself, initially provokes bitter regret: ‘Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength. O, how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling!’ (p. 385). Yet this premature imposition of adult rationality is succeeded by the greater trauma of the child’s overactive imagination, thus reaffirming the previous essay’s message of moderation and balance. Elia’s rational mode of thinking subsides after he accidentally tears a page and Stackhouse is confiscated, but not before an illustration of ‘the Witch raising up Samuel’ (p. 385) has made a terrifying impression on him. The child’s imagination is itself held responsible, carrying as it does the as yet unadulterated ‘archetype’ of man’s fear of the unknown. The Stackhouse illustration merely gives shape or form to this innate condition, which society has gradually eroded until it is now manifested only in ‘sinless infancy’ (pp. 386–7). At this point, the essay’s suitability for the London’s political agenda seems clear. Terror, as an experience of the sublime, reminds civilized man of his human frailty, thereby curbing ambition and keeping him from overreaching himself. This readily translates into socio-political terms as a means of preserving the

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status quo.42 The magazine’s criticism of Madame de Staël therefore suggests just such an overreacher, one who is oblivious to her own limitations and has transgressed from her true intellectual level. Conversely, Elia’s self-confessed lameness, his susceptibility to night-fears as a child and subsequently unimaginative dreams as an adult, seems to express a deferential or ‘proper’ awareness of his limitations. In the latter confession of lameness, Elia decries his own dreams in deference to those of his literary peers. His dreams are now ‘tame and prosaic’, ‘never romantic, seldom even rural’, and feature instead a curious architectural verisimilitude of foreign cities he has never visited: I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon – their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight – a map-like distinctness of trace – and a daylight vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. – I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells – my highest Alps, – but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape, in any way whatever of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. (p. 387)

But as ever, the appearance of lameness in Elia cannot be taken at face value. The overwhelming effect of Westmoreland recalls the letter to Manning, in which Lamb’s egoistic feeling among the Lakes, of being ‘a very great man’, ultimately cannot replace the homely anonymity of London. The praise that follows for Coleridge’s inspirational architecture in Kubla Khan, as the standard against which Elia’s own dreams supposedly fall so short, is also deceptive. Above all, however, it is the unacknowledged presence of the opium-eater’s dream cities that highlights Elia’s alternative aesthetic. In the second and final instalment of the ‘Confessions’, appearing in the same issue of the London as ‘Night-Fears’, the opium-eater recalls: ‘In the early stage of my malady, the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural: and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds’ (p. 374). The opium-eater invokes, in turn, Wordsworth’s fantastic city in Book II of The Excursion to buttress the ethereal, poetic, image of his own dream cities, thereby casting – as with ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ – Elia’s ‘prosaic’, down-to-earth equivalent in the mode of parody. Opium is initially presented as an enabling stimulant rather than a disabling ‘malady’, unlike drink in Elia’s ‘Confessions’, yet here Elia has no disability other than the imagination itself. Or so Elia presents it. Since Kubla Khan also famously owes its existence to opium, Elia’s vividly realized, non-dreamlike cities describe a cleaner, purer and altogether more stable vision, free both of opium’s illusory ordering, and its debilitating psychological effects as described in the opium-eater’s October instalment.

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Ironic lameness occurs in another ostensibly unfavourable comparison, this time with ‘Barry Cornwall’ (Bryan Waller Procter), again, moreover, through the image of the domesticated city. With an amusing echo of the influence of Purchas’s Pilgrimage on Kubla Khan, the spectacular marine procession of ‘tritons’ and ‘nereids’ in Cornwall’s poem, A Dream, prompts Elia to apply his ‘poor plastic power’ to the conjuring of his own version (p. 387). At the head of this procession is Elia himself, majestically riding the waves as ‘the leading god’, but at the point of being greeted by the sea goddess Ino Leucothea, the waves start to subside until the sea turns into the ‘gentle Thames’, landing Elia ‘in the wafture of a placid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace’ (p. 387). Discussing the essay’s satirical implications, Gerald Monsman notices of this episode that the dream vision descends into reality-bound anticlimax the moment Elia approximates the sublime, egoistic isolation of his peers, De Quincey, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Monsman points out that, although ‘venerable and imposing’, Lambeth Palace – etymologically, ‘Lamb’s Haven’ – is hardly the stuff of ‘fantastic vision’, and the Thames appears as a ‘more placid version of the sacred Alph’ in Kubla Khan.43 As opposed to the transcendent or other-worldly cities in the poetic visions of his contemporaries, then, it is the familiar, domesticated city in which Elia’s place as a prose writer is established. This is achieved through the guise of a lamed imagination, a process of inversion encapsulated in the critical ambivalence of the word ‘prosaic’, denoting something both dull or uninteresting and characterized by prose language. Elia’s anticlimactic dream convinces him that ‘the degree of the soul’s creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking’, sufficient grounds to refrain thereafter from ‘that idle vein’ of poetry and ‘subside into [his] proper element of prose’ (p. 387). His subversive propriety enacts a mode of self-empowerment as a metropolitan writer, which in the process implies a critique of the visionary claims or pretensions of Lamb’s poetic peers. Lamb is thus defined but not confined by knowing his place, the prosodic and prosaic city of his home.

The Opium-Eater and the Drunkard In the third Elia essay to coincide with the opium-eater’s appearance, ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’, the dialogue involved literally dramatizes the empowering self-deprecation of Elia’s metropolitanism. As De Quincey does in the Appendix to the first edition of the opium-eater’s Confessions, Lamb warily seeks to avoid the inherent danger of self-incrimination from the confessing persona, in the preface to the August 1822 issue of the London. Under the heading ‘Re-prints of ELIA’, Elia claims that the personal experiences which inform the subject have been ‘heightened’ and ‘exaggerated’ for artistic effect (LM, 6, p. 99). This extra-

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essayistic statement is important in several ways. The heading itself is indicative of the appropriative eminence of ‘ELIA’, or its ontological capacity for appropriating other texts and selves, the name of Elia replacing that of Lamb as the author of a text which predates the former by seven years. The essay had previously appeared in two rather less liberal publications than the London, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill’s utilitarian organ, the Philanthropist ( January 1813), and Basil Montagu’s temperance compilation, Some Enquiries into the Effects of Spiritous Liquors (1814). Lamb did not even authorize the first publication, and both are clearly highly unlikely vehicles for an essay which, as Lamb explains in the preface, grew out of an earlier parody of utilitarianism and confessional literature, ‘Edax [the great eater] on Appetite’.44 In the preface, moreover, Lamb’s assertion of artistic license accompanies a complaint about the Quarterly Review’s claim that the essay’s harrowing account of the consequences of intemperance was factually true of its author. As with his angry letters to Coleridge, therefore, we find Lamb strongly reacting to an imputation of weakness, while the drunkard’s confessions represent, once again, a use of lameness on Lamb’s own, ironic terms. Finally, Lamb uses his extra-essayistic freedom in the London to attack a misreading of the essay which only occurs in the first place due to its appearance in the kinds of publication patently ill-suited to Lamb’s characteristic playfulness. The re-presentation of Lamb’s ‘Confessions’ as an Elia essay for the London makes a crucial point about how the much-used Bakhtinian notion of a dialogically unstable text might be reinterpreted in terms of authorial primacy. Despite the partial erasure of its parodic element by editorial excision in the essay’s two earlier appearances, and the high moral tone of both publications as a pressurizing political context, it is clear from Bonnie Woodbery’s reading of the text in all its incarnations that Lamb’s play with irony’s ‘dangerous figure’ cannot be entirely subdued. Woodbery concludes that ‘the ability of the fluid autobiographical self to provoke both unease and laughter in the essay’s readers is evidence of its potential to challenge and subvert a wide range of social, economic, and religious discourses and practises’. Yet in apparent contradiction of this conclusion Woodbery earlier cites Bakhtin to claim that ‘no discourse, including those of the local context, can become totalizing’: explicitly following Mark Parker’s study of the Romantic essay as a historically embedded periodical text, Lamb is credited with the ‘appropriation’ of various discourses, yet is somehow, tantalizingly, unable to ‘undermine’ them – his is merely an ‘attempt’ to do so.45 However, a resolution to the schism between the interests of authorial scholarship and periodical context, which is articulated by studies such as Parker’s and Woodbery’s, exists in the concept of metropolitanism. As suggested by the content and very fact of Lamb’s extra-essayistic preface, the appropriation of the ‘Confessions’ essay by Elia for the more sophisticated and liberal London Magazine marks the point

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at which it finds, as it were, its natural, metropolitan habitat. This impression is reinforced by the London’s publication of both De Quincey’s and Lamb’s texts, of confession and parody, the texts together exhibiting a plurality of voice in the London which is anathema to the utilitarian and temperance reformists, and characteristic also, of course, of just Elia himself. Excisions were not made for the essay’s appearance in the London because of a shared metropolitan ideology, of a liberal, self-ironizing discourse, between magazine and author. This suggests that the Bakhtinian dialogic form can itself be interpreted as an urban construct, an overriding or totalizing discourse which defines the polyphonic voice of Elia. Because the drunkard’s text operates at one level as satire, therefore, it also bears an ambivalent relationship to De Quincey’s Confessions and other such Rousseauistic texts.46 The essay’s revival under Elia’s name to coincide with the opium-eater’s publication in book form that same month serves to emphasize the essay’s teasing dubiety between confession and parody. On the one hand, there is a shared tone of moral ambivalence over the nightmarish yet pleasurable aspect of both addictions, and, as Woodbery notices, a veering between ‘self-justification and painful revelation’: on the other hand, Elia satirically uses a Benthamite simile in describing the springs of the drunkard’s will as having ‘gone down like a broken clock’, a key utilitarian virtue is ignored in the drunkard’s inability to ‘forfeit the pleasure of the moment for future happiness’, and Elia answers the ‘sturdy moralist’ who would condemn his lack of willpower by recollecting dreams of ‘purling water’, a pun on ‘purl’, a cheap beer as dangerously narcotic as opium.47 Even more so than the moral ambivalence and formal looseness of De Quincey’s, therefore, Lamb’s is a hybridized and dialogic text, essaying at once confessional and satirical, or sincere and duplicitous positions, and which, as such, includes the opium-eater among the subjects of its play. Parody is further evident in the drunkard’s sense of incapacity, which seems as if defined against the opium-eater’s peripatetic dynamism in the instalment ‘The Pleasures of Opium’. The following exemplifies the opium-eater’s contention that instead of reducing the taker to the ‘inactivity, or the torpid state of self-involution’ ascribed to Turkish users, the drug induces a superficial sociability: Some of these rambles led me to great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had doubled on my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. (LM, 4, p. 361).48

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The opium-eater roams the London streets on Saturday nights, induced to abandon the self to a sensation of absolute harmony between the aesthetic and the human. After visiting an Italian opera, where even the interval chatter of Italian women takes on a musical coherence, he contrastingly seeks out the humble leisure of the poor. Yet always he is driven onwards by an unspecified and unfulfilled yearning that makes any tangible notion of purpose or destination that is attached to his wandering (his ‘attempts to steer homewards’) seem all but irrelevant. The opium-eater’s flânerie is established through his actively losing himself, as opposed to the passivity of becoming lost, in a compellingly labyrinthine or ‘enigmatical’ city. As amply illustrated, what conversely compels in Elia’s city is a domesticated or enclosed, therefore patently circumnavigable, quality. Robin Jarvis contrasts De Quincey’s sense of the street in his Confessions with Hunt’s, the one ‘a place of alienated and alienating encounters’ which thus makes it ‘central to the experience of the Romantic city-walker’, the other a less disturbing, more pleasurable engagement, expressing a ‘good-humoured, sociable pedestrianism’ Jarvis identifies in Hunt an urban development of Celeste Langan’s Lake School rambler, Hunt’s essays providing ‘an attenuation of the Romantic ideology of freedom-through-walking’ into a ‘lighter, recreational-touristic creed’.49 Given the absence of all forms of pedestrianism in his work, it is hardly surprising that Lamb does not feature in Jarvis’s book, yet the conspicuousness of this absence in the present context provides the reason for discussing Lamb in relation to flânerie. Jarvis presents two modes of flânerie or urban pedestrianism, the dark, De Quinceyan, and the lighter, Huntian model. The humour and sociability of Lamb aligns him with Hunt, yet this is an expression of metropolitanism which in itself informs the undercutting or overwriting of De Quincey’s text by Lamb’s. Epitomized by the fireside reverie of storytelling for his dream children (discussed further in the next chapter), in contrast to the opium-eater the point of departure and return for the wandering imagination in Elia’s use of the familiar idiom is typically and appropriately the domestic enclosure. The relationship between the two texts over the respective effects of drink and opium works to highlight the features of Elia’s metropolitan form against the opium-eater’s. In elucidating the positive effects of opium by dealing with popular and scientific misconceptions, the opium-eater contrasts its effect with that of drink: wine ‘is sure to volatize and to disperse the intellectual energies, whereas opium always seems to compose what had been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted’ (LM, 4, p. 357). Elia concurs with the opium-eater that drink reduces mental capacity: My favourite occupations in times past, now cease to entertain. I can do nothing readily. Application for ever so short a time kills me. This poor abstract of my condition was penned at long intervals, with scarcely any attempt at connection of thought, which is now difficult to me. (LM, 6, pp. 120–1)

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Confessional sincerity is undercut as much, however, by Elia’s formal or essayistic subjectivity as by the sly satire against utilitarianism and evangelical temperance. The very disability lamented by the drunkard perfectly equips Elia for his particular choice of literary labour: by definition, periodical essays are relatively brief compositions, characterized by informality and desultory thoughts or ideas. A detailed description of a Correggio print, which allegorizes the drunkard’s condition, is loaded with synonyms and cognates for lameness that simultaneously evoke Lamb’s own, narrative-arresting art: being ‘fast bound’ and nailed down, stuck in the past, indulging in ‘languid enjoyment’, ‘utter imbecility’ and a ‘submission to bondage’, and being victim to the broken ‘springs of will’ and the self-defeating reflex of ‘remorse preceding action’ (p. 119). With Correggio’s fallen man languishing in the past, furthermore, time itself is frozen in the painting, an impression reinforced by a repetitious and static prose style marked by paradox and oxymoron. Pleasure counterbalances suffering, the past the present, evil, good, and delight, remorse, with a similarly static Elia gripped by the intractable and holding out ‘no hope that it should ever change’ (p. 119). A characteristic self-portrayal of lameness in ‘Mackery End, in Hertfordshire’ ( July 1821) suggests that Elia has a literally essayistic character: ‘Narrative teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events … The fluctuations of fortune in fiction – and almost in real life – have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me’ (LM, 4, p. 28). Similarly, the drunkard’s lament that his ‘broken and dispirited nature seems to sink before anything great and admirable’ (LM, 6, p. 121), works at another level to inscribe the belletristic qualities of the essayist’s ostensibly small-scale literary endeavour. Also, in the opium-eater’s hypnotic experience of the ‘chorus and elaborate harmony’ (LM, 4, p. 359) of Italian opera, an art form to which Elia notably expresses a strong aversion in ‘A Chapter on Ears’ (March 1821), the chaotic features of his past life appear arranged into a coherent and meaningful narrative divested of all superfluous matter. The opium-eater could indeed be referring to Elia in mentioning a friend for whom ‘a succession of musical sounds’ is as indecipherable as ‘a collection of Arabic characters’ (p. 359). In ‘A Chapter on Ears’ Elia is conversely tortured beyond endurance by being forced to ‘thrid the maze, like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon hieroglyphics’, and recalls having ‘rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not obliged to follow… [an] unpretending assemblage of honest, common-life sounds’ (LM, 3, p. 264). The constantly ‘harassing conceit of incapacity’ (LM, 6, p. 120) that furthermore confines the drunkard to the house inverts the opium-eater’s apparently liberating habit, while it deploys the interrelated motifs of lameness and enclosure.50 The literary implications of the drunkard’s wretched condition therefore replicate those of Elia’s unimaginative dreams in ‘Night-Fears’, as gestures of inferiority that belie or ironically convert into an affirmation of the essayist’s art.

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Unlike the opium-eater, therefore, Elia enjoys the streets for their absence of narrative potential, for the randomness and dissonance of the crowd. Conversely, the peripatetic existence brought about by the opium-eater’s addiction is, in turn, commensurate with a rambling narrative featuring associative images of ‘contrast and counterpoint’.51 In other words, De Quincey’s choice of narrative style ironically mirrors opium’s dictation of the narrator’s condition as flâneur. Opium addiction creates flânerie by removing the sense of the familiar or knowable which is central to Elia’s metropolitan world. It prevents the opium-eater from building relationships with any of the people he encounters and is ultimately responsible for distancing him from the marginalized poor, with whom opium yet compels self-identification. Yet for all its differences from De Quincey’s text, Lamb’s writing of the city can also be understood in terms of the flâneur. If the drunkard’s condition is linked to essay-writing by desultory thought processes, so too is flânerie. Certainly, the key terms with which Claire De Obaldia describes the dynamic of the essay could almost as accurately refer to the random wanderings of flânerie: The essay is an essentially ambulatory and fragmentary prose form. Its direction and pace, the tracks it chooses to follow, can be changed at will; hence its fragmentary or ‘paratactic’ structure. Rather than progressing in a linear and planned fashion, the essay develops around a number of topics which offer themselves along the way. And this sauntering from one topic to the next together with the way in which each topic is informally ‘tried out’ suggests a tentativeness, in short a randomness … [italics added]52

Although as essayist Lamb has the freedom to ‘saunter’ from one topic to another, without having to make the relationship between them immediately apparent, this discursiveness never causes him to become ‘lost’ in terms of argument. The mode of argument in Elia’s sauntering text often proceeds by analogy: to explicate a notion of childhood credulity in ‘Night-Fears’, for example, the reader is asked to parallel this state with that of primitive, superstitious society. The focus of ‘Old China’ moves from a close examination of the artefact, to an expansive, anecdotal association of chinaware with Elia’s other material acquirements, before returning to the domestic item of departure, the tea cup. This structural or narrative dynamic, in which the ostensible subject, often fittingly of a domestic nature, occasions a sort of epistemological ramble and configures an absorbingly multiplicitous yet ultimately knowable, city. Even De Quincey’s experimental narrative of contrast and counterpoint cannot approximate the discursive flexibility and dexterity within, and of course between, the Elia essays. Such essayistic flânerie, moreover, involves a detachment of tone as well as narrative construction, epitomized by the ambivalence between sincerity and satire in the ‘Confessions’, towards the end of which Elia teasingly reflects, ‘I know

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not whether I shall be laughed at, or heard seriously’ (LM, 6, p. 121). In this respect it is Lamb rather than De Quincey who anticipates Baudelaire: in the ‘petits poèmes en prose’ in Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire conceives a very similar idea, of a quintessentially urban prose form in which the experience of the city is stylistically reflected in the text’s rhythms and tonal shifts.53 However, beyond the drunkard’s confessions, the difference between Lamb’s writing of the city and De Quincey’s inheres in content as much as form, as the detachment of flânerie is belied in Elia by figures of companionship or local attachment, particularly in recurrent examples like Bridget and John Elia, Bigod and G. D. The dual motif informing Elia’s version of flânerie is, of course, particularly pronounced in ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’, an essay for which ‘lameness and enclosure’ might comprise an alternative title. The torpor brought on by a habit begun as a means to ease social awkwardness, merely replaces one kind of lameness – a stammer, or ‘natural nervous impediment in speech’ (p. 118) – with another. Indeed, it is the essay’s elaborate, melodramatic emphasis on lameness and enclosure that makes the suggestion of a self-empowering metropolitan subtext so strong. As the drunkard’s confessions suggest, the dual motifs revolve in the essays as a whole around the ambivalent, ‘guilty pleasure’ figure of the consumer. Elia’s description of the Corregio print uses a telling phrase, ‘Sybaritic effeminacy’, or a man emasculated by an inordinate attachment to comfort, pleasure and luxury. Symbols of such a predilection abound in the essays: sundials, fountains, statues, old china, books, playing cards and, of course, fine art prints. Elia’s enjoyment of such items approaches the drunkard’s state of dependency. He cannot imagine living among the Quakers in ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ due to being ‘all over sophisticated – with humours, fancies, craving hourly sympathy’: he simply ‘must have’ all the comforts of bourgeois urban living, ‘books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whimwhams …’ (LM, 4, p. 155). Elia’s weakness for such artefacts represents a form of lameness that tends, naturally, to situate him within the domestic enclosure. Such domesticity in turn implies the effeminacy Elia himself attributes to his condition. His admission that he has an ‘almost feminine partiality for old china’ (LM, 7, p. 269), in Jane Aaron’s analysis, ‘declares at once his enjoyment of the particularities of quotidian domesticity, and his acknowledgement of the feminine traits in himself revealed by that partiality’.54 The fireside games of ‘sick whist’ in ‘Mrs Battle’s Opinions on Whist’ and the bed-ridden hypochondriac in ‘The Convalescent’ further suggest an emasculated character. Still more revealing is the lame ‘childangel’ in the essay of that name. Influenced by Thomas Moore’s Loves of the Angels, Elia’s child-angel is Ge-Urania (meaning, literally, ‘earth’ and ‘heaven’), a visionary immortal whose ‘lame gait’ and destiny ‘to know weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human imbecility’ keeps him earth-bound (LM, 7, p.

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678). Lameness, both literal and figurative, similarly anchors the Elian figure’s flights of fancy to the familiar, realist setting of the metropolitan enclosure. Other instances of lameness occur in Elia’s metaphoric limp in ‘My Relations’, his ‘lame-footed’ boyhood in ‘Dream-Children: A Reverie’, where also his brother John is crippled, then loses a leg, the legless Elgin Marble beggar in ‘The Decay of Beggars’, and, of related interest, Elia’s tumble in the street in ‘The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers’. Discussed further in Chapter 4, Elia’s moment here of spectacular self-humiliation implicitly debunks the essential aloofness or sense of superiority in the flâneur’s observatory detachment, facile mobility and sublime ego. The definitive model, Charles Baudelaire, describes this latter condition of flânerie through his persona, Constantin Guys, as being ‘an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting’.55 For Elia, however, since the inverted ego is a natural state of selfhood there is no need to wander in search of it. Elia is more likely to ‘lose [him]self in other men’s minds’ within the cloistered enclosure of a library, reading his beloved books: ‘When I am not walking, I am reading’, as he tells us. The essays, in particular ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ and ‘The Two Races of Men’, where Elia bemoans Comberbatch’s (Coleridge’s) plundering of his library, suggest he is mostly occupied with the latter. Comberbatch freely comes and goes from Elia’s house, leaving his perplexed host to ruefully brood on the gap-ridden bookshelves. Evidenced also in ‘The Convalescent’, here Elia playfully deflates what Aaron identifies as ‘the hypochondriac type’,56 one for whom the domestic enclosure incubates a finicky, unhealthily selfabsorbed tendency into monstrous proportions. Elia thus develops Boswellian hypochondria from a malady or illness requiring the remedy of the metropolis, to a common trait or familiar foible, hence, like that of imperfect sympathies, a mode of behaviour to be affectionately humoured if not cherished as integral to metropolitan life. However, like the competitive strain of egoism which Elia also attacks, rather than pointing to the anonymity of the crowd for a solution, the wry auto-critique enacted in these essays of enclosure suggests that such tyrannous behaviour needs to be confronted by the perpetrator himself. Not for Elia, therefore, the flâneur’s un-self-awareness and superior sense of ‘dissatisfaction’ with domestic life.57 Elia may share the ‘bent for disguises and masking’, but in the process of exalting the metropolitan enclosure as an emancipatory space instead of seeking such freedom outside of it.

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A Semi-Detached Home If, as Julian Wolfreys proposes, London is ‘a city of losses, disappearances, obscured identities, dreariness, and dream-like states’ for the homeless opiumeater,58 then clearly the opposite is true of the home-loving Elia and his prosaic dreams. Through a domestic variation on flânerie Elia offers a re-stabilized sense of the metropolis, against the instability not only of the opium-eater’s metropolitan vision, but equally, that of history itself. Metropolitan figures like clerks and old benchers function, moreover, as Elian types in a city where lameness and enclosure form the very bases of emancipation. One final illustration of this paradoxical aesthetic is required in order to establish its full ontological implications. In ‘The Superannuated Man’ (May 1825) Elia celebrates retiring from the ‘irksome confinement’ of his trading-house employment (LM, n.s. 1, p. 67). Yet when finally liberated from his desk-job, with time and the pleasures of flânerie seemingly endless, Elia suffers a sense of disorientation: What is become of Fish-street Hill? Where is Fenchurch-street? Stones of old Mincing-lane which I have worn with my daily pilgrimage for six and thirty years, to the footsteps of what toilworn clerk are your everlasting flints now vocal? I indent the gayer flags of Pall Mall. It is ’Change time, and I am strangely among the Elgin marbles. It was no hyperbole when I ventured to compare the change in my condition to a passing into another world. Time stands still in a manner to me. I have lost all distinction of season. I do not know the day of the week, or of the month. Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday … The genius of each day was upon me distinctly during the whole of it, affecting my appetite, spirits, &c. (pp. 72–3)

Of his working life, Elia recalls feeling estranged from London on his Sundays off because of the absence on that day of its commercial attractions. For all the ‘ pleasure’ he derives from watching ‘the poor drudges whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring’ (p. 73), there is a sense of loss, and being lost, due to the devaluation of his leisure time. The tranquillity of Sundays and retirement are hence anathema to Elia because they efface the features of commerce and pressurized time that characterize the city of his home. Likewise, it is because they themselves are bounded by the bustling metropolis that the peaceful, historical enclosures of the South-Sea House and the Temple are inspirational. For all the motifs of domestic anchorage, however, Elia’s corporeality within the city is just as illusory as the flâneur’s. Paralleling Charles’s sense of he and Mary being ‘marked’, and the overall, paradoxical significance of the peripheral in Lamb’s work, his literary incarnation as Elia requires a marginal relation to the crowd. As the discussion of metropolitan emancipation in the next chapter demonstrates, the reality effect of Elia’s dual identity in the city as essayist and accounting clerk is offset by extra-essayistic invocations of fictive licence which

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never allow that effect to restrict the exploration and appropriation of different selves. Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, in other words, or Poe’s elusive figure as discussed in the Conclusion, the pervasive and phantasmal Elia is ‘the man of the crowd as opposed to the man in the crowd’.59 To this effect, Elia’s expression of love for ‘all the glittering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen’ (LM, n.s. 1, p. 67), implies at once complicity with, and critique of, the opiate of metropolitan consumerism. It is significant that Elia is never seen to purchase or even touch any of these goods: they remain as spectacular images, with Lamb’s man of the crowd maintaining the appropriate, emancipatory, distance. ‘The Superannuated Man’ introduces the next chapter in two ways. Firstly, the identity of the eponymous figure is itself indeterminate or questionable. Using a nom de plume, ‘J—s D—n’, fittingly defined by absence as much as presence and in the same magazine as the phantasmal Elia, Lamb’s distinctly Elian attempt at a post-Elian text is not ‘claimed’ by the genuine article until its appearance in Last Essays in 1833. As the reading of another two essays featuring metropolitan enclosure will show, this is very much the kind of identity play with which Elia himself is most at home. Secondly, a country idyll in Hertfordshire is recollected as the birthplace to which the superannuated man previously returned on summer vacations, to escape the drudgery from which he now retires. Yet in the following chapter such rural sanctuary is undermined in the three essays in which it features by uncharacteristically disturbing interpretations of lameness and enclosure. Emphasizing London’s liberal homeliness, the essays featuring an old country house revisited, Mackery End and, especially, the mansion at Blakesmoor, offer instead a quite unhomely form of enclosure. Elia’s love of the city thus inverts the pathological urbanism of the opium-eater, in that it is the world outside the metropolis that is disturbing, and the metropolis itself a safe haven.

3 THE GREAT WEN AND THE RURAL GOTHIC

It should seem to me, from my (trivial) observations, that noblemen and gentlemen have almost abandon’d the country … and that dowagers have gone away … and that as that encreasing Wen, the metropolis, must be fed the body will gradually decay … Many landowners, especially among the politically active magnates, spend only a modest amount of time on their estates, and in this respect were much more urban in character … than is commonly allowed. John Byng, Torrington Diaries (1789)1

The MP John Byng’s reference to the metropolis as ‘that encreasing Wen’ occurs over thirty years before the more famous ‘Great Wen’ of Cobbett’s Political Register essays of 1822–6, which were collected as Rural Rides in 1830. This chronology reminds us that writers of Lamb’s generation grew up and lived at a time of intense debate over London’s growing socio-economic and cultural influence, over the country as a whole and rural life in particular. Raymond Williams traces usage of the term ‘wen’ for describing London’s phenomenal growth as far back as 1783, and, moreover, proposes that it was a politically expedient term, rather than an accurate reflection of the capital’s relationship to the country. Williams argues that, far from being aberrant, what the expansion of London actually indicated was the true condition and development of the country as a whole. If it was seen as monstrous, or as a diseased growth, this had logically to be traced back to the whole social order. But of course it was easier to denounce the consequences and ignore, or go on idealizing, the general condition.2

Nevertheless, at the end of the nineteenth century the fact of London’s accelerated expansion in the early decades could still be imaged in terms of monstrosity, as Conan Doyle’s novel Beyond the City indicates: ‘When the Metropolis was still quite a distant thing … in the days when the century was young’, recalls the narrator, there were cottages scattered amongst ‘rolling country-side’ before ‘the City had thrown out a long brick-feeler here and there, curving, extending, and coalescing, until at last the little cottages had been gripped round by these red tentacles, and had been absorbed …’.3 It is this cultural currency, of the monstrous – 87 –

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or otherwise malignant metropolis as an imaginative response to something real enough to provoke it rather than its historical accuracy, with which we are concerned. In the midst of Lamb’s literary orbit there is of course Wordsworth and his opposition to metropolitan culture, as expressed in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. In declaring the motivating force behind the poems to be a conviction that ‘the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants’, Wordsworth cites among the chief causes of such a dulling of the discriminating power of sensibility, ‘the increasing accumulation of men in cities’.4 It is, however, from the former, personally more remote and unlikely source of the Great Wen which, in this instance, we find an imaginative resonance in Elia. Lamb’s Elia is contemporary with Cobbett’s rides, while the childhood experiences alluded to at Mackery End and Blakesware predate Byng’s diaries by a mere eight or nine years. Authors as diverse as Lamb and Cobbett could only be linked, perhaps, by the pervasive issue that was metropolitanism in the early nineteenth century, as variously manifested in the prevalence of periodicals, the reactionary aspect of the Lake School and the image of the Great Wen. It will be argued that Elia’s own ‘rural rides’, from the metropolis to the neglected country house with which his family is connected, act as a parable of rural decay as imaged in Byng’s and Cobbett’s journalistic accounts. Byng uses the word ‘decay’ to describe the malignant effect of the Wen on the ‘body’ of traditional country life, and it is decay that also characterizes both the country house and the human body enclosed within it in the essays ‘Dream-Children: A Reverie’ and ‘Blakesmoor, in H—shire’. Along with that of incarceration, the motif of decay is articulated through Lamb’s recourse to what was by the 1820s the already well-worn trope of the Gothic. As a self-reflexive figure of the periodical, London Magazine, text, therefore, Elia enacts a more benign, commercial appropriation of the country by the city. This is because the ‘country house’ essays form a city-versus-country dichotomy with the ‘urban enclosure’ ones discussed in this and the previous chapter. In the present chapter a healthful, emancipative identity is established in a short trip up the Thames to the inspiring enclosure of Oxford University, and is confirmed back in London at Christ’s Hospital, whilst the supposed escape into the country in the essays featuring Mackery End and, especially, Blakesmoor, is marked instead by the Gothic staples of incarceration and decay.

Vacation and Emancipation In ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, from October 1821, the next essay to appear after ‘Recollections of the South-Sea House’, Elia’s dual metropolitan identity as clerk and essayist is established. The vacation at Oxford is then used to rehearse the

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emancipation possible within that identity, both through Elia’s own example and that of his scholarly friend, ‘G. D.’, the barely fictionalized surrogate for the scholar and journalist George Dyer. But at a further, textual level this selfhood is enacted by subsequently excised footnotes and passages, plus an exposition of Elia’s emancipatory ethos in the correspondence pages of the London. A detailed analysis of the essay and the ostensibly superfluous, paratextual or extra-essayistic material which originally helped both to comprise and complement the text, is therefore necessary. Oxford’s geographical connection with London via the Thames is apposite to the essay’s sense of the vacation as an incomplete escape from the metropolis. The periodical (con)text once more supplements the meaning of the Elian text, with Elia’s perception of Oxford as a second home being foreshadowed in Hazlitt’s ‘Table Talk’ essay, ‘On the Conversation of Authors’, in the previous issue of the London: Authors may, in some sense, be looked upon as foreigners, who are not naturalized even in their native soil. L— once came down into the country to see us. He was ‘like the most capricious poet Ovid among the Goths.’ The country people thought him an oddity, and did not understand his jokes. It would be strange if they had; for he did not make any, while he staid. But when we crossed the country to Oxford, then he spoke a little. He and the old colleges were hail-fellow well met; and in the quadrangles, he ‘walked gowned’. (LM, 2, p. 261)

The first observation highlights Lamb’s shifting and shuffling of the facts of Elia’s existence, a ludic reflex belying the essays’ previously discussed motifs of domestic anchorage. The enclosure’s capacity for inspiring identity-play, furthermore, is imaged in Lamb’s sudden change of mood and reversion to performance, described ironically with a quotation from Lamb’s sonnet ‘Written at Cambridge’. Lamb’s strangely subdued behaviour when taken out of his London home, temporarily losing his characteristic humour yet becoming more himself again when in a proximate location, tallies with the unsettling effect on Elia of the rural enclosures of Mackery End and Blakesmoor. Prior to the Oxford essay, Elia’s playful treatment of identity in the metropolitan enclosure is introduced at the end of the ‘South-Sea House’, with an admission that the ‘fantastic-insubstantial’ clerks owe more to the spirit than the factuality of history. Echoing the use of Ossianic fabrication earlier, the essay appropriately draws to a close with the phrase ‘solemn mockery’, from Ireland’s Shakespeare forgery, Vortigern. The educable ‘London reader’ is thus established, in the interrelated sense of the ‘London’ magazine and the city that inspires and produces it. This preoccupied surburbanite, ‘fooled … to the top of his bent’ in the ‘South-Sea House’ (LM, 2, p. 146), has his educative role further developed at the start of the Oxford essay. Now commensurately cast as a fastidious ‘connoisseur’ of periodical authorship, the reader demands to know just ‘who is

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Elia?’ (LM, 2, p. 365). John Nabholtz describes this reader-type as one ‘primarily interested in the external identity and reputation of the artist, not in the imaginative values of the product before him’.5 According to such a reading, Elia’s own numerous admissions of a materialistic predilection serve, presumably, to subtly manoeuvre such a reader towards a more abstract and humanistic engagement with the text and the city. Yet Elia’s relation to consumerism is surely more complex, as suggested by an ambivalent, hedged response to the demanding reader. First, supposing that the reader has identified him on the evidence of the first essay as being a desk-clerk, Elia mocks this imposed identity as belonging to ‘one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill’ (p. 365). However, Elia then acknowledges that much of his day is indeed taken up with clerking, before attempting to disguise the banal reality of his workaday life with artistic pretension: It is my humour, my fancy – in the forepart of the day, when the mind of your man of letters requires some relaxation … to while away some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. (p. 365)

This yoking together of consumerist labour with creative endeavour, and a disenfranchised with an ‘enfranchised’ self, is continued at length: In the first place * * * and then it sends you home with such increased appetite to your books * * * * * not to say, that your outside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays – so that the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author. The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among the cart-rucks of figures and cyphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation. – It feels its promotion. * * * * * So that you see, upon the whole, the literary dignity of Elia is very little, if at all, compromised in the condescension. (p. 365)

In typically auto-critical style, Elia undermines his own efforts at obviating dayjob ignominy with asterisked omissions that invite the reader’s participation in creating the text’s meaning. The comical image for arguing a complementary relationship between clerking and essay-writing, of a plodding cart-horse transformed into a prancing show-horse, has the same effect. This teasing, playful response to the connoisseur’s attempt at fixing his identity acknowledges an inescapable involvement in commodity production, through, as it were, the two ‘breeds’ – clerking and essay-writing – of the one, metropolitan ‘horse’. As indicated by the recurring figure of the gourmand, Elia is not a puritan opposed to materialistic pleasure but rather the denial of a higher, imaginative pleasure by the ‘darkness of sense and materiality’ (LM, 4, p. 284), or a reductive empiricism.

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Effectively a statement of this ethos, Elia uses his Oxford vacation to perform various varsity roles, thus suggesting the importance of emancipative play within the material, metropolitan world. The reduction in religious holidays since Elia’s childhood at Christ’s Hospital emphasizes the importance of the vacation as one of the few remaining ‘sprinklings of freedom’ (LM, 2, p. 365) available for such moments of self-indulgence. Couched in characteristically tentative and deferential terms, Elia abortively criticizes the modernizing Church for deciding that these holy-days had become obsolete: Only in a custom of such long standing, methinks, if their Holinesses the Bishops had, in decency, been first sounded – but I am wading out of my depths. I am not the man to decide the limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority. (p. 366)

Shifting the focus of the essay from loss to compensation, and the workaday to the transcendental, Elia expediently invokes the same empirical identity he had played with at the beginning: ‘I am plain Elia – no Selden, nor Archbishop Usher – though at present in the thick of their books, here in the heart of learning, under the shadow of the mighty Bodley’ (p. 366). Appropriately enough, therefore, Elia sets up the passage of self-emancipation that follows by catching himself behaving out of character, and remembering his place. Pre-emphasized thus, the freedom inspired by Oxford’s enclosure follows, with Elia able to assume whichever academic identity he chooses, from the humblest to the grandest: I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To such a one as myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a few idle weeks at, as one or other of the Universities. Their vacation, too, at this time of the year, falls in so pat with ours. Here I can take my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree or standing I please. I seem admitted ad eundem. I fetch up past opportunities. I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that it rings for me. In moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peacock vein rises, I strut a Gentleman Commoner. (p. 366)

Figuring abstract learning in terms of material consumption, Elia compensates for the educational malnourishment of his prospects in the city by sampling the various roles of the academic institution of which he has been ‘defrauded’. This re-enacts the reader-fooling mode of emancipation Elia practises when in the city, in the South-Sea House. Like the metaphorically short-sighted reader hoaxed by Elia’s spurious historian, the ‘dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers in spectacles’, who ‘drop a bow or curtsey’ when Elia passes, are taken in by his ‘Master of Arts’ act (p. 366). Moreover, the dubious veracity of the vacation itself challenges restrictive notions of identity, due to the displaced echo of Lamb’s poem ‘Written at Cambridge’. In the essay’s London text an apparently authenticating note at the end of the essay states: ‘August 5, 1820. From my rooms facing the Bodleian’ (p. 369).

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Yet in the Examiner of 15 August the previous year, Lamb’s sonnet situates similar notions of self-transference and quasi-belonging under the titular inspiration of Cambridge. Although, or perhaps because, the speaker here is ‘[N]ot train’d in Academic bowers’, he is able to ‘fancy, wandering ‘mid thy towers, / Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap’, as the strength of the delusion increases: ‘My brow seems tightening with the Doctor’s cap, / And I walk gowned; feel unusual powers’.6 Serving to illustrate the slippery relationship between Lamb and his literary personae, Hazlitt’s ‘Table Talk’ essay depicts Lamb, like Elia, walking gowned instead at Oxford. For the phantasmal Elia therefore, an ironic embodiment of Hazlitt’s detached author, the Oxford vacation seems less a literal event than an abstraction for Elia’s reader-educating triumph over material circumstances. Accordingly, he has a peripheral relationship to Oxford, an institution from which Elia’s very exclusion in the ‘real’ world occasions the compensation of his spiritual adoption. In the deserted halls, the portrait of a benefactor, ‘(that should have been ours)’, seems to Elia ‘to smile upon their over-looked beadsman, and to adopt [him] for their own’ (p. 366). Moving deeper into Oxford’s enclosure, other’s identities are marked by upward mobility in Elia’s compensatory imagination. Walking through vast kitchens which once fed Chaucer, this author’s ‘meanest minister’ becomes ‘hallowed’, and his ‘Cook goes forth a Manciple’ (p. 366). At this point, however, the focus shifts again, from enjoyment of the spiritual consolations drawn forth by Oxford’s antiquity, to dramatized reflection on the anomalous nature of such attraction: Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing, art every thing! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity – then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou called’st it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejeune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being every thing! the past is every thing, being nothing! (p. 366)

Elia’s own love of antiquity implies the anomaly that his idolatry coexists with an awareness of the delusion involved. Indeed, Elia seems more like the complete Janus, combining the one face of innocence and the other of experience, an impression mirrored by the paradoxical state of the Bodleian and other such libraries as ‘repositories of mouldering learning’ filled with old ‘moth-scented’ books, yet as ‘fragrant as the first bloom of those sciental apples which grew amid the happy orchard’ (pp. 366–7). Antiquity therefore offers a paradigm for Elia’s elusive selfhood, which is personified as an ontological phantom even to itself; hence, like Elia, having no fixable identity and belonging nowhere. The phantasmal body is refigured, first in the writers’ book-bound ‘souls’, and later in the

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absent-mindedness of Elia’s scholarly friend G. D.: the former ‘reposing’ in the library ‘as if in some dormitory or middle state’ (p. 367) – or, present in spirit but not body – and by inversion G. D.’s body being present but his mind elsewhere. Furthermore, implicit in Elia’s contentment with the illusion of ‘inhal[ing] learning’, and desiring not to ‘profane’ the books or ‘disturb the elder repose of MSS’ by handling them (p. 367), is the related sanctification of imaginative literature. Yet in keeping with the equal prominence of consumerism in Elia, print culture ironically plays a vital role in preserving this transcendent quality. A curiously fixed, rigid notion of the literary text is implied in Elia’s unwillingness to let the ‘variae lectiones’, or different manuscript versionings ‘disturb and unsettle [his] faith’ (p. 367). At this point in the London essay, but subsequently cut from the collected text, a footnote emphasizing Elia’s position begins: ‘There is something repugnant to me, at any time, in written hand. The text never seems determinate. Print settles it’ (p. 367). On seeing the original manuscript of Milton’s Lycidas and other, minor poems, Elia resents being made privy to the perspiration behind the inspiration and the breaking down of the organic, whole beauty of the poem into its ugly, constitutive parts: How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! Interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspirations were made up of parts, and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent! (p. 367)

However, although the very qualities of indeterminacy and impermanence which are imperative to Elia’s free identity are opposed to the textual stability he demands, there is no contradiction involved. Both notions advance a sort of vacation-ethos liberation from material conditions: the one through an autonomous self free of social constraint, and the other by admitting of only the genius and not the labour in the production of great art, a denial achieved by the illusionism of print. Indeed, further passages edited out for the essay’s collected version, plus the debate over G. D.’s characterization that the essay instigates in the London’s correspondence pages, suggest that print ‘settles’ things only where the essentially homogenizing book is concerned. In the dialogic and heterogeneous periodical text, Lamb exploits print’s capacity, in one sense, to unsettle, with an extra-essayistic, emancipatory self to which the above footnote testifies. The essay’s London text ensures that the function of G. D.’s character is itself difficult to pin down. On the one hand it presents an affectionate caricature of George Dyer, the philanthropic but scatterbrained scholar immortalized also by the recollections of Crabb Robinson, Hunt, Hazlitt and Talfourd, as well as in Lamb’s letters and essays.7 In what represents a tension between different roles, however, G. D. also suggests a valorized exemplar of Elia’s world view. Elia warns the reader not to be short-sighted and judge G. D. by appearances, as the far-

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sighted or preoccupied state of mind with which G. D. stumbles around in the immediate material world, suggests the philanthropic nature of his work.8 Also, like Elia, G. D.’s relation to the Oxbridge institution is that of an outsider, an ambiguous presence sealed by a controversial investigation of the two Universities9 which is regarded as ‘impertinent’ and ‘unreverend’ by complacent, fat-cat principals who are ‘contented to suck the milky fountains of their Alma Maters’ (p. 367). Particularly at home in such quiet, learning-steeped enclosures as the Bodleian, G. D.’s propensity for transcending his immediate environment is more dramatic, more committed, even than Elia’s, thus making him an invaluable asset, it seems, in educating the materialistic reader. The essay ends with Elia placing the reader safely in G. D.’s hands to effect the final transformation: enthusiastically guiding the reader around the halls and colleges, G. D. appears to the reader as an incarnation of Bunyan’s ‘Interpreter at the House Beautiful’ (p. 369). Such indeed is how Nabholtz sees the ending, with G. D. assisting Elia to engineer a radical ‘redirection and transformation’ of the reader: ‘In the final two paragraphs G. D.’s world triumphantly asserts itself ’, by pointing the way to ‘secular salvation, the expansion of one’s humanity that the imaginative response to the past through literature provides’.10 Nabholtz makes it clear that his reading is confined to the text appearing in the Essays of Elia, and as such it represents an illuminating study. Yet in the London text, G. D.’s figure is more problematic, or harder to reduce to a consistent ethical function. Because he is introduced as the kind of meticulous scholar to whom Elia gladly leaves the study of old manuscripts, G. D.’s abhorrence of manuscripts in the excised footnote suggests a quite different engagement with the literary text. The intensity of G. D.’s studying makes it seem to Elia as he had ‘grown almost into a book’ (p. 367), hence, presumably, best left unopened – unlike the texts G. D. himself disturbs. But Elia does, of course, ‘open up’ G. D. in the London version, thus causing this figure to articulate the very elusiveness the essay espouses. Another subsequently deleted footnote adds to the impression of G. D.’s problematic role within the essay. This time it is supposedly written by a mutual friend, ‘not by Elia’, responding to Elia’s assertion that G. D.’s aura of innocence shields him from ‘violence or injustice’: ‘But you will acknowledge that the charming unsuspectingness of our friend has sometimes laid him open to attacks, which, though savouring (we hope) more of waggery than malice … might, we think, much better have been omitted’ (p. 367). Under the guise of censoring such cruelty one such ‘silly joke’ is divulged, involving ‘L.’ fooling G. D. into telling everyone that Lord Castlereagh had confessed to being the ‘author of Waverley’ (p. 367). The play of identities here establishes a peer group for G. D.: Elia, L. (who will return in a more prominent role in the ‘Christ’s Hospital’ essay), and the mysterious footnote-writer himself. Elia uses these mock, and

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mocking, witnesses to mythologize G. D.’s eccentricity, writing it in the process into the famous ‘Waverley’ issue of authorial identity. This adds to the derisive tone established in the main text by an anecdote about G. D. visiting a friend’s house having completely forgotten he had called there only a few hours earlier. The omitted text therefore enables G. D. to outgrow the paradigmatic function of types like the South-Sea clerks and the old benchers. Elia himself seems undecided as to how to treat his friend, both cautioning the reader against and encouraging him into judging G. D. according to his unpromising appearance. An affectionate but patronizing attitude is evoked, with G. D.’s gullibility over L.’s joke offering a comic example of how not to approach the slippery world of literary identity within which Elia thrives. G. D.’s own slippery identity in the London text is also conveyed by an excised passage, in which his downtrodden fate is traced to his time as an assistant teacher, receiving only half the wages he was entitled to from a ‘knavish, fanatic schoolmaster’ (p. 368). G. D.’s unassuming nature, and equally ‘inobtrusive’, anachronistic writing, hopelessly out of step with a brash, faddish, commercial world, renders him a pathetic, and again marginalized figure: his intimate scraps of poetry are ‘little tributes and offerings, left behind him, upon tables and window-seats, at parting from friends’ houses; and from all the inns of hospitality, where he has been courteously (or but tolerably) received in his pilgrimage’ (p. 368). His anonymous existence involves drudging at low rates for unappreciating booksellers, – wasting his fine erudition in silent corrections of the classics, and in those unostentatious but solid services to learning, which commonly fall to the lot of laborious scholars, who have not the art to sell themselves to the best advantage. (p 368)

Unlike G. D., therefore, Elia’s own anachronistic and self-deprecating essays patently do succeed in selling his character to the best advantage. As the first two Elia essays amply demonstrate, and subsequent ones such as ‘Witches and other Night-Fears’, ‘The Old and the New Schoolmaster’ and ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ confirm, Elia turns anachronism and self-deprecation quite literally into an art. G. D.’s academic drudgery at Oxford furthermore inverts Elia’s liberating vacation at the same place, thus suggesting G. D. more as an enslaved than emancipated figure. In the simplified, collected version of the essay, then, G. D.’s peripatetic figure is altogether more optimistic, as the brief final paragraph emphasizes, where the two texts re-converge. Here, a ‘delightful’, pastoralized G. D. appears ‘at his best’ and happiest when at the Oxbridge enclosure which shunned him; the ‘Cam and the Isis’ are to him “better than all the waters of Damascus”’, and ‘On the Muses’ hill he is happy, and good, as one of the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains’ (pp. 368–9). The removal of certain footnotes and passages therefore ‘confines’

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G. D., in a sense, to the paradigmatic identity observed by Nabholtz. Print, in the essay’s book version, does indeed ‘settle it’ where the matter of G. D.’s meaning is concerned. Conversely, in the extra-essayistic London text, in which G. D.’s unfortunate personal history is divulged and even his friends’ attitude is ambivalent, he emerges as a more complex, problematic figure. Championed as a philanthropist, laughed at as an unwitting fool, and sentimentalized as a pathetic, bookish loner, ill equipped for the harsh commercial world to which Elia’s own ostensibly lamed character is so well adapted, G. D.’s ambivalent periodical rendering defies the fixed identity of a didactic interpretation. Finally, the London text configures the essay’s valorization of the emancipatory self through the correspondence pages, where the issue of G. D.’s relationship to George Dyer is debated. In ‘The Lion’s Head’ for December 1820 a complaint from ‘W. K.’, about the essay’s possibly incriminating ridicule of Dyer, at first glance seems to draw an admission of culpability. The complaint is fittingly issued by someone (possibly Dyer himself ) obscuring his own identity, and poses a challenge to the liberties taken by Elia with the identity of both himself and others. In response the later-excised passage about G. D.’s exploitation by the schoolmaster is conceded to have been ‘an imperfect remembrance of some story he heard long ago, and which, happening to tally with his argument, he set down too hastily to the account of G. D.’ (LM, 2, p. 596). Yet the response is written not in Lamb’s but Elia’s name, and George Dyer is not mentioned, only the ‘virtual’ name of G. D. In the same way that Elia mocks G. D.’s credulity whilst affecting to censure mockery, therefore, the typically double-voiced Lamb retains Elia’s fictive licence under the guise of curtailing it. Such extra-essayistic debate over G. D.’s identity, whether to read his character as incriminating biography, safely detached fiction or something teasingly between the two, illustrates the overall dialogic nature of the periodical text which Lamb appropriates. This is a textual instability that book publication necessarily obviates. Because Lamb remains in the guise of his persona for paratextual discourse, thus leaving his correspondent in futile dispute with an unaccountable ghost, Elia achieves the ultimate act of emancipation, by ironically transcending the ‘enclosure’ of the Oxford essay itself.

A Country Boy in the City As if attempting to outdo the emancipatory antics of his previous appearance, in the next issue of the London in November 1820 Elia contrives liberation from the self itself. ‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’ opens with the claim that Elia’s account will supply the harsh realities at the school omitted from the ‘magnificent eulogy’ (LM, 2, p. 483) of ‘Mr. Lamb’s’ ‘Recollections of Christ’s Hospital’, as it appears in the Works of 1818. Elia’s play of identities this time

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involves appropriation from Coleridge’s childhood to establish an antithetical rural identity to ‘Mr. Lamb’s’ urban one. This affective combination of autobiographical testimony with a country-versus-city dichotomization is used again when Elia ‘reclaims’ Lamb’s London nativity in ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’. This in turn results in another example of extra-essayistic dialogue in ‘The Lion’s Head’, again involving the fictive, emancipatory self pitted against a reductive reader. As for Christ’s Hospital itself, the shifting relationship between initially opposing perspectives implicitly challenges the notion of a fixed identity which informs efforts to reform the school. Criticism of Elia tends, as I have argued, to interpret Lamb’s playfulness over identity in essentially negative terms, either of the compromise or loss of a substantive biographical self and authorial credibility, or an uncompromising denial of the periodical context and the complicity in metropolitan culture which that context entails. My use of the term ‘emancipatory’ clearly indicates a very different, positive interpretation. Originating in Lamb’s vehement rejection of his urban incarceration in Coleridge’s Lakeish poem ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’, Lamb relocates the rhetoric of liberalism to the metropolis itself. Emancipation in Elia is therefore the assertion of an ideal ontological state through the appropriation of an environment which would otherwise dissolve or compromise the asserting self. There can be, therefore, no compromise and loss nor escapism and denial involved in this appropriative model of selfhood. As we shall see in the reading of ‘Dream-Children’, even when a dark sincerity appears momentarily to pierce the veneer of a ludic, phantasmal self this is undercut by the double-voiced irony of Elia, as evidenced in this case by the essay’s analogous appropriation of Gothic ‘affect’ to autobiographical discourse. Such self-emancipating use of autobiography also characterizes the essay on Christ’s Hospital. Elia once again overwrites the proximate, more straightforward mode of periodical text in the London. Opening the November 1820 issue and immediately preceding Elia’s essay is an article by John Scott, ‘The Literature of the Nursery’, which loosely shares Elia’s sceptical attitude to educational reform. Yet despite this, Elia promotes a very different model of education to Scott. Scott identifies, in effect, a corrupting metropolitanization of children’s literature. The innocent pleasure provided by ‘the gentle “White Cat,” “Beauty and the Beast,” the good “Cinderella,” and the Family of Mr. Allworthy’ are being replaced, Scott laments, by rhymes alluding to the ‘vices, follies, affectations, and infirmities of worn-out society, in its worst specimens’: such imagery forms a ‘contaminating knowledge of which the child’s mind should if possible be preserved’ (p. 480). Scott attacks the rationale that rhymes featuring scenes of contemporary metropolitan life function at the level of insight to ‘satirize the coxcomical clerks and apothecaries of the city of London’ and ‘the stays of dandies and dandy courtships’, on the grounds that they inculcate via ‘the love of ridicule’ a cynical or

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‘mercenary’ mindset (p. 481). For all the manifest inspiration it provides for his own periodical venture therefore – the magazine in which this article appears – the metropolis as an educative subject for children is deemed by Scott to be wholly inappropriate. With the metropolis having encroached on that other traditionally sentimentalized concept, the country, Scott seems to be pleading for childhood itself to be protected from the Great Wen. The educative function linking the respective enclosures of Christ’s Hospital, the Inner Temple and (as we shall see in Chapter 5) the Old Drury theatre, all featuring recollections of childhood, testify to an altogether more liberal notion of the metropolis than we find in Scott. Against Scott’s desire to preserve children’s education from metropolitan corruption, the initial revelation of iniquity and brutality at Christ’s Hospital is reinterpreted in the course of the essay as an exceptionable licence for self-governance, one that ideally prepares the child for constructive employment in the metropolis and the wider, colonial world emanating from it. Lamb’s earlier essay on Christ’s Hospital specifically addresses itself to the charge of corruption at the school’s charity foundation. The essay first appears in the Gentleman’s Magazine in June 1813, under the title ‘On Christ’s Hospital, and the Character of the Christ’s Hospital Boys’. This version includes an introductory passage directly addressing the issue of ‘the Governors of this Hospital abusing their rights of presentation by presenting the children of opulent parents to the Institution’.11 From 1816 to 1819 a parliamentary Select Committee on Education sat in judgement of the school’s governors, as a result of action taken against the school in 1811 by Robert Waithman, a prominent reformist in the Common Council of the City of London.12 Waithman cited examples in the press of inappropriately affluent parents whose sons had been admitted, then moved a motion in the Common Council in November 1808 before publishing in the same month the controversial Letter to the Governors of Christ’s Hospital. The governors appeared before a Chancery Committee in 1811, and several cases were investigated. Although the Committee narrowly decided against expelling any of the boys, Waithman’s letter, in which he estimated that ‘not one fifth of the boys’ were ‘fit and proper objects’ of the foundation’s charity, excited public debate over the precise identity of whom the school intended to educate.13 Lamb plays down the alleged seriousness of the problem by proposing that it happens too infrequently to be of concern, and that, in any case, the ‘sprinkling of the sons of respectable parents … has an admirable tendency to liberalize the whole mass’.14 Even without this passage, however, the essay’s attempt to establish through personal testimony a consistent and unimpeachable identity for the bluecoat boy is clear. His bluecoat contemporary Coleridge had already entered the fray in July 1811, by attacking Waithman’s political beliefs and defending the school’s current practice on the grounds of a necessary maintenance of established social hierarchies, its duty being to ‘preserve, and not to disturb or destroy,

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the gradations of society; to catch the falling, not to lift up the standing, from their natural and native rank’.15 Lamb’s essay two years later uses a similar argument: Christ’s Hospital is held up as a principled, ‘renovating’ institution for ensuring that children from middle-class families who had fallen on hard times could still receive a similar standard of education to their parents.16 Much of the school’s problem seems to have stemmed from its own ambiguous identity, as both a foundation for parents otherwise too poor to provide for their children’s education and a venerable and prestigious London institution. Founded by Edward VI in 1553 as a home for children of the poor, with one of its schools founded by Charles II and featuring Samuel Pepys as governor, Christ’s Hospital became renowned for its famous names. It numbers among its illustrious old boys William Camden in Elizabethan times, George Dyer in the 1770s, Coleridge from Lamb’s time and, a little later, Hunt, the latter three all writing recollections of the school. Divided into three distinct schools, Christ’s Hospital strove to equip its boys for a broad range of employment either in the great trading houses, the Navy and Merchant Service, or the Universities and hence to the higher professions. The controversy over Christ’s Hospital is perhaps indicative that by the end of the eighteenth century the Industrial Revolution and the growth of the mercantile middle classes had begun to erode a traditional, relatively straightforward social hierarchy based on noblesse oblige. Discussed in detail as the social context to the reading of the Elia essays on child sweeps and beggars in the next chapter, such a change throws the role of charity itself into question. Lamb’s ‘Recollections’ reflects the school’s uncertain social position by clearly placing Christ’s Hospital above similar charitable foundations, thus with a unique prerogative to include a few sons of nobility. The typical families of the pupils are ambiguously described as ‘liberal though reduced’, with the school delicately, according to Lamb, neither lifting its pupils above their family’s social class, nor dragging them ‘below its level by the mean habits and sentiments which a common charity-school generates’. Lamb also distinguishes the bluecoat boy from ‘members of an ordinary boarding school’, for possessing a greater ‘intelligence and public conscience’ as a result of the diversity of social background he encounters: furthermore, the boy’s unobtrusive demeanour elevates him above ‘the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some or other of the public schools’.17 The ‘Recollections’ essay therefore attempts to fix a singular, corporate image to the bluecoat boy with which to answer charges against the school implying the lack of such a coherent identity. As Lamb reflects, ‘I belong to no body corporate such as I then made a part of ’.18 Although asserting that the Christ’s Hospital boy ‘has a distinctive character of his own’, that character is emerges as belonging to the school’s institution as surely as the uniform he wears.19 Moreover, beyond the school itself the bluecoat identity is assimilated to the shows of London: at play, the boys ‘freshen and make alive again with

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their sports the else mouldering cloisters of the old Grey Friars – which strangers who have never witnessed, if they pass through Newgate-street, or by Smithfield, would do well to go a little out of their way to see’.20 The boys’ uniformity extends to acting as one in a desirably self-regulatory manner, as when, during a potential ‘time of anarchy’ after the imperious steward Mr Perry dies, out of respect ‘the whole body of that great school kept rigorously within their bounds, by a voluntary self-imprisonment’: furthermore, the essay’s anaphoric rhetoric supports this notion of the body corporate: ‘The Christ’s Hospital boy is a religious character’; ‘The Christ’s Hospital boy’s sense of right and wrong is peculiarly tender and apprehensive’; ‘The Christ’s Hospital boy’s friends at school are commonly his intimates throughout life’.21 Elia is therefore accurate in describing Lamb’s earlier treatment of Christ’s Hospital as ‘eulogistic’. His purportedly more truthful account reintroduces his alter-ego’s from a different angle. From a Londoner’s testimony, Lamb turns with Elia to that of a rural newcomer to the school and the metropolis, a reversal of nativity that is the key to Elia’s alternative representation. Thus characterized as an outsider, Elia seems ideally placed to identify differences of experience from, if not inaccuracies in, Lamb’s account. This in the process sets ‘L.’ up as a prime example of the governors’ abuse of the school’s foundation. The ‘peculiar advantages’ L. enjoys are directly linked to his privileged metropolitan background: sumptuous meals are brought to him daily by a maid or an aunt and he visits his friends almost at will, not simply because of their proximity but more sinisterly due to an ‘invidious’ connection with the sub-treasurer to the Inner Temple. Curiously, however, Elia does not dispute the facts of L.’s account but rather, in similar fashion to the anti-/Caledonian dichotomy in ‘Imperfect Sympathies’, presents an alternative, counterbalancing testimony. The description of L.’s domestic privileges, for example, explains the claim in ‘Recollections’ that boarding schools prevent boys from becoming effeminized through too close an attachment to the family home: Elia evokes instead a ‘poor, friendless boy’ removed from his country home and abandoned to fend for himself in ‘the great city’ (LM, 2, p. 484). Although displaced into a rural identity, with a subsequent estrangement from the city, Elia retains a characteristic attachment to domestic enclosure and, as he does with Sir Thomas Browne in ‘Imperfect Sympathies’, confronts abstract theorizing with personal experience: O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years! How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, and trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire! (p. 484)

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Elia melodramatically draws on Coleridge’s experience of arriving at Christ’s Hospital from the small Devon town of Ottery St Mary, which to maintain fictive distance is exchanged for a Wiltshire location. The rural environment will return in quite a different way through the ‘country house’ essays, when Elia inverts his Christ’s Hospital identity into that of the rurally displaced Londoner. Here, however, it facilitates an affective response to L.’s implicitly detached account, in accordance with James Treadwell’s observation that Elia’s account seems to ‘achieve a superior veracity when placed in response to L.’s, subjective rather than eulogistic, constructing a transcendent inwardness where L. seeks the uniformity of the institution’.22 It might be added that this effect of authenticity and sincerity in Elia is conveyed largely through the affect of the pastoral. The innocence and gentleness of the country is contrasted with the cynicism and harshness of the city, in an act of cultural knowingness which can itself be described as metropolitan. The country is made synonymous in the early part of the essay not only with the family, but is also positively imaged in terms of friendliness, liberty and warm summer weather. Conversely, the city separates children from their parents, imposes inadequate or brutal guardianship, and is figured in terms of alienation, confinement and the cold winter: never much of a walker, as previously established, Elia recalls an ‘objectless’ wandering of the streets relieved only by ‘shivering at the cold windows of print-shops’ or by the boredom of a ‘fifty-times repeated visit … to the Lions in the Tower’ (p. 484). Accordingly, Elia’s ‘friendless holidays’ in London are only enjoyable when involving the rural approximation of excursions to the New River: ‘How merrily we would sally forth into the fields; and strip under the first warmth of the sun; and wanton like young dace in the streams’ (p. 484). The cosseted domestic life behind the gloss L. puts on the same event is suggested by Elia’s claim that he can remember the excursions ‘better, I think, than [L.] can – for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not much care for such water-pastimes’ (p. 484). Elia’s supposedly revelatory yet pastoralized recollections continue in terms of difference to L.’s, with the veracity of the latter challenged on account of the ‘effectual screen’ of L.’s metropolitan domesticity. Contradicting the opening paragraph’s suggestion that his recollections are consciously (‘ingeniously’) misleading, therefore, the incompleteness of L.’s account is attributed more innocently to the ignorance of privilege. Given that this privilege arises in turn from L.’s metropolitan identity – first as a native Londoner at Christ’s Hospital, then as the successfully published writer of that experience in his Works – metropolitanism itself ironically approximates innocence. Signalled by the dichotomous yet interrelated figures of Elia and L., with their phonemically similar names, the essay thus completely overturns the traditional pastoral opposition it originally sets up, and, in the process, challenges the alleged culpability of the school as a metropolitan institution. Wryly presumed

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to have ‘grown connoisseur since’ (p. 485), it seems that L. really can remember the grand dining hall only for the paintings by Verio and Lely, and not for the nurses’ plundering of the boys’ meagre dinner rations. And that there is nothing conspiratorial, after all, in Elia’s pointed remark that ‘L.’s favourite state-room’ (p. 487), the Great Hall, was also the scene of ceremonial humiliation and flogging. Because essayistic suggestiveness works both ways, simple, innocent explanations are just as likely as deeper truths to fill the meaningful, or not so meaningful, spaces left by the ludic Elian text. Trying to second guess Elia in this way inevitably draws attention back to his subjectivity, hence to questions about his reliability as witness-narrator. He admits to having been of a ‘hypochondriac’ nature, thus implying a tendency to exaggerate. A sense of horror at the use of fetters and dungeons overshadows the redeeming disclosure in a footnote of the school’s humanitarian, self-regulatory action in doing away with them. Sensationalism is furthermore apparent in the reader’s invitation to ‘witness’ for himself the ceremonial flogging of a boy in the Great Hall: in the manner of a stage impresario, Elia asks ‘Wouldst thou like, reader, to see what became of him in the next degree?’ (p. 486). Apparent again, therefore, is the undertone of cultural knowingness that undercuts any claim to authenticity. The child Elia ‘shivering at the cold windows of print-shops’ appears in this light as a self-conscious manipulation of a popular metropolitan image, as found in the prolific illustrations of print-shop scenes in the Romantic period.23 Superseding its initial self-righteous bluster, moreover, Elia’s testimony grows more conciliatory as the essay progresses. Like the two testimonies themselves, the good continues to counterbalance the bad: the evil of the dungeons is offset by the ‘little Goshen’ of enclosure at the Lower Grammar School; the imagery used for the school’s neglect now omits the wintry city but retains the ruralsummer imagery of the New River excursions; the Reverend Matthew Field’s lackadaisical regime still prompts in Elia ‘all the soothing images of indolence, and summer slumbers, and work like play, and innocent idleness, and Elysian exemptions, and life itself a “playing holiday”’ (p. 488). Even the polarity between Field’s neglectful Lower and Boyer’s tyrannical Upper school analogizes the essay’s resistance to the fixed corporate identity, and suggests a working equilibrium between the former’s ‘Helots’ and the latter’s ‘young Spartans’ (p. 488). Similarly, the school’s strength in heterogeneous individualism is exemplified by the ‘wit-combats’ between the deep and broad erudition but ponderous style of Coleridge, and the superficial learning but quick-wittedness of Charles Valentine Le Grice. The school’s unsystematic self-regulation, predicated on highly individualistic, autonomous modes of authority, is again used to oppose the reformists’ argument for standardization and external regulation. As in Hazlitt’s treatment of his Londoner, the Cockney, the tone also shifts from damning critique to affectionate sketch as the relationship between Elia

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and L. turns to one of mutual complement, concomitant with a subsidence of hostility to the school itself. A specific recollection offers a cautionary tale to the reformers of which L. would presumably approve. An aversion to the eating of ‘gags’ or boiled beef fat, which L. puts down exclusively to a Christ’s Hospital ‘superstition’, is, according to Elia, a universal condition in children. An incident is described where a boy is ostracized by his schoolmates for being observed to flaunt this taboo after every dinner by stowing away the leftovers in his room. After appearing to confirm the suspicions of his watchful peers that he is feeding the gags to beggars, the boy is found guilty at a mock trial and made to await sentencing at the hands of the steward, Mr Hathaway. Hathaway, however, decides to conduct his own investigation, and finds that the boy has sacrificed membership of the bluecoat fraternity to keep his own poverty-stricken parents from begging on the streets. The governors applaud the boy’s altruistic individualism by donating a relief sum to his family and presenting him with a silver medal, while Hathaway reads a lesson on ‘RASH JUDGEMENT’ to a shamed audience. By thus following the negative examples of abusive and abused authority with a positive one of self-regulation, Elia argues that, for all its flaws, Christ’s Hospital and its governors are capable of practising sound judgement and upholding the school’s charitable principles without outside interference. The reformers appear to be the principal readers at whom Elia’s typically deceptive essay is aimed, by working against a definition of the bluecoat boy in reductively corporate terms which threaten the school’s proposed strength in social heterogeneity. The displacement of Elia as a native of rural Wiltshire against L.’s Londoner sets up the appearance of veracity only to question it, thus questioning in the process the efficacy and purpose of rooting out false from true testimony. Personified in the antithetical characters of Elia and L., this metropolitan institution represents a microcosm of, and indeed a schooling in, the traditional claims of the ‘emancipatory city’ to cosmopolitanism and toleration of difference.24 The metropolis also denotes imperialism and the essay ends by listing the vocational achievements in foreign countries of the top boys or ‘Grecians’ from Elia’s contemporaries, including missionary, ecclesiastical and military postings. Added to the contribution ex-bluecoats make to the great trading houses and the merchant service, the role of Christ’s Hospital in expanding and maintaining the empire is thus confirmed. Remaining within the city, however, neither Elia’s hypochondriac country boy nor L.’s cosseted Londoner seem to have been cut out for the rugged, worldly adventuring of their bluecoat peers. By implication, their job is to remain in London and defend the imperial role of their old school. Typically, Elia’s argument against the restrictive, fixed identity is equally expressed through extra-essayistic, tangential discourse. Appropriately for such a self-deprecating figure, what is ostensibly trivial, peripheral and ephemeral is instead integral to the meaning of the Elia essay. In March 1821, in an unrelated

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postscript to ‘A Chapter on Ears’, Elia responds animatedly to Hunt’s review of Lamb’s Works in the Indicator, in which Hunt lets slip that Lamb sometimes wrote as Elia for the London. Elia accuses Hunt of both the theft and murder of his identity: They call this an age of personality: but surely this spirit of anti-personality (if I may so express it) is something worse. Take away my moral reputation: I may live to discredit that calumny. Injure my literary fame, – I may write that up again – But when a gentleman is robbed of his identity, where is he? Other murderers stab but at our existence, a frail and perishing trifle at the best. But here is an assassin, who aims at our very essence; who not only forbids us to be any longer, but to have been at all. (LM, 3, p. 266)

Elia follows with a claim to Genoese ancestry and a birthplace at Cavendish Square authenticated by the parish register. His melodramatic response to the threat of annihilation parallels Scott’s glee over Blackwood’s error in identifying Elia but not Lamb as a ‘Cockney Scribbler’, in that both perpetuate and promote Elia as an extra-essayistic phenomenon of the London Magazine. This assertion of liberty concurs with more extra-essayistic dialogue, in the postscript to ‘The Old Benchers’ (September 1821) discussed previously in Chapter 2. Elia’s pragmatic response here to a factual inaccuracy identified by an ‘honest chronicler’ (Randall Norris), proposes that Elia’s ‘indecorous liberties’ with fact testify to ‘the license [sic] magazines have arrived at in this personal age …’ (p. 284). Such reflexivity establishes Elia’s elusive presence within the ‘shadows of fact’, a freedom derived from the otherwise dubious, cultic phenomenon, the ‘age of personality’. Like a comical inversion of the Byronic prototype, the paradoxically lamed and enclosed Elia trades upon the reader’s expectations of a real, or corporeally fixed identity to establish an emancipatory metropolitan self.25 Exactly a year after the Christ’s Hospital essay, moreover, Elia’s identity is again the subject of paratextual debate. Appearing in ‘The Lion’s Head’, Elia tackles two readers who have seized upon a supposed inconsistency over his native origins. In the ‘The Old Benchers’, in September, Elia’s claim that ‘I was born and spent the first seven years of my life’ in the Temple, seemingly contradicts the earlier essay’s placement of his infancy in Wiltshire. Elia’s claim to the liberty of fiction here implies that it would be no less oppressive to have his ‘nativity’ fixed than for the heterogeneity of Christ’s Hospital to be eradicated by a similarly reductive conception of identity: Elia hath not so fixed his nativity (like a rusty vane) to one dull spot, but that, if he seeth occasion, or the argument shall demand it, he will be born again in future papers, in whatever place, and at whatever period, shall seem good unto him. (LM, 4, p 465)

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The effectiveness of the weathercock as a metaphor for the emancipatory self is enhanced by its simultaneous allusion to Lamb’s coeval writer in the London, the art critic T. G. Wainewright. Similar to Lamb’s use of Phil-Elia, Wainewright enlivens his essays with dialogue and enables the eccentric and foppish yet critically astute persona, Janus Weathercock, to become himself the criticized subject, through the perspective of another, more refined character called Egomet Bonmot, and even a third, the pompous Van Vinkbooms. Like Elia too, Janus achieves an extra-essayistic presence in the London, inciting skittish banter with Wainewright’s fellow contributors and their personae, including Elia, and in general playing the part of licensed fool.26 Never taking any of his various selves too seriously, Wainwright therefore suggests a further example of a writer who happily exploits, rather than expresses anxiety over, the corporate pseudonymity of periodical authorship. Elia’s elaborate assertiveness is not, therefore, a desperate, buttressing act of self-justification, or indicative that the essays to which it pertains have somehow failed and alienated the reader. On the contrary, Elia uses correspondence, whether with readers or other writers, real or fabricated, for the very purpose of augmenting what is already expressed in the essays. Lamb takes the essay, a form predicated on flexibility and open-endedness, to its logical conclusion by using it to proliferate further, extra-essayistic text. Such text in the process both emphasizes and develops the essay’s themes or ideas, including in this case that of the free identity itself.

A City-Dweller in the Country If Elia’s metropolitan enclosure is emancipatory then the opposite is true of his rural version, when visited by the Londoner. Hertfordshire supplies the country setting for Elia’s visits from the city, to the ancestral houses of both Mackery End and Blakesmoor, as featured in two eponymous essays and in ‘Dream-Children: A Reverie’. In all three, Elia reinterprets the security of the familial country house into a form of psychological imprisonment, an act of Gothicization with Blakesmoor which ironically circumscribes it within the wen-like commercial influence of the metropolis. Lamb’s metropolitanism once again overwrites that of his peers. In the New Monthly Magazine, some six months before Elia’s ‘Mackery End’ essay, Hazlitt’s ‘On Going a Journey’ features a city dweller for whom time spent in solitude in the country is enjoyable for the relief it presents from the intense sociability of life in the metropolis. Although Hazlitt associates the rural sojourn with ‘liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases’,27 he is no belated prose convert to the Lake School. The attraction of the country is defined less by intrinsic worth than by difference from the city, meaning that within Hazlitt’s

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very profession of love for the former is expressed a belonging to the latter. And yet still not to the extent of Lamb. Lamb’s attachment to the city is the stronger because Elia’s infrequent journeys into the country cannot even afford relief, let alone the sense of liberty Hazlitt finds, the motif of incarceration serving as it does to emphasize the emancipatory aspect of Lamb’s native metropolitan environment. Elia’s discomfort with the country house is first expressed in ‘Mackery End, in Hertfordshire’ ( July 1821), in which he makes an excursion for the first time in over forty years to see his relatives. His companion on this journey is his cousin, Bridget, with whom he lives in the city. Although their relationship is presented as a unified domestic selfhood – ‘We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness’ (LM, 4, p. 28) – the pairing of the two characters effects a similar pastoral dichotomy to that of Elia and L. in the ‘Christ’s Hospital’ essay. Bridget’s formative reading matter is a ‘fair and wholesome pasturage’, on which she has unflatteringly ‘browsed’ like a grazing cow, and a rural mindset is further evoked by her straightforward, ingenuous character; she ‘never juggles or plays tricks with her understanding’, prefers stories with a simple linear narrative, rejects all ‘that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy’ and instead ‘“holds Nature more clever”’. Elia is of a more sophisticated character, congruent with the complexity of metropolitan life, his distaste for ‘narrative’ and fondness for ‘out-of-the-way humours and opinions … the oddities of authorship’ delineating his periodical, essayistic identity, against which Bridget’s rural character is also notably signalled in the distress with which she responds to Elia’s capacity for ‘dissembling’ different voices (pp. 28–9). This pastoral dichotomy informs the greater ease with which Bridget makes herself at home when they arrive at the old farmhouse. Elia and Bridget are equally curious as to whether ‘kindred or strange folk’ have inherited Mackery End (p. 29), but on their arrival Elia freezes in bemusement in contrast to Bridget, who immediately takes to her new environment. Elia’s self-fooling sophistication and the intervening years mean that his first sight of the farmhouse confronts him with the extent to which he has juggled or played tricks with his memory: For though I had forgotten it, we had never forgotten being there together, and we had been talking about Mackery End all our lives, till memory on my part became mocked with a phantom of itself, and I thought I knew the aspect of a place, which, when present, O how unlike it was to that, which I had conjured up so many times instead of it! (p. 30)

As we have already seen, Elia’s phantasmal state in the metropolitan environment is central to an emancipatory self, yet here, faced with the rural enclosure, the phantom makes Elia a dupe or victim of his own memory. Although lines from Wordsworth’s ‘Yarrow Visited’ emphasize that the reality of the house is

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not a disappointment, Elia’s stunned reaction hints at the psychological hold the country house will exert in the ‘Dream-Children’ and ‘Blakesmoor’ essays. His state of static, distanced contemplation contrasts with the ‘waking bliss’ of a regressive Bridget’s dynamic engagement with the environs of the farmhouse, in which she is recalled to have ‘traversed every out-post of the old mansion, to the wood-house, the orchard … the place where the pigeon-house had stood … with a breathless impatience of recognition’ (p. 30). Bridget’s rural empathy enables her to cross the threshold of the farmhouse to meet their relations, while Elia stalls outside, his awkwardness deriving from a sense of displacement from the city’s environment of detachment to the strange-seeming friendliness of the country, in which familial identity is all-important. As he reflects: ‘Those slender ties, that prove slight as gossamer in the rending atmosphere of a metropolis, bind faster, as we found it, in hearty, homely, loving Hertfordshire’ (p. 30). Despite eventually entering the house and enjoying this unfamiliar familiarity, his wording has darker implications. Being ‘fast bound’ suggests confinement or imprisonment rather than comfort and security, within the rural enclosure, or, being smothered by a close affection inimical to the definitive metropolitan detachment of the essayistic figure. Moreover, although for Bridget the visit enables her true, city-repressed rural character to reassert itself, ‘as words written in lemon come out upon exposure to a friendly warmth’ (p. 30), for Elia the task of retaining a clear, undistorted image of the country house on his return to the metropolis is a daunting one. His mind will as usual play tricks with his understanding, an inevitability projected in his very pledge never to forget this latest rural venture. The concluding projection of himself in old age, remembering ‘those pretty pastoral walks, long ago, about Mackery End’ (p. 30), depersonalizes memory with cultural convention and evokes the sentimental image of the country typically conceived by those born and bred in the city. Therefore, ‘Mackery End’ not only suggests Elia’s unease with the rural homefrom-home but his tendency to romanticize such places in their absence. In the case of Blakesmoor’s neglected old mansion, this anomalous response reaches the point of pathological crisis. Here, the familial enclosure – at once strange and familiar, repulsive and attractive, unhomely and homely – assumes gro28 tesque subconscious, or ‘uncanny’ proportions. Like the Gothic castle defined by David Punter and Glennis Byron, Elia’s rural enclosure is compellingly paradoxical: It can be a place of womb-like security, a refuge from the complex exigencies of the outer world; it can also – at the same time, and according to a different perception – be a place of incarceration, a place where heroines and others can be locked away 29 from the fickle memory of ordinary life.

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This is precisely the entrapment effected by Blakesmoor: the escape afforded from the city’s ‘complex exigencies’ involves a psychological mode of imprisonment. The very effectiveness of Blakesmoor’s spell derives from the house’s physical obliteration, hence its existence solely in the mind. Moreover, the essay represents a highly appropriate vehicle for the Gothic because, as an expression of the uncanny, the Gothic merely provides a distorted image of the familiar, a staple feature of the essay. In this light, Elia’s preternaturally essayistic attachment to domestic enclosure makes the appearance of the Gothic almost inevitable.

The Decline of the Old Country House Blakesmoor features prominently in ‘Dream-Children: A Reverie’, in January 1822, and reappears in the eponymous ‘Blakesmoor, in H—shire’, in September 1824. Although ‘Dream-Children’ does not name the great house and locates it in Norfolk instead of Hertfordshire, in all other respects it is the same house. Like the farmhouse adjacent to the mansion at Mackery End, Blakesware as it was 30 called did exist as a country house with which Lamb had family connections. Lamb’s great-aunt lived at the Mackery End farmhouse while housekeeper at the mansion, and her sister Mary Field lived as housekeeper at Blakesware, also in Hertfordshire. The decay and eventual destruction of Blakesmoor in the two essays can be fruitfully contextualized with the real house of Blakesware as an example of the decline of the country house in the late eighteenth and early nine31 teenth century. Built around 1640 by Sir Francis Leventhorpe, Blakesware was the seat of the Plumer family from 1683. William Plumer the younger, however, who inherited Blakesware in 1778, seems to have cared little for the house. Leaving Mrs Field in sole charge of Blakesware, Plumer immediately moved to a more modern residence a few miles away at Gilston – alluded to in ‘Dream-Children’ as a ‘newer and more fashionable mansion’ (LM, 5, p. 22) – and eventually arranged for Blakesware to be pulled down, with the demolition being carried out on his death in 1822. Published in the London shortly before Blakesware was demolished, ‘Dream-Children’ refers to the aged, cancer-stricken Mrs Field struggling in Plumer’s absence to maintain the house until her death in 1792. Plumer’s neglect of Blakesware epitomizes London’s increasing influence on country life at the time. As M. H. Port suggests, given that ‘London during the Georgian period exercised an increasingly powerful influence in national life … [it] would have been surprising if the Georgian upper classes had resisted its lure 32 to moulder away in their traditional country residences’. In 1779, the year after Plumer became master of Blakesware, Samuel Rudder observes in the New History of Gloucestershire that:

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Many gentleman’s seats are totally deserted … and too many others, in compliance with the taste of the present age, are left by the owners for the greater part of the year, to partake more largely of the pleasures of the metropolis.33

In particular, according to Port, the landowning gentry’s political aspirations, especially the prestigious seat in Parliament, kept them in London for longer and longer periods: ‘from the late 1770s, the session not infrequently opened in November and ran regularly into mid-June; from the 1810s, it generally ran into July, – and by 1792 summer pleasures had extended the season to August’.34 John Byng acerbically remarks in 1784 that Powis Castle is ‘sadly neglected … some great windows quite forc’d in’, due to the fifth Earl of Powis preferring to spend his time and money ‘in the prodigalities of London, and in driving high phaetons up St James’s Street’.35 The fate of Blakesware in Hertfordshire particularly echoes that of Houghton in Bedfordshire: on Lord Tavistock’s death in 1767 the renovated Jacobean house passed on to his son the fifth Duke of Bedford, who had it demolished in 1793–4. As a local MP for Lewes, then Hertfordshire and finally Higham Ferrers, with the further commitment to London of a governorship of Christ’s Hospital, Blakesware’s Plumer belonged to this new breed of metropolitanized country gentleman. London’s influence can be traced in his very preference for the more fashionable Gilston Park, which was originally called ‘New Place’, over traditional old Blakesware (although Gilston itself only survived until 1853). Towards Elia’s time, the London-smitten squire of a destabilized country house materializes in the novel, a form like the essay predisposed to such contemporary issues: in Persuasion (1818), the foolishly vain Sir Walter Eliot initially refuses to sacrifice his trips from Somerset to London as part of a proposed economy drive at Kellynch Hall. Amply illustrated in their writings, the country house as encountered by the susceptible Londoner provides a narrative theme for the Lambs. That it had haunted Charles’s imagination long before Elia is indicated by an earlier foray into the Gothic, in the short story Rosamund Gray, first published in 1798. Like Elia, the protagonist travels from London to relive his childhood at a deserted family mansion. Compelled by memories which the house activates, his ramble over it enacts a sublime loss of free will similar in effect to the spell cast by Blakesmoor. Playing an old abandoned harpsichord in one room, he falls into a ‘trance’, and wanders with an overwhelming ‘sense of unreality’, ‘scarce knowing where, into an old wood … at the back of the house’,36 a place inspired by Blakesware’s ‘Wilderness’. The following year, a letter to Southey on 31 October 1799 prefigures Blakesmoor still more clearly. Having just returned from Blakesware, Lamb writes: I could tell you of an old house with a tapestry bedroom, the ‘Judgement of Solomon’ composing one pannel, and ‘Actaeon spying Diana naked’ the other. I could tell of

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine an old marble hall, with Hogarth’s prints, and the Roman Caesars in marble hung round. I could tell of a wilderness, and of a village church, and where the bones of my honoured grandam lie; but there are feelings which refuse to be translated, sulky aborigines, which will not be naturalized in another soil.37

The violent tapestry scenes and sinister Roman Caesars, however threatening in content, are works of art which seem to be quite straightforwardly ‘translated’, in turn, into the Gothic art of the two Blakesmoor essays. But most telling, perhaps, is how the ‘sulky aborigines’ of Lamb’s feelings about Blakesware evoke a sense of the old house as a troubling, and for Lamb an unusually ineffable presence, as yet beyond the reach of art. It is of course impossible to know the extent to which Lamb was able to translate or transpose these stubborn feelings into art, aside from, as he does in the above letter, emphasizing their paradoxical value to art by conferring upon them the power of ineffability. With its generic suggestiveness and capacity for radical shifts in focus and tone, however, the essay is arguably the best suited of all literary forms for exploiting the emotional resonance of anything buried or subconscious. Elia’s very skittishness suggests a dark subtext, even while he is telling us in ‘Night-Fears’ how prosaic his dreams have grown. Nevertheless, it is precisely because Elia is not the same as Lamb that we should beware of seeing the former simply as a mask, for to do so is to fail to recognize Elia’s ingenious complexity. As an author confronted with the ineffable through Blakesware, therefore, Lamb’s solution is to create a thoroughly urban persona, one whose dreams are normally of highly realistic, un-dreamlike cities, yet for whom the old country house appears, as Blakesmoor, only in ‘properly’ Romantic dream and dream-vision. The country house next appears in Mary’s ‘The Young Mahometan’ (1808), from the Lambs’ short story collection, Mrs. Leicester’s School. Impressionable young Margaret Green is installed in a ‘large old family mansion’ as a companion to its reclusive and wealthy owner, Mrs Beresford. Margaret’s solitary wanderings around the desolate house and its gardens lead her to become obsessed with the exotic teachings of Mahometism, through a book she discovers in the library. Because many of the pages are missing Margaret forms an unbalanced view of the religion, which leads to a nervous breakdown. After eventually learning that Mahomet was an imposter and his ‘fabulous stories’ quite untrue, she returns home ashamed at her susceptibility and ‘perfectly cured of the error into which [she] had fallen’.38 Blakesmoor effects a continuing hold in Elia, but Margaret’s captivation by the book nevertheless anticipates the spell cast by the house: her daily habit of gazing at the portraits of the twelve Caesars hung in the hall prefigures the hypnotic effect of the busts of the Twelve Caesars in both the Blakesmoor essays. Finally, in April 1825, ‘The Last Peach’ is a humorous plea for help addressed to the editor of the London by a bank clerk, ‘Suspenserus’: he suffers from a terminal case of kleptomania initiated as a child when ‘let loose’ in a

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nobleman’s ‘magnificent fruit garden’ (LM, n.s. 1, p. 594), a fall strongly echoing Elia’s highly sensual, Marvellesque self-abandonment in Blakesmoor’s gardens. In these fictions, moreover, the country house’s captivation of the susceptible visitor is rendered all the more effective by the absence or neglect of parents or guardians. Margaret Green’s father is dead, forcing her impoverished mother to find Margaret a place at Mrs Beresford’s house. In Rosamund Gray the narrator attributes a morbid fascination with the old house to the death of his parents, which meant he ‘had no counsellor left, no experience of age to direct [him], no sweet voice of reproof ’,39 and Suspenserus’s fall clearly ensues from a lack of adult supervision. So it is with the child Elia in both the Blakesmoor essays, who is left to roam at will, though hardly his own, around the old house and its grounds. Yet beyond the house’s reconstruction in the Londoner’s memory and imagination, the spell the house exerts in Elia is dramatized at another level by the intrinsically metropolitan context of this reconstruction.

Essaying the Gothic The first of Elia’s two Blakesmoor essays involves a dream the London bachelor has, in which he assumes the identity of a doting father recalling his childhood days at the old house to his own children. Blakesmoor thus subconsciously ‘visits’ Elia, analogously in the process Gothicizing the country house for a metropolitan middle-class audience. Many of the defining features of the Gothic are evident in both the Blakesmoor essays: torment and terror, the supernatural and the uncanny, a vast building of decayed grandeur, the ghost story, a curse, a spell, and the overall dramatic use of a gloomy or foreboding atmosphere.40 The notion that the Gothic by the 1820s had passed its cultural zenith seems to be borne out by the appearance in 1818 of two parodies, Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey. Indeed, not only the belatedness but the irony inherent in an art form predicated on exaggeration makes the tone of purportedly more serious or genuine examples such as Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) difficult to pin down. What seems easier to ascertain, however, is that the typically ironic and consciously metropolitan Lamb employs the subconsciously troubled Elia in a wry, knowing use of the Gothic. Immediately preceding ‘Dream-Children’ in the January 1822 issue of the London is a commensurate appropriation of the genre, as Elian and periodical text perfectly collude. A ‘Traditional Literature’ feature by Allan Cunningham works to highlight the London’s commercial role within Lamb’s use of the Gothic.41 As with the Elia essay, the first instalment of ‘The Twelve Tales of Lyddalcross’ has a meta-fictional premise which analogizes the commercial processing of storytelling: the tales themselves arise from a narrative describing

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the decline from warlike deed into nostalgic memory of the ancient Highland clan of Lyddal. Paralleling Blakesmoor’s decline and replacement with a modern house, Lyddal castle, formerly the site of generations of inter-clan feuding and Anglo-Scottish warring is eventually destroyed and rebuilt in more peaceful times as Lyddalcross house. Here, the last of the Lyddal warriors resides in domestic retirement, inviting visitors to tell the romantic fireside tales which are now appearing, in print, in the London: tales of ‘the heath where flits the grisly ghost, – the glen / With Spectres throng’d and fiery shapes of men’ (LM, 5, p. 5). The Lyddalcross tales’ metropolitanism is signalled in ‘The Lion’s Head’, where a ‘few difficult northern words’ (p. 3) are glossed for the reader’s edification. Just as the premise to the Lyddalcross tales elides the London’s mass, unknowable readership by appropriating from antiquity the more intimate, oral and folkloric model of storytelling, so too does Elia’s traditionalized fireside audience of the dream children, whose invocation thus is normalized as the timeless and universal desire in all children to ‘listen to stories about their elders, when they were children’ (p. 21). Exaggerated to ‘a hundred times bigger’ (p. 21) than the children’s London home, their grandmother’s country house in ‘Dream-Children’ assumes Gothic proportions through Elia’s role as imaginative storyteller. Blakesmoor’s expedient relocation from Hertfordshire to Norfolk, moreover, utilizes the local ballad of the ‘Children in the Wood’, which Elia recalls as being carved into the chimneypiece of the great hall. The literal inscription of this sensationalistic story into the structure of Blakesmoor is a highly significant detail. Featuring a neglectful and an unscrupulous landowner, murdered children and a cursed farm that falls into ruin, the ballad’s melodramatic narrative of country life is echoed in a legend of Blakesmoor itself. Mrs Field frightens the child Elia – who as an adult frightens his (imaginary) son John, with his account – by telling him of the ghosts of two children ‘to be seen at midnight gliding up and down the great staircase’ (p. 22). This alludes to a Plumer family legend concerning the loss of the baronetcy through the mysterious death at the house of two children. John is frightened not simply by the stories themselves, but by the effect of the uncanny: both tales of murdered children feature a boy and a girl, like himself and Alice. The supernatural features of the house are evident also in the busts of the Twelve Caesars, at which Elia gazes ‘till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble with them’ (p. 22). The effect of the house on the child Elia is therefore repeated in the effect of the parent Elia’s account of the house on his children. Horror or ghost stories captivate or spellbind an audience, just as Blakesmoor itself, inscribed with its own horror stories, casts a spell over the impressionable child. The same sense of captivation appears in Elia’s trance-like wanderings around the mansion, in which he is absorbed by its desolation and symbols of decayed

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prosperity: ‘worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken pannels, with the gilding almost rubbed out’ (p. 22). The ‘spacious, old-fashioned gardens’ too are imaged in terms of a fallen state and its morbid attraction: Elia plucks ‘forbidden fruit’ and abandons himself to a sensual world where it seems he is ‘ripening too along with the oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth’ (p. 22). The child’s succumbing to the succulent ripeness of the garden’s fruit seems ominous in the context of the decay, or over-ripeness, of the house itself, which in turn still haunts the similarly over-ripe, ‘boy-man’ figure of the adult Elia.42 Blakesmoor’s reincarnation in Elia’s London home, or the re-enactment of its spell over Elia through his children, is suggested at other moments. Alice automatically spreads her hands in a pious gesture at the mention of Mrs Field’s religious nature, and her right foot plays ‘an involuntary movement’ when her great-grandmother’s prowess as a dancer is revealed (p. 22). Similarly, John automatically reaches for the grapes when Elia mentions the garden’s forbidden fruit. The children’s preconditioned responses to Elia’s storytelling simultaneously revive the spirit of their Blakesmoor ancestors, evoke their father’s Blakesmoor experience of captivation and captivity, and ultimately enact the spellbinding appeal of Gothic fiction itself. Furthermore, at the very moment Elia falters in the task of storyteller, the essay highlights the whole process of urbanization responsible for Blakesmoor’s Gothic image. Despite being upbraided by Alice for digressing on how the ballad on the chimney had been lost to modernizing alterations, Elia soon returns to this spell-breaking hobby-horse to lament the removal of the old house’s ornaments to the owner’s ‘newer and more fashionable mansion’ (LM, 5, p. 22). Displaced from their natural setting in the old country house to the modern metropolitan enclosure, they seem to be as out of place as Elia is himself at Mackery End. His disapproval of Blakesmoor’s modernization prior to its neglect and eventual destruction therefore appears initially to chime with the contemporary notion of the Great Wen, and the preservation from its ruinous consequences of a sanctified country life. Yet in Elia’s dream the decaying country house has ruinous consequences of its own. Mrs Field’s ambition to be a dancer is ended by cancer, a tragic incident repeated in the laming of Elia’s 43 spirited, athletic older brother, John. Reprising the eponymous ‘lame brother’ in the Lambs’ 1809 poem – an energetic boy who is crippled when he over-exerts himself and henceforth has to rely on his sister to help him walk to school – John, who had once carried Elia when he was temporarily lamed, eventually has his leg amputated. This recurring lameness appears to manifest a curse from the fallen familial enclosure, an impression reinforced by the tragic ballad on the fireplace and its partial enactment in the ghosts of the two dead Plumer children. From the destabilized rural enclosure of his dream, Elia awakes into the stable domestic reality of his London home. Although the more ideal image of domesticity which began the essay – the father entertaining his children with family

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lore around the hearth – evaporates into the figment of an old bachelor’s wistful imagination, consolation is solidly embodied in ‘the faithful Bridget unchanged by [his] side’ (p. 23). Previously cast as the rural antithesis to her cousin’s urban character, Bridget here symbolizes the reassuring homeliness of Elia’s life in the city, a reality to which he can always return after ‘visiting’ the compellingly un-homely country house. As a dual subconscious-commercial construction, therefore, the old country house remains with, and is mythologized by, Elia’s dream. His imaginary audience, the dream children, poignantly fade from his view with an apt reference to the mythical river of forgetfulness: ‘We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence and a name’ (p. 23). Unlike the dead who drink from the waters of Lethe for a happy oblivion of all past suffering and wants, these things return to haunt Elia and entertain his real-life audience in the Gothic image of the old country house.

Spellbinding London Following an eight-month absence from the London, in September 1824 ‘Blakesmoor, in H—shire’ appropriately marks Elia’s own resurrection after a dramatized demise. Elia’s ‘death’ is first reported in January 1823, when the essays were still regularly appearing. Janus Weathercock exclaims: ‘Elia is dead! – at least so a Friend says’, before declaring that ‘Elia’s ghost’ (LM, 7, pp. 3–4) will continue contributing to the magazine. The essay appearing in that same issue, ‘Rejoicings on the New Year’s Coming of Age’, is accordingly signed by ‘Elia’s Ghost’. In the same issue, as a publicity stunt for the impending first volume of Elia, ‘A Character of the late Elia. By a Friend’, Phil-Elia begins: ‘This poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to nature’ (p. 19). The joke of imputing to an incorporeal phantom of the periodical text the affective value of a physical reality is stretched still further in John Hamilton Reynolds’s skit in February on the leading writers of the day. Written in the style of the police reports found in other publications, ‘The Literary Police Office, Bow Street’ wryly suggests appropriate crimes for the writers. Alluding to his supposed apostasy, Wordsworth, for example, is accused of stealing a pony from Mrs Foy of Westmoreland, but is acquitted for being ‘beside himself”, while Coleridge’s famed indolence gets him two months’ hard labour at the Muses’ Treadmill (LM, 7, pp. 157–8). Lamb is ‘charged with the barbarous murder of the late Mr. Elia’, the motive being attributed to jealousy of his success, and Lamb’s guilt being sealed on the basis that his peculiar ‘looks would have appeared against him!’ (p. 160). Elia’s resurrection is then announced in ‘The Lion’s Head’ for March 1823 with: ‘Elia is not dead! – We thought as much …’ (LM, 7, p. 243). Elia himself then appears, accusing Janus of having ‘plotted

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a sham account of his death’, and ‘imposed upon the town a posthumous Essay, signed by his Ghost’, and even suggesting that ‘one or two former papers … were pleasant forgeries by the same ingenious hand’ (p. 243). In the periodical’s incorporeal world of authorship, therefore, the metaphysical notion of resurrection found in the intimate and affective ‘Blakesmoor’ essay is ironized with skittish detachment. Elia’s slippery periodical subjectivity – appearing both inside and outside the nominal enclosure of the essays, authenticating the self one moment and dissembling over it the next – is thus comprised itself of affective and detached voices. The affective voice, as expressed in the Gothicism of the two Blakesmoor essays, and as highlighted by the London’s detached voice, is integral to Elia’s metropolitan appropriation of the old country house. Blakesmoor’s power of affect, conveyed in ‘Dream-Children’ by the hypnotic Twelve Caesars and the responsiveness of the imaginary audience, this time all but overwhelms the Elian subject. The marble busts indeed reappear towards the end of ‘Blakesmoor’, evoking a spell-like stasis or inertia in their oxymoronic ‘coldness of death, yet freshness of immortality’ (LM, 10, p. 228). Elia’s tone at the start, however, is relatively calm, as he typically argues that the evocations of past glories from desolate buildings expose the follies of modernization: The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy: and contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. (p. 225)

The confrontation in a ‘fine old family mansion’ between the intoxicating ‘illusions’ of a glorious past and the sobering realities of an oblivious and degraded present ownership, is paralleled with the difference between visiting ‘an empty and a crowded church’ (p. 225). In advocating the pleasures of the empty church, however, the experience takes on darker, more negative implications: ‘With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee’ (p. 225). The weeping effigies surrounding the visitor evoke a sense of doom, as soothing relief turns to intoxication and paralysis. Even more sinisterly than the busts of the Twelve Caesars, moreover, an effigy is a dummy burned or hanged in place of a persecuted individual which enacts a sort of curse upon its subject. This image of the cursed, or at least spellbound, visitor in the deserted country church ominously introduces Elia’s childhood experience of Blakesmoor, as recalled on a recent return to the old house. That Blakesmoor still maintains its hold on Elia is immediately signalled. ‘Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles out of my road to look upon the remains of an old great house’ (p. 225), he tells us, as if he

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had been suddenly and mysteriously drawn towards it. Although forewarned that the house had been pulled down, such is Blakesmoor’s enduring spell that when he arrives Elia is quite unprepared for this reality. He struggles in vain to trace the features and boundaries of an enclosure that, in impressionable childhood, had exerted such a strong emotional hold: ‘Where had stood the great gates? What bounded the courtyard? Whereabout did the out-houses commence?’ (p. 225). A sense of panic-stricken dependency ensues: had Elia witnessed the house’s destruction, the removal of every ‘magic’ ‘plank’ and ‘pannel’ would have compelled him to beg the workmen to spare just one memento (pp. 225–6). From the anguish of adulthood, however, Elia’s childhood impressions of the house return. Like the Twelve Caesars and marble effigies, the lifelike Ovidian tapestries lining the bedroom walls, featuring Actaeon and Marsyas, of ‘stern bright visages, staring reciprocally’ (p. 226) amid scenes of dismemberment and flaying, simultaneously effect hypnosis and intimidation. Whilst some of the house’s recesses are recalled as ‘cheerful’, such as the window-seat in summer where Elia read Cowley, others, like the bedrooms, one in which the old matriarch Mrs Battle had died, hold again a morbid fascination for the child: ‘every nook and corner’ is ‘wondered [at] and worshipped everywhere’, as Blakesmoor takes on the pseudo-religious aura of a ‘lonely temple’ (p. 226). Consequentially, the adult’s question, ‘How shall they build it up again?’ (p. 226), seems less a demand for restitution than a rhetorical expression of abject dependency. Thus, in contrast to the emancipative Oxford vacation the purported benefits of Elia’s Blakesmoor visit are eclipsed by the incarcerating consequence of its psychological power. He is ashamed now of having been almost completely oblivious to everything outside Blakesmoor’s enclosure: So strange a passion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though there lay – I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion – half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me. (p. 226)

‘Variegated views’, and ‘extensive prospects’ (p. 226) similarly go unappreciated by the spellbound child, whose preternatural devotion to Blakesmoor’s ‘strict and proper precincts’ provides the formative experience to the adult’s panic-stricken reaction to the erasure of the old house and its boundaries. As Elia reflects: ‘So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my chosen prison; and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture of those excluding garden walls’ (p. 226). This is indeed a far cry from Elia’s metropolitan enclosure, where even the purported brutality of Christ’s Hospital is mitigated by a liberalist, anti-reform agenda, and other bluecoats venture forth to worldly achievement. As in the ‘Old Benchers’ essay the ‘garden-loving poet’ Marvell is

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quoted, but instead of sensual liberation, with lines suggestive this time of masochistic bondage: Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines; Curl me about, ye gadding vines; And oh so close your circles lace, That I may never leave this place; But, lest your fetters prove too weak, Ere I your silken bondage break, Do you, O brambles, chain me too, And, courteous briars, nail me through. (p. 226)

The entrapment of the impressionable child by Blakesmoor’s ‘lonely temple’ in the country inverts the more balanced tutelage of London’s Inner Temple. Like the Gothic castle, which is at once a ‘place of womb-like security’ and a ‘place of incarceration’, the very strength of Blakesmoor’s prison exists in its ‘homeliness of home’, ‘wholesome soil’ and ‘tenderest lessons’ (p. 226). Yet at the same time it is the house’s very decrepitude – the dark homeliness attributed to its Gothic grandeur – that explains Elia’s capitulation. In mitigation he proposes that such an environment inculcates in even the humblest commoner a compulsion to assume for himself a ‘feeling of gentility’, to enliven the otherwise ‘tedious genealogies’ of real nobility (pp. 226–7). Devotedly picking out the house’s symbols of profligate aristocracy, the ‘tattered and diminished ’Scutcheon that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs’ (p. 227), Elia relives the process by which they became indelibly etched upon his consciousness. Evoking a similar trance-like state to that effected by the ubiquitous Twelve Caesars, Elia recalls being ‘so oft stood poring upon the mystic characters … till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility’ (p. 227). Elia’s appropriation of nobility here, in order to ‘raise fancy, or to soothe vanity’ (p. 227), superficially resembles the self-emancipation of his ‘walking gowned’ at Oxford. But in the rural enclosure of the old country house, an obsessive-possessive quality to such identity-play leads this time to incarceration. By virtue of Blakesmoor’s neglect by its blue-blooded inheritors, and Elia’s own conversely spiritual connection with the old house, Elia confers upon himself a right of ownership denied by class and blood. He speculates on his own humble ancestors, and concludes that the ‘present owners’ would have no right to object to his ‘presumption’ as ‘they had long ago forsaken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle’. ‘I was the true descendent of those old [Plumers]’, he claims, ‘and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places’ (p. 227). Elia, we can safely assume, does not wish to have owned and occupied Blakesmoor in order to renovate or even restore it to some idea of its past glory: he would have kept the place exactly as he remembered it from childhood, in its captivating state of desolation with the past and present mutually

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suspended. The very un-fulfilment of this desire has actually maintained, if not intensified, the old house’s hold over Elia. The irony, of course, is that the whole attraction of Blakesmoor for Elia – and by extension the reader – is only possible because of its neglect. Desolation and decay, socio-economic evils, become synonymous with sensation and attraction in the perverse economy of the Gothic. Invoking his spiritual right to ownership brings Elia to list the old house’s outstanding features as reclaimed possessions. Anaphoric attributions of ‘mine’ and ‘mine too’ are attached in turn to the gallery of family portraits onto which Elia imposes his own family’s identity, the Marble Hall with the Twelve Caesars, the imposing Justice Hall, and, most worshipped of all, the extensive gardens. Reapplying the phrase from Rosamund Gray, even the ‘sweet voice of reproof ’ of a footnoted ballad by Bridget (Mary Lamb), which gently mocks her cousin’s one-sided love affair with a Blakesmoor portrait, goes unheeded by the obsessive-possessive Elia. Climaxing this passage, in the gardens the inanimate objet d’art once again provides a transfixing or hypnotic presence: ‘that antique image in the centre, God or Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery’ (p. 228). No sooner does he start to gain a sense of liberation from Blakesmoor’s consuming enclosure then the house is refigured by Elia as lost property. Trapped within this intractable double bind, continuing to commit the ‘sin’ of ‘idol worship’ (p. 228), Elia’s hope at the end that houses like their inhabitants have an afterlife, recalls the visitation by Blakesmoor in ‘Dream-Children’. Through its Gothicization in that essay and this one Blakesmoor’s ‘extinguished habitation’ is indeed, in terms of literary commodity, ‘a germ to be revivified’ (p. 228). The readings of the five essays in this chapter collectively argue that, beyond a pastoral dichotomization of city and country in terms, respectively, of emancipation and incarceration, it is an extra-essayistic, periodical ontology that defines Elia’s metropolitanism. The very term ‘enclosure’, as it relates to agricultural history, describes a fundamentally metropolitan influence on country life. The final spate of farmland enclosure across the Georgian period was another factor in the destruction of older country and farm houses, in a commercial reorganiza44 tion of the land instituted by the parliamentary Act passed in the metropolis. Therefore, although Blakesmoor’s spellbinding entrapment of Elia’s Londoner seems to represent an avenging reversal of the social model, the return here of the old country house ultimately represents a further appropriation of the country by the city. This is due to the paradoxical aesthetic of the Gothic, in which, as ‘Blakesmoor, in H—shire’ suggests, loss forms the very basis for possession. Elia’s old country house therefore seems to exemplify Matthew Johnson’s cultural notion of such houses: ‘they owe their continuing power to their carrying of diverse and often apparently contradictory social messages’, and form ‘part of a

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continually reinvented tradition, an endless process of appropriation of the past from the present’.45 Just as the material loss of Blakesmoor reactivates a spell that deprives Elia of an autonomous self, the reciprocal spellbinding of the reader of the Gothic text as enacted in ‘Dream-Children’ defines the very attraction of such fiction as literary commodity. The real-life destruction of Lamb’s Blakesware, in other words, is the occasion for its commercialization through Elia’s Blakesmoor for the metropolitan readership of the London Magazine.

4 UTILITY AND PITY: WORDSWORTH, BLAKE AND EGAN, AND THE ACT OF CHARITY

Our readers, we fear, will require some apology for being asked to look at any thing upon the Poor-Laws. No subject, we admit, can be more disagreeable, or more trite: But, unfortunately, it is the most important of all the important subjects which the distressed state of the country is now crowding upon our notice. Edinburgh Review (1820)1

By the 1820s the Poor Law had become as unavoidable an issue as it was undesirable for the literary magazine. Like Elia’s comfortable middle-class type, who resents the importuning visits made by his ‘poor relation’, the Edinburgh grudgingly plays host to the vexing, recurring topic of the Poor Law and its protracted, controversial process of reform. For Elia himself, however, there appears to be no such reluctance or awkwardness, as periodical writing in this case embraces the disconcerting ‘poor subject’ through the familiar, essayistic figure. In consecutive essays in May and June 1822 – respectively, ‘The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers’ and ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’ – Lamb involves himself in the separate and collective social debates surrounding these iconic figures with an implied reader who is, like the Edinburgh’s imagined reader, disaffected by such discussion. In these essays Elia reactivates the jaded metropolitan reader’s sense of charity by a form of inverse argument, in which a traditional but contemptuous attitude of pity is negated by emphasis on the poor subject’s importance to art and popular culture. Thus redeemed, the metropolitan reader reasserts the residual power of individual agency to, as it were, ‘make a difference’ against the dominant discourse of institutional reform. In the process, Elia enters into dialogue with various other historical and contemporary representations of the sweep and the beggar. The theoretical basis for the mode of metropolitanism that emerges is established primarily through an interrogation of literary and cultural assumptions about how ‘low’ society in early nineteenth-century London is portrayed, specifically the identifying of 2 a morally ambivalent feature of theatricality or ‘comic grotesquery’. Deborah Epstein Nord’s book on the Victorian literature of ‘street-walking’ includes the – 121 –

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two relevant Elia essays in the opening chapter’s discussion of a Regency ‘city as theatre’ aesthetic, while Judith Plotz analyses the ‘Chimney-Sweepers’ essay in her chapter on Lamb’s contribution to a Romantic idealization of the child figure. Both see Lamb as typifying an elaborate avoidance in Romantic literature of the more troubling realities of quotidian life. Before the grittier, socially concerned realism of Victorian fiction, proposes Epstein Nord, periodical writers such as Cyrus Redding and Lamb create a medium of spectatorship that preserves ‘the essayist’s ultimate detachment from the social question’. As a mode of performance itself, the pseudonymous persona of Elia typifies the essayist’s ‘tentative relationship to what he observes and records’: the sweep and the beggar in the above two essays are naturalized as part of the whole ‘pantomime and masquerade’ of London life, in an ambivalent stance falling somewhere between sentimental nostalgia and bitter condemnation.3 Plotz similarly proposes that Lamb avoids addressing the suffering sweep’s feelings in the way that humanitarian poems by Blake and the philanthropist campaigner James Montgomery do, to present instead an essentially irresponsible model of detached spectatorship.4 Such readings seem to undervalue the potential for dissent of irony, the habitual pose of the Romantic essayist in general and Lamb in particular. More specifically they do not account for the sophistication of Lamb’s metropolitanism, or, Lamb’s deployment of a stylistic approach which is entirely congruent with the metropolitan identity of his reader. In this chapter I will argue that Lamb uses the language of the city to purposively appropriate rather than passively reflect an aesthetic of ambivalence. Read in the context of Poor Law debate Elia’s tentativeness is integral to Lamb’s argumentative method. Lamb clearly emerges as an author fully committed to a certain ethical position on the repercussions of reform for the social constitution of the metropolis. Elia provides the means for Lamb to appeal to the reader as one city dweller to another, by meeting the disaffection which the ‘unceasing intensity of urban interaction’ is apt to induce, with an ironic, provocative mode of detachment.5

The Poor Law Context The early decades of the nineteenth century were the most eventful and signifi6 cant in Poor Law history. Up to the end of the previous century there had been relatively little change to the law as it had been conceived in 1601, when the Act of Elizabeth dictated that each parish was to be responsible for the care of its own poor: annually appointed overseers levied a poor rate upon the local people for the incapacitated to be maintained, with the able-bodied poor being put to 7 work. But by 1796, when William Pitt announced amendments which began a gradual process of reform, culminating in the landmark New Poor Law of 1834, the old system was groaning under the administrative and economic weight of a

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still rapidly increasing pauper population. The Old Poor Law had become costly and inefficient, with the burden of poor relief increasing as the system struggled to cope with a changing socio-economic environment.8 As Cobbett’s Rural Rides suggest, the Industrial Revolution led to widespread urbanization, with villages and towns rapidly growing into or being absorbed by cities with dense and disparate populations. In London itself, the city’s phenomenal growth in the early nineteenth century resulted in a move out of the centre by the wealthy which left it to ‘a mass of the poor that periodically threatened to overwhelm the capacity of both philanthropy and the poor law to provide adequate relief in times of distress’.9 The crisis point that the Poor Law had reached in this period is indicated by the clamour of dissatisfaction emerging from resentful ratepayers and humanitarian campaigners alike. This is despite the Poor Law Act of 1796, which attempted to keep pace with the higher demand for relief by repealing the workhouse test, thereby making it legal once again to relieve the poor in their own homes, and 10 sanctioning higher scales of relief. Along with subsequent amendments, the 1796 Act also marked an important step away from the ethos of ‘local problem – local treatment’ and towards the more centralized administration that was to 11 eventually characterize the New Poor Law. Pauperism, however, continued to rise in the opening decades of the nineteenth century along with the cost of poor relief, while both orphanages and impoverished parents continued to be forced into begging or selling children into slave labour in mills, down mines and up 12 chimneys. However, the increasing poor rates levied on the public caused a hardening of sympathies, and a growing ‘belief that any kind of charity, over and beyond relief in cases of dire necessity, tended to encourage idleness and vice’.13 Published in 1798, the possible archetype of this unsympathetic mood was Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, which suggested that poor relief actually encouraged dependency and should therefore be abolished altogether. Not that this attitude is exclusive to the reform era, of course. Joseph Addison’s essay in the Spectator for 26 November 1711 finds the writer and his friend Sir Andrew Freeport, a wealthy merchant nobleman, importuned into giving alms before the latter reflects that such intended charity represents ‘the Wages of Idleness’. Freeport argues for subsidising only the working poor and concludes: ‘Besides, I see no Occasion for this Charity to common Beggars, since every Beggar is an Inhabitant of a Parish, and every Parish is tax’d to the Maintenance of their own Poor. For my own Part, I cannot be mightily pleas’d with the Laws which have done this, which have provided better to feed than employ the Poor … ‘… I cannot but think it a Reproach worse than that of common Swearing, that the Idle and the Abandoned are suffered in the Name of Heaven to extort from

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As a businessman, Freeport’s argument focuses on economic rather than moral reasons for dispensing with acts of charity, whether individual or institutional. In support of his opinion that the poor might profitably be put to work he glowingly refers to a formulation by the economist Sir William Petty, from the essay ‘Concerning the Growth of the City of London’ (1683). Petty’s clinical method of economic calculation in another treatise is savagely satirized by Swift in A Modest Proposal, with a provocative, inverse mode of argument taken up later by Lamb in Elia’s attack on the perceived inhumanity of a similar institutional body. The notion of the complexity of the issue, its alarming capacity to polarize opinion and make of the opinionated person either an exploited fool or inhumane cynic, is evident here. Moreover, it is clear the Elia essays in question enter not only into the contemporary reform controversy, but in the process a longestablished and unresolved debate over the ethics and economic sustainability of charity. The stark division of opinion over mendicity in Lamb’s time is indicated by the contrasting sentiments expressed within the one periodical, the London Magazine. Against Elia’s valorization of the beggar an attitude of intolerance is expressed three years later in the untraced article ‘On the Projected Improvements of St. James’s Park’ ( July 1825), which dismisses the ‘sentimental philanthropy’ that ‘indulges itself in weeping over those who must be removed’ (LM, n.s. 2, p. 446). The contemporary equivalent to Petty’s treatise was Malthus’s essay, the clinical, utilitarian principles of which Hazlitt specifically attacks in both his 1807 Reply to Malthus and in his 1826 Plain Speaker essay ‘On the New School of Reform’. Like Lamb, Wordsworth felt that, far from being too generous, the heartlessness of the New Poor Law was disastrous for fundamental human relations. Appearing in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ is written in direct response to reformers like Malthus, who appeared to be, in the wake of the 1796 Act, ‘beginning their war upon mendicity in all its forms, and by implication, if not directly, on alms-giving also’. Wordsworth takes the liberalist line that an intimate, personal relationship between a given community and its poor is of mutual benefit. As in Elia’s complaint over twenty years later, Wordsworth laments the threat posed by reform to the beggar’s vital social role as he sees it. For Wordsworth, the urban influence of manufacturing has created an institutional and centralized mode of poor relief which is responsible in turn for a form of social disease extending beyond the beggars themselves, in a ‘rapid decay of the domestic affections among the lower orders of society’.15 Wordsworth voices similar fears over the repercussions of the 1796 Act for the

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family and rural community in a letter to the opposition MP Charles James Fox, on 14 January 1801: But recently by the spreading of manufactures through every part of the country, by the heavy taxes upon postage, by workhouses, Houses of Industry, and the invention of Soup-shops etc. etc. superadded to the encreasing disproportion between the price of labour and that of the necessaries of life, the bonds of domestic feeling among the poor, as far as the influence of these things has extended, have been weakened, and in 16 innumerable instances entirely destroyed.

The letter directs Fox’s attention to two poems, ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’, which together illustrate the poet’s concern over the threatened ‘bonds of domestic feeling’.17 Of key relevance, however, is the notion that centralized solutions represent the community-breaking sign of a creeping urbanization. For Lamb, it is ironically and unusually the reverse, a concept of metropolitan ‘community’, which is itself under threat, instead of the cause of it. Contrary to Wordsworth’s ruralist attribution of the eradication of mendicity to the evil of urbanization, for the urban Lamb the prevention of begging is destroying the social equilibrium of the metropolis. For all its liberal humanitarianism Wordsworth’s letter highlights above all the sheer ethical complexity of Poor Law reform: the self-righteous ‘vanity and pride’ of the reformers is ‘so subtly interwoven’ with well-intentioned but out-oftouch ideas ‘that they are deemed great discoveries and blessings to humanity’.18 To discuss Poor Law reform was indeed to embroil oneself in a broader and equally intractable political and socio-economic debate. Malthus’s theory of population and the Benthamite utilitarianism it gave rise to did not itself emerge simply out of isolated observation, but was intended as a pragmatic dose of common sense to combat the radical utopianism of William Godwin. His treatise, Political Justice (1793), and novel, Caleb Williams (1794), both express the anarchic belief that all political institutions stifle the human capacity for, amongst other things, benevolence. Furthermore, the alternatives to slave labour for children – disease and death in a run-down and overcrowded orphanage, petty crime or reliance on the overburdened relief system – must have appeared even less appealing to the law-abiding ratepayer. It was indeed argued by some that at least the ‘climbing boys’ were learning a trade, as evidenced by the many who became master-sweeps. Against the campaigning of the London Society for Superseding the Employment of Climbing Boys, for instance, was the London Society of Master Sweeps, founded in 1826: this organization set the profession’s own rules of employment, including the keeping of Sundays free for the boys to attend Sunday School and learn literacy.19 Such organizations were dedicated to strict self-regulation and a belief that those within the profession were best qualified to deal with the use and working conditions of climbing boys.20 Clearly

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then, there were no simple solutions, as an apparently philanthropic campaign could end up doing more harm than good. Lamb’s scepticism over reform of any denomination implicitly acknowledges the dilemmas and divisions it gave rise to, and the danger of a disenfranchising, ultimately dehumanizing effect on the metropolitan reader. At the crux of this scepticism, therefore, is a liberalist belief in the agency of the individual, not in Wordsworthian opposition to, but as the very basis of metropolitan life.

Pity Not the Poor Sweep Amid the customary bluster and banter of ‘The Lion’s Head’ in the May 1822 issue of the London is a poem of relative serenity by Thomas Hood entitled ‘Moral Reflections Written on the Cross at St. Paul’s’. Immediately followed by the essay ‘The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers’, Hood’s evocation of the sightseer’s reaction to a famous London prospect complements Elia’s alternative, ironic mode of detachment: The man that pays his pence, and goes Up to thy lofty cross, St. Paul, Looks over London’s naked nose, Women and men: The world is all beneath his ken, He sits above the Ball. He seems on Mount Olympus’ top, Among the Gods, by Jupiter! and let’s drop His eyes from the empyreal clouds On mortal crowds. (LM, 5, p. 404)

The poem describes the popular attraction of climbing to the top of St Paul’s Cathedral, whereby the panoramic view over the city instils a gratifying sense of escape from the teeming masses far below. The sightseer’s humble pleasure is due to an illusion of godlike superiority, a transient sensation both created and commercialized by the metropolis. This typical example of Hood’s light verse harmonizes with Elia both in the affectionate mocking of the egoistic reflex and in the turn towards a questioning of metropolitan ambition: ‘What is this world with London in its lap?’ (p. 404). But as usual in the London, the layered Elia overwrites the simpler, adjacent text, as the sightseer’s lofty perspective over a safely generalized mass is neatly inverted by an elevation of one of the city’s lowliest individuals, the sweep. Superficially, Hood’s gratified spectator perched high above London, and Lamb’s valorized sweep in its midst, express a similar need for respite from the social conscience. In Elia, however, the negation of conscience facilitates rather than avoids a sense of individual agency and social responsibility.

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Lamb’s approach is immediately signalled by the neutral term ‘chimneysweepers’ being preferred to the emotively humanitarian ‘climbing boys’,21 and in the celebratory subtitle ‘A May Day Effusion’. However, the social concern underpinning this approach is also evident: I LIKE to meet a sweep – understand me – not a grown Sweeper – old chimneysweepers are by no means attractive – but one of those tender novices, blooming through their first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite effaced from the cheek – such as come forth with the dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little professional notes sounding like the peep peep of a young sparrow; or liker to the matin lark should I pronounce them, in their aerial ascents not seldom anticipating the sun-rise? (p. 405)

So heartless does this blithe opening seem that it works to parody rather than express metropolitan detachment. Elia chooses the as yet unspoilt appearance of the child sweep over the unpalatable sight of the deformed adult sweep with the eye of a discerning consumer, discussing the latest fashions or selecting fruit at the market. Undercutting this apparent callousness, however, the description of the sweeps as ‘young Africans of our own growth’ (p. 405) reinforces the association carried in the term ‘nigritude’ between child-labour and the equally controversial slave trade. Similarly there is an ironic disparity between the enslaved sweep’s traditional cry and the sparrow’s spontaneous, free song, as there is between the ‘aerial ascent’ of the sweep and the lark. The chimney-sweepers and beggars essays by Lamb are cited by Richard Cronin as prime examples of the early urban-modern aesthetic in the 1820s of ‘magazine callousness’, as mentioned in the Introduction. Cronin does not elaborate on the humanity and social reality which Lamb supposedly denies the sweeps and beggars because Lamb’s periodical writing exemplifies for Cronin not a pre-Victorian failure of moral conscience, but, more positively, a burgeoning, alternative sensibility. In May 1822, regular readers of the London would have indeed encountered a recent example of Lamb’s brand of magazine callousness, in the previous Elia essay, ‘Distant Correspondents’ (March 1822). Written in the form of a letter to ‘B. F.’ (Barron Field), in Sydney, Elia breaks out at one point into a series of dubious jokes about the settlement’s function as a penal colony: And tell me, what your Sydneyites do? Are they th**v*ng all day long? … The kangaroos – your Aborigines – do they keep their primitive simplicity un-Europetainted with those little short forepuds, looking like a lesson framed by nature to the pick-pocket! … Is there much difference to see between the son of a th**f, and the grandson? Or where does the taint stop? Do you bleach in three or four generations? … Your lock-smiths, I take it, are some of your great capitalists. (LM, 5, p. 285)

The ‘nigritude’ of the sweeps’ sooty skin seems as ingrained as the taint of the Sydneyite’s criminality, both essays equally wanting in what might appropriately

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be termed ‘good taste’ – or, both indicative of the provocative ‘low urban taste’ identified in Chapter 3. The child sweep and the deported criminal alike, otherwise troubling reminders of society’s ills, are unashamedly made into objects of whimsical contemplation. In fact, ‘sentiment’ itself, a cognate of pity, is de-sentimentalized in ‘Distant Correspondents’ as an item of gastronomic consumption, a ‘kind of dish [which] requires to be served up hot’ (p. 283). There seems, however, a reason other than the expression of a modern-urban sensibility for an author predisposed to contrariness such as Lamb, to use what amounts to an aesthetic of aestheticism. The very point about Elia’s seemingly casual allusions is that they are not pressed home or buttressed with some higher form of discourse. Inviting the reader to reconcile the thoughtless with the thought-provoking, and the cynical with the sentimental, they are further examples of Lamb’s dissembling, suggestive voice. When an ostensibly more appropriate mood of pathos seems about to surface, with dark reflection looming on the fate of ‘these dim specks – poor blots – innocent blacknesses’ (LM, 5, p. 405), Elia breaks off and provokingly returns to the superficial impressions created by outward appearance. The strongest emotion Elia expresses toward the sweep’s plight is the vaguely empathetic ‘kindly yearning’ (p. 405). The darker, deeper meaning, of suffering, exploited children, is simply left unsaid, implicitly acknowledged to have been amply provided elsewhere by an accumulating corpus of humanitarian literature. More deliberate, perhaps, than an example of political suggestiveness, the essay provides an inverse mode of argument that ideally fits with Elia’s circumnavigation of the conscience. As such it finds a brutal antecedent in Swift’s mock treatise, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to their Parents or the Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Public (1729). Like Lamb does later, Swift attacks the mechanistic inhumanity of social reform. The Proposal represents a savage parody of Sir William Petty’s ‘Treatise on Ireland’ (1693), which had recommended the alleviation of poverty by a systematic depopulation of the country, and is clearly designed to shock the Irish and English gentry out of a moral complacency. After a contemptuous pity is evoked for the ‘melancholy object’ of the ‘beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms’, and after other ideas have been eliminated, comes the proposer’s own outrageous solution: ‘that a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and … that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.22 As one who once famously replied ‘b-b-b-boiled, madam’, to a woman who asked how he liked children, and in whose writing the image of the gourmand is prolific, Lamb would presumably have appreciated the dubious ‘taste’ of Swift’s black humour in the Proposal. Specifically prefiguring Lamb’s ironic consumer in the

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‘Chimney-Sweepers’ essay, moreover, Swift attacks Petty’s inhumanity through a turning of the target’s own voice against itself, as a more shocking alternative to the humanitarian approach. The bland materialistic tone that Elia uses for describing the sweep, like the appropriation of utilitarian language in discussing the beggar, represents a subtler versioning of Swift’s deadpan approach (which extends to meticulous calculations and culinary tips). In addition to the hypercritical magazine milieu discussed in Chapter 1, therefore, Elia’s indirectness derives from an aversion to heavy-handed didacticism. This much is suggested, appropriately enough, in Lamb’s criticism of Wordsworth’s ‘Old Cumberland Beggar’, in January 1801, in the same letter, moreover, in which Lamb first expresses his love of the city over the country. Although there is much he likes about the poem, Lamb finds rather as Keats does later with Wordsworth’s poetry ‘that the instructions conveyed in it are too direct and like a lecture: they don’t slide into the mind of the reader, while he is imagining no such matter’: this approach tends to alienate the ‘intelligent reader’, claims Lamb, because he ‘finds a sort of insult in being told, I will teach you how to think upon this subject’.23 Lamb’s avoidance in his own essays of the didacticism he finds in Wordsworth’s treatment of the poor subject orients him more towards Blake’s questioning of moral presumption. Elia also likens the sweeps to diminutive members of the ‘clergy’, who ‘sport their cloth without assumption; and from their little pulpits (the tops of chimneys), in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of patience to mankind’ (LM, 5, p. 405). The sweeps’ work therefore articulates only the vaguest perfunctory moral, one which seems barely even related to his own plight. Again the imagery is highly provocative, as the prolonged religious metaphor (the clergy, the cloth, the pulpit and the sermon) is used to evoke the sweep’s innocence, thus ironically recalling Blake’s bitter condemnation of the Church in the Experience version of ‘The Chimney Sweeper’: And because I am happy, & dance & sing, They think they have done me no injury: And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King 24 Who make up a heaven of our misery.

The Church is complicit in the sweep’s institutionalized exploitation by providing moral succour to parents and guardians through preaching forbearance and resignation, a ‘lesson of patience’ indeed. Blake’s equivalent poem from Innocence is included two years after Elia’s essay in the poet and newspaper proprietor James Montgomery’s campaigning publication The Chimney-Sweeper’s Friend and Climbing-Boys’ Album, the poem proposed by Lamb in lieu of his own contribution. Consisting of documentary accounts, essays and poems from contributors who include Lamb’s fellow London-ers Bernard Barton and Allan

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Cunningham, Montgomery’s project combines a clarion call to activism and abolition, analysis of possibilities for change, and an appeal to the conscience through the pathos of betrayed innocence.25 The very fact of Lamb’s inability to contribute a poem suggests a sense of unease with the moral certitude of Montgomery’s reformist project. Indeed, Lamb’s position on reform might have been still clearer had he offered for Montgomery’s album both the Innocence and Experience poems on the sweep. In the Innocence poem, there are two sweeps: one, the speaker, initially calms the other, Tom, who is upset at having had his blond hair shaved for the job. After being visited by an angel in a dream who frees all the boys from coffins, Tom becomes ‘happy and warm’ in the belief that if he does his ‘duty’, ‘He’d have God for his father & never want joy’.26 Blake’s illustrations for the two poems support the dichotomized notion or ‘contrary states’ of innocence and experience: children play beneath a tree in warm shades of brown and red in the Innocence version, while the solitary sweep of Experience trudges with his bag of soot in falling snow through city streets in appropriately cold shades of blue and grey. Although the sweeps’ harsh existence and the scandal of their condition is obvious even in the Innocence poem, the two texts combine to confront the reader with a ‘social dilemma’, according to Nicholas Marsh, which frustrates the urge to take action: should we, or should we not, make people miserable by telling them … that they are obscenely exploited? What do you do with a happy victim, like Tom Dacre at the end 27 of the poem: make him unhappy, or leave him as he is?

Blake’s sweep of Experience is clearly the unhappily knowing alternative to the blissfully ignorant but exploited child, Tom Dacre. Between them, therefore, the poems warn the would-be reformist of the uncertain moral ground upon which s/he enters, and a potentially disaffecting dilemma to which Elia’s refusal to appeal to the conscience responds. Referring to the ‘Chimney-Sweepers’ essay in his overview of Lamb’s position within a Romantic ‘sceptical tradition’, Donald Reiman identifies the middle-class guilt that Elia addresses: In an age when it had become fashionable to forgo personal acts of charity in favor of moralistic clichés or letters to a newspaper asking, ‘Why doesn’t the government do something about this?,’ Elia disarms his reader’s sense of guilt about the use of children as chimney sweeps (for everyone used them to clean chimneys) – guilt that 28 frequently results in trying to pass by on the other side of the road.

Although Reiman curiously ignores the essay’s mythologizing of the sweep to see this effect as achieved rather through ‘humanizing’ him, the description of a guilt-ridden and eventually disaffected reader largely informs the model identified in the present study. It is precisely because the humanitarian perspective had

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been so heavily promulgated and the example of the Good Samaritan endangered by a subsequent over-reliance on institutional solutions, that Lamb seeks to preserve the spontaneous individualism of that philanthropic paradigm. Standing at odds with the humanitarian campaign is a whole folkloric counter-culture with which Lamb aligns himself to expound an alternative model of philanthropy. Lamb’s shift of the focus away from the suffering subject to the metropolitan reader is therefore far from representing an abdication of moral responsibility, thus contradicting Plotz’s claim that: ‘Unlike Blake, Montgomery, and the poet contributors to The Chimney-Sweeper’s Friend and Climbing Boy’s Album, Lamb is not interested in inciting his readers to action’, as evidenced by avoidance of the term ‘climbing boy’ and emphasis on descriptive terms connoting to ‘vitality, incongruity, or visual interest’.29 All Lamb supposedly is interested in is the sweep’s role in popular culture, thus trivializing his plight in the process. And yet if the early decades of the nineteenth century were ‘fervid’ with the movement to abolish child labour in chimney sweeping, it seems unlikely to say the least that Lamb or indeed any author would go to the trouble of discussing such a highly controversial figure if not to address in some way the humanitarian issue at stake. Lamb’s way is defined by a strategic irony and indirection. In declining to involve himself in Montgomery’s project Lamb is not seeking to avoid the issue, but instead to engage with it as a fundamentally metropolitan issue on his own, appropriate terms. The refusal of pity for this seemingly most pitiful of subjects is the key here, and is expressed in another way through Elia’s typical reversion to the child’s perspective: When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to witness their operation! to see a chit no bigger than one’s self enter, one knew not by what process, into what seemed the fauces Averni – to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding on through so many dark, stifling caverns, horrid shades! (LM, 5, p. 405)

The child’s sense of wonder at the apparently magical skills of a boy otherwise just like himself, is as yet unspoiled by the onset of conscience, as a cognate of Blake’s experience. The ‘dark, stifling caverns’ and ‘horrid shades’ of the chimney enthral rather than appal Elia, and his fear that the intrepid sweep will be ‘lost forever’ owes more to the mysterious nether world of the child’s imagination than to an awareness that the sweep might suffocate (as indeed some did). Similarly, any sense of outrage is obscured by Elia’s theatrical vision: the brush emerging from the chimney is glorified as ‘the brandished weapon of his victorious art’, and a horrific tale about the ‘bad sweep’ made into a human weathervane recalls ‘the old stage direction in Macbeth, where the “Apparition of a child crowned with a tree in his hand rises”’ (p. 405). The sweep is at once dehumanized and valorized by assimilation into the transcendental, alchemical apparatus, the theatre, of the

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Elian vision. Here, he joins artefacts such as the ‘imaginative’ picture cards that differentiate playing from ‘mere gambling’ (LM, 3, p. 163) in ‘Mrs Battle’s Opinions on Whist’, the frescoes and the ‘recondite machinery’ (LM, 4, p. 279) of the seemingly magic fountain in the Inner Temple, the similar machinery of stage illusion in ‘My First Play’, and the china tea cup with its evocation of a strange, exotic ‘world before perspective’ (LM, 7, p. 269). Apocryphal stories about the sweep function more as an indicator of the figure’s folkloric significance than an indictment of humanity. Although the appalling conditions endured by climbing boys at the hands of unscrupulous master-sweeps was well publicized by Montgomery and the Superseding Society, the prevalence of the sweep especially in children’s literature worked against this representation to ingrain the figure within popular culture. For every stridently campaigning verse pitying the ‘shivering urchin’ and imploring the reader to ‘Awake from apathy’s cold sleep! / And when you plead for other’s wrongs, forget not the poor SWEEP’,30 there is a tale of a little boy abducted as a sweep after straying too far from home, or who learns a valuable lesson about personal vanity from an unpleasant encounter with a sweep. The ubiquitous print shop window added to this process, with the sweep’s disruptive, comical figure often 31 forming a part of the assorted metropolitan life depicted in the prints. Like an urban version of the ghoul, dragon or troll, the sweep, with his symbolic blackness, distinctive cry, contagious sootiness, his strange and dangerous craft and tender age, became at this time a compelling feature of street scenery.32 Sidestepping the humanitarian angle, Elia’s essay therefore dwells on the sweep’s image in popular culture instead of the conscience-driven representation in campaigning literature. Attempting to speak for those without a voice, such literature typically assumes the voice of its subject, as in Mary Alcock’s poem The Chimney-Sweeper’s Complaint, published in 1799: A CHIMNEY-SWEEPER’S boy am I; Pity my wretched fate! Ah, turn your eyes; ’twould draw a tear, 33 Knew you my helpless state.

Not only does the poem patronizingly, in Lamb’s terms, ‘teach you how to think upon this subject’, because it sentimentalizes the sweep’s plight without suggesting at least palliative action it connotes to the impotence of middle-class guilt. Such inertia, of course, easily turns to apathy, and it is the apathetic reader whom Elia subtly manoeuvres in promoting the individual, personally administered act of charity such as a penny, or two-pence, to which can be added the practical gift of ‘a pair of kibed heels’ (LM, 5, p. 405). The donation of a variety of herbal tea or ‘saloop’, particularly favoured by young sweeps, is suggested as another such act of charity. A detailed account of the tea’s composition and its

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possible medicinal benefit to the sweeps includes a mock advertisement for the Salopian House in Fleet Street of a Mr Read. Again downplaying the role of conscience in promoting individual action Elia appeals to both the commercial spirit and sense of stability of the metropolis. He informs vendors like Mr Read of the cheapest current price of a bowl with bread and butter and offers non-charitable reasons for making this donation, namely, to prevent the sweep contaminating with soot the more appetizing and expensive soups, and to increase his efficiency at a job which helps prevent noisy fire crews from disturbing the peace. Indeed, the essay as a whole refers only allusively and fleetingly to the sweeps’ suffering, in a detached approach entirely congruent with the disaffectedness of the implied reader. This ‘pitiless’ approach is based on a notion of carnival which emphasizes the rare moment of pleasure instead of the more obvious hardship it alleviates. Pleasure emanates from two charitable moments in the essay where the established social hierarchy at the bottom of which the sweep exists is momentarily overturned. The first occurs immediately after Elia has described the sensory pleasure afforded the sweep by the herbal tea, which, in turn, follows the pleasure of spectacle the child Elia derives from the sweep’s ‘performance’. The former marks a role reversal of the first passage, in which Elia himself becomes part of the metropolitan spectacle by providing a moment of comic relief for the poor subject. This involves an embarrassing tumble in the street at which a passing sweep unashamedly laughs: There he stood, pointing me out with his dusky finger to the mob, and to a poor woman (I suppose his mother) in particular, till the tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked themselves out at the corners of his poor red eyes, red from many a previous weeping, and soot-inflamed, yet twinkling through all with such a joy, snatched out of desolation, that Hogarth – but Hogarth has got him already (how could he miss him?) in the March to Finchley, grinning at the pie-man – there he stood, as he stands in the picture, irremovable, as if the jest was to last for ever – with such a maximum of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his mirth – for the grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it – that I could have been content, if the honour of a gentleman might endure it, to have remained his butt and his mockery till midnight. (pp. 406–7)

Elia’s generosity of spirit is set up by a preceding insistence that he is ‘by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts’: he affects a haughty disdain for the ‘lowbred triumph’ London people typically ‘display over the casual trip, or splashed stocking, of a gentleman’ (p. 406). This haughty gentleman act is repeated later in his claim to be usually ‘obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called a fine set of teeth’, before making a charitable exception for the sweep’s ‘white and shining ossifications’ (p. 407). However accidental the fall, here is a gentleman happy to let it momentarily bring him down to the sweep’s level, or to shed the dignity

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conferred by class for the entertainment of one of the city’s lowliest inhabitants. Elia’s donation affords a ‘joy, snatched out of desolation’, as the otherwise dark reality of the sweep’s existence and its dramatization in the otherness of humanitarian literature is literally, once again, taken as read. Elia’s comical fall and the essay’s general pattern of exchanged pleasure thus enacts the ‘turning upside down of the hierarchical scale’ that characterizes carnival.34 Laughter itself has a destabilizing, anti-authoritarian power,35 yet the authority challenged by the sweep’s laughter is not so much the social system that enslaves the boys as the well-meaning but humourless humanitarians who oppose that system. By inculcating first guilt then disaffection with perpetual attacks on the conscience, their plaintive literature ends up undermining for Lamb the empowering sense of individual agency imperative to metropolitan life. Hogarth’s ‘March to Finchley’ is used to establish the sweep’s laughter in bold iconic terms, as Lamb immortalizes a fleeting, anecdotal encounter through the famous London artist’s ability to capture social types amid crowd scenes, an ability earlier identified by Lamb in the 1811 essay for the Reflector, ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’. In this essay the painter’s highly individualized figures yet manage to embody eternal notions of humanity: ‘The faces of Hogarth have not a mere momentary interest’, Lamb asserts, but are instead ‘permanent abiding ideas’. Equally pertinent is Lamb’s egalitarian defence of Hogarth against Joshua Reynolds’s dismissal of the artist as being ‘of an inferior and vulgar class’, his subjects being typically drawn from ‘common or vulgar life’.36 Lamb’s earlier criticism is therefore reapplied to Elia’s own metropolitan art, through an appropriation of Hogarth’s carnivalesque style to a celebration of supposedly low, plebeian life. This egalitarian aesthetic reactivates the disaffected reader’s interest in the poor subject, as a figure integral to the cultural as much as the social life of the metropolis. But only in the irony-layered sophistication of Elia does Lamb use an apparently calloused, aesthetic treatment of a pitiable humanitarian subject as a means of social protest. An earlier portrayal of the sweep in ‘A Sylvan Surprise’, which appeared in the Examiner in 1813, seems to inform Elia’s enjoyment of the figure’s appearance as spectacle within the cityscape, but without the exaggerated consumerism and other manipulative devices of the essayistic persona, to no discernable effect other than evocation of the titular emotion. The bland, almost inane sense of a metropolitan aesthetic seems to be all that is stimulated at the spectacle of the sweep’s black figure reclining in a green meadow beside the Thames; ‘as something discordant … like an artificial discord in music … a combination of urs in rure’.37 Discordant, but hardly disturbing. As already demonstrated, Elia, on the other hand, drops dark hints amid the bland urbanity, as epitomized by the ‘joy, snatched out of desolation’ of the sweep’s grin, which indicates an absence of ‘malice’ belying the sweep’s plight.

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Above all, of course, the sweep’s grin frustrates the will to reform. It suggests that his pitiable status is potentially reversible, by signifying in popular myth noble birth or ancestry: It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct; a badge of better days; a hint of nobility: – and doubtless, under the obscuring darkness and double night of their forlorn disguisement, oftentimes lurketh good blood, and gentle conditions, derived from lost ancestry, and a lapsed pedigree. (LM, 5, p. 407)

The abduction theory is notably illustrated with the reported instance of a sweep found asleep in a bed at Arundel Castle, Elia claiming that the reason why the boy did not opt for the humbler couch or carpet was the subconscious agency of his aristocratic heredity. While Elia suggests that the reader can take it or leave it, his own example as usual is to eschew the ‘mannish’ authority of reason in favour of a childlike credulity, by indulging himself in the shadowy hinterland of lore and proto-psychological hypothesis. Despite a typically fleeting, sobering supposition that instances of abduction reflect a regularly practised evil, moral outrage is deflected by a perpetuation of the riches-to-rags tale, one which expresses the same interest in myth, superstition and preconscious origin found in ‘Night-Fears’. A self-confessed lover of the fool and his world of topsy-turviness, as discussed in the next chapter, Elia deflects the jaded reader’s attention from the dominant reformist issue of social iniquity, towards a more neutral contemplation of the alternative or counter-cultural area of hierarchical disruption. Although Hogarth’s pictures are seen as moralistic high art in relation to the bawdier, more licentious popular prints that follow from the 1780s to the 1820s, Elia’s laughing sweep nevertheless seems to revive the already fading spirit of the ‘city of laughter’ identified in Vic Gatrell’s study of eighteenth-century print culture. The late Georgian period, according to Gatrell, marks the heyday of a ‘great tradition of ridicule and of the satirical and humorous prints that sustained it’, notably by Gillray, Rowlandson and Isaac and George Cruikshank. This was a culture of disorder and chaos that began to grow obsolete in the 1820s amid Nash’s architectural ordering of London, the so-called ‘march of intellect’, and the process of ‘moral and political reform’.38 There may be little in the way of satire in Elia’s essay, but its celebration of carnivalized social relations, the destabilizing effect of laughter, and opposition towards institutional reform, closely allies Lamb with the above tradition. Lamb therefore combats the reformist use of a didactic, moralistic idiom not only with a Blakean sense of ethical complexity but also by drawing on the eighteenth century and older tradition of, in Spenser’s phrase, ‘mery London’.39 The charity-as-carnival theme is most apparent in the final part of the essay, devoted to the annual chimney-sweepers’ feast held at St Bartholemew’s Fair.

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As a credulous Elian type, James (‘Jem’) White wholeheartedly subscribes to the theory of abducted nobility, a conviction that inspires him to institute the feast as a partial means to ‘reverse the wrongs of fortune in these poor changelings’ (p. 408). This charitable act again derives, therefore, not from the goaded social conscience but from the more pleasurable source of an imaginative investment in myth and folklore. As an act of charity the feast’s key donation is also unorthodox: beyond the humble food of small ale and sausages, charity is again enacted through the temporary reversal of the poor subject’s lowly status. Rather like the coronation of the Cockney king and queen, the sweeps’ feast is an example of urban festival based on a performance of mock gentility, complete with invitation cards, eloquent toasts and the sweeps’ being waited on by White, Elia and ‘Bigod’ ( John Fenwick). The charitable event of the feast participates in the carnival that characterizes Bartholemew Fair itself, against which, according to Peter Ackroyd, ‘a frequent source of complaint was that the apprentice and the lord might be enjoying the same entertainments, or betting at the same gam40 ing tables’. The merrymaking of carnival is evoked in the image of the sweeps’ ‘hundreds of grinning teeth [that] startled the night with their brightness’ (p. 408). This feast, moreover, is an occasion with which Elia’s general propensity for debunking authority, as discussed earlier, is naturally at home. Significantly for such a gourmand, moreover, Elia’s sense of charity derives here from the enjoyment of watching others eat: ‘O it was a pleasure to see the sable younkers lick in the unctious meat … how he would fit the tit-bits to the puny mouths, reserving the lengthier links for the seniors’ (p. 408). Equally ironic and rolereversed is the appearance as a waiter of Bigod, who is conversely a borrower in ‘The Two Races of Men’, thus also emphasizing the feast’s chaotic and generous spirit, while its integrity as an unofficial yet unthreatening event is conveyed in toasts made to the King, the Church and professional pride. Elia’s approach to charity is carried through several other essays in which food and the poor subject are discussed. In ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’ (September 1822), Elia recalls suffering acute self-recrimination as a child over giving away to a London beggar a plum cake, specially baked for him by his aunt. The initial ‘sweet soothing of satisfaction’ (LM, 6, p. 248) quickly gives way to a deep sense of guilt at committing a thoughtless act in relation to the thoughtfulness of his aunt. Elia’s anger at his own ‘coxcombry of charity’, ‘impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of goodness’ (p. 248) arises not from a conviction that the beggar was an ‘imposter’ – as indicated in the last chapter and confirmed in the next, modes of performance in Elia usually convey positive values – but because he had acted in effect like the remote institutional authority attacked in the sweep and beggar essays. In ‘Poor Relations’ (May 1823), Elia opens with a catalogue of hostile impressions, ‘a piece of impertinent correspondency, an odious approximation … a haunting conscience … an unwel-

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come remembrancer’ (LM, 7, p. 533), through which to introduce a discussion of the importuned conscience as caused by the poor subject. The mysterious and proud friend of Elia’s father, John Billet, who regularly comes to dinner, however, betrays none of the poor relation’s pitiable characteristics. His stigmatized identity as such is only revealed in the very last line, after an incident in which Elia’s well-meaning aunt offends Billet with a patronizing faux pas. Thus emphasized is the importance of the poor subject’s pride and individual integrity, as indeed is Lamb’s overall aversion to pity whether it be directed toward the poor subject or himself. Finally, in ‘Captain Jackson’ (November 1824), the eponymous character’s celebrated, infectious ability to re-imagine humble meals into sumptuous banquets, despite being ‘steeped in poverty up to the lips’ (LM, 10, p. 483), echoes the transcendent carnival of the sweeps’ feast: whilst not acts of charity, the captain’s triumphant dinners similarly work to circumnavigate an attitude of pity. However, Elia gloomily informs the reader at the end of ‘Chimney-Sweepers’ that the sweeps’ feast has passed away with the death of James White (in 1820), along with the Fair’s traditional carnival spirit. He laments that ‘half the fun of the world … of my world at least’ has vanished with White’s death and the Fair’s related decline: ‘His old clients look for him among the pens; and, missing him, reproach the altered feast of St. Bartholemew, and the glory of Smithfield departed for ever’ (LM, 5, p. 408). The passing of Bartholemew Fair indeed seems indicative of the demise of Gatrell’s city of laughter. By the 1820s there was concern that an increasingly sprawling event had got out of hand, with cases of theft and violence on the increase. This was cited as the chief cause of its eventual and generally welcomed demise in 1855.41 Elia’s effusion thus ends by mourning the loss to the metropolis of spontaneous individualism itself, to the quickening march of institutional reform.

The Power of Inverse Argument By referring to the ‘bugbear MENDICITY’ (LM, 5, p. 532) in the opening sentence of ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’, Elia acknowledges the contentious nature of his subject. In the previous essay, the titular focus on praise rather than complaint re-engages the disaffected metropolitan reader. To the same end, praise of the subject in this essay is integral to complaint. Directed initially against a specific institution – the London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity – Elia attacks all such ‘societarian reformation’ as detrimental to basic human relations in the metropolis. In the process, the poor subject is again valorized in terms of its contribution to high art and popular culture alike.

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Founded in 1818, the Society perceived London’s beggars as an eyesore, a public nuisance and an unnecessary burden on the poor relief system. It accordingly investigated every individual case reported by its members, with the twofold objective of providing its own relief for all genuine cases and instigating legal proceedings against imposters, who were usually placed in the workhouse. Appearing in June 1822 and following ‘The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers’ in May, the essay’s attack on the Society in the opening paragraph develops the former text’s secondary tone of complaint. The Society’s autocratic self-importance is immediately identified: THE all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation – your only modern Alcides’s club to rid the time of its abuses – is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear MENDICITY from the metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags – staves, dogs, and crutches – the whole mendicant fraternity with all their baggage are fast posting out of the purlieus of this eleventh persecution. From the crowded crossing, from the corners of streets and turnings of alleys, the parting Genius of Beggary is ‘with sighing sent.’ (p. 532)

Elia’s favourite term for the presumptive reflex, ‘impertinence’, again appears as he bemoans ‘this wholesale going to work, this impertinent crusade … against a species’ (p. 532). The broom metaphor recalls Wordsworth’s address in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ to the reformers ‘Who have a broom still ready in [their] hands / To rid the world of nuisances’.42 A utilitarian ethos underpins the Society’s approach, to which a sceptical Lamb in the ‘Beggars’ essay is fundamentally opposed.43 The Society’s plans for sweeping away this underclass in the interests of the metropolitan middle class carries for Lamb the rationalistic inhumanity of Bentham’s ‘hedonic calculus’ for determining ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’.44 As a prime example of ‘societarian reformation’, the Society is seen as symptomatic of the seemingly indiscriminate and relentless ‘sweep’ of reform. The ethos if not the aims of the Suppression Society, for example, were very different to those of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor. If the Suppression Society evolved out of utilitarian principles and a mood of intolerance towards begging after 1815, caused by an ever-increasing poor rate, the very name of the other society implies a conversely 45 preventive approach. It is therefore through an attack on the former society that Elia again expresses opposition to all such organizations, for the perceived use of an arbitrary authority based on little knowledge or understanding of the poor subject and its relationship with the city. As with the acts of charity advocated in ‘The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers’ it is the individual and spontaneous initiative, free of any bureaucratic or autocratic systemization, which Elia espouses. In this, Lamb echoes Godwin, who in 1797 admits that he is willing to forsake a hostility to begging in principle when confronted in person: ‘I cannot consent

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to lending even my passive assistance, to the starving [of ] men to death, that the laws may be reformed’.46 What is indeed true of Lamb’s written style and way of thinking, an aversion to system typically self-represented as a weakness, becomes itself a point of principle in the sweeps and beggars essays. Elia again adopts an ironic pose of detachment, as the beggar’s contribution to the humanity of the city evokes the clinical language of economic calculation: ‘Much good might be sucked from these Beggars’; ‘Theirs were the only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the assessment’ (p. 532, italics added). At least with such personal acts of charity, Elia argues, there is no amount stipulated, unlike the institutionalized charity of the poor rates, which were presumably not felt to be ‘uninvidious in the levy’, or ‘ungrudged in the assessment’. Elia responds to the Society’s systemic intolerance by invoking the pious origins of mendicity: ‘They were the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism. Their appeals were to our common nature; less revolting to an ingenuous mind than to be a suppliant to the particular humours or caprice of any fellow-creature’ (p. 532). Turning the Society’s own titular term against it, Elia traces a direct line from the mendicant orders of Roman Catholicism to their modern metropolitan counterparts, the ‘Mendicants of this great city’ (p. 533). Indeed, Elia implies that the present-day beggars play perhaps an even more important spiritual role in the fallen, modern world of the metropolis. Elia borrows from Jaques’s bitter sentiment towards the aptly sweeping crowd in As You Like It: ‘Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens; / ’Tis just the fashion: wherefore do you look / Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?’47 Through his own experience as a crowd member, Elia likewise sees the crowd as needful of the beggar’s sobering presence: I can no more spare them than I could the Cries of London. No corner of a street is complete without them. They are as indispensable as the Ballad Singer; and in their picturesque attire as ornamental as the Signs of old London. They were the standing morals, emblems, mementos, dial-mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children … (p. 533)

Elia’s notion of a mendicant heritage and of the beggar as moral metropolitan palimpsest, presumably obviating the need for didacticism in the text itself, seems to owe something to J. T. Smith’s more or less contemporary book, Vagabondia, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London, with Portraits of the Most Remarkable Drawn from Life (1817). Smith’s popular book features thirty-one engravings of various examples, and undercuts its own condemnation of beggars as ‘disgusting nuisances’ with the sympathetic inclusion of life stories and mendicant history.48 As living, pseudo-religious text, then, the beggar serves to arrest the preoccupied crowd’s perpetual motion and reflect ‘salutary’ images of the city back at itself. Far from taxing its social conscience, Elia implies that the metropolis owes to the beggar the very existence of a conscience.

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As with the sweep, however, Elia also emphasizes the beggar’s secular significance, through the imaginative and affective realm of art and popular literature. The innate ‘dignity’ of the beggar, as ‘springing from the very depth of [his] desolation’, achieves a ‘heroic pity’, or receives ‘compassionate admiration’, in Van Dyke’s image of the Byzantine general Belisarius ‘begging for an obolus’ (p. 532), and his prominence within London folklore is established through reference to ‘The Beggar’s Daughter of Bednall Green’. Again dwelling upon the dramatic contrast itself between the highest and lowest strata of society instead of questioning the equitability of such a division, Elia rhetorically asks whether the tale of a nobleman reduced to a blind old beggar would have been more affecting if he had fallen merely to the status of shopkeeper. More dramatic and literary incarnations follow: King Lear, The Testament of Cresseid, ‘King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid’ from Percy’s Reliques, and the poetry of the ‘unfastidious’ Vincent Bourne, a highly popular eighteenth-century Latinist poet. The choice of Bourne’s verse to support Elia’s versioning of metropolitan life relates to the innate ‘Londonish’ quality Lamb elsewhere finds in it: ‘From the streets, and from the alleys, of his beloved metropolis he culled his objects, which he has invested with an Hogarthian richness of colouring’.49 Quoting and translating in full ‘A Dog’s Epigraph’, Elia recommends Bourne’s sentimental poem about the blind beggar Irus and his faithful dog for the same good that the real-life beggar does to ‘the moral sense of the passengers through the daily thoroughfares of a vast and busy metropolis’ (p. 534). When Elia does appear to discuss the beggar in terms of contemporary reality, moreover, his impression that the subject is to be envied rather than pitied still owes more to art than life. Drawing on a representation of the beggar as an emancipated figure, originating with St Augustine and developed in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,50 Elia upholds mendicity as an ideal state of humanity, distinguishable as such from the state of poverty. This, Elia proposes, is an expedient term for asserting social superiority in the manner in which poor relations are treated. Pity in such instances equates to ‘contempt’, where ‘Poor man reproaches poor man in the streets with impolitic mention of his condition, his own being a shade better, while the rich pass by and jeer at both’ (p. 533). Symptomatic of Elia’s inversely unpitying approach to charity, it is notable that ‘poverty’ crops up also in the ‘Night-Fears’ essay in the discussion of a relatively trivial aesthetic subject, that of Elia’s supposedly prosaic dreams. The ‘Beggar’, with the initial letter thus capitalized for effect, is free from such metropolitan self-aggrandisement. Even more than the carnivalized sweep, the beggar transcends the divisive social hierarchies upon which modern society is predicated: No rascally comparative insults a Beggar, or thinks of weighing purses with him. He is not in the scale of comparison. He is not under the measure of property. He confessedly hath none, any more than a dog or a sheep. No one twitteth him with ostentation

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above his means. No one accuses him of pride, or upbraideth him with mock humility. None jostle with him for the wall, or pick quarrels for precedency. No wealthy neighbour seeketh to eject him from his tenement. No man sues him. No man goes to law with him. If I were not the independent gentleman that I am, rather than I would be a retainer to the great, a led captain or a poor relation, I would choose, out of the delicacy and true greatness of my mind, to be a Beggar. (p. 533)

The bold conclusion to this line of argument is that the beggar ‘is the only free man in the universe’ (p. 533). Such a sentiment certainly accords with Elia’s ‘prison days’ in ‘The Superannuated Man’, as a desk clerk ‘without hope of release or respite’ (LM, n.s. 2, p. 67). It is complemented also by the atypical hell of the domestic metropolitan enclosure in ‘Popular Fallacies XII: That Home is Home Though it is Never So Homely’. Compared to the social freedom Elia’s beggar enjoys in the city without, here the ‘very poor man’ is psychologically as well as domestically imprisoned by the ever-pressing need to provide for his family: ‘All interests, real or imaginary, all topics that should expand the mind of man, and connect him to a sympathy with general existence, are crushed in the absorbing considerations of food to be obtained for the family’.51 Yet Elia’s suggestion that the beggar be envied as a paradigm of metropolitan emancipation should not, of course, be taken too seriously. It functions on a more practical level to distance the poor subject once again from the ‘pity alloyed with contempt’ that Lamb sees as informing the reformist urge (p. 533). Such scepticism again echoes Blake’s view of the poor subject. In the Experience poem ‘The Human Abstract’, pity is a belated, impotent response to social inequity: ‘Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody poor’.52 Elia’s Burtonian elevation of the beggar to a mythical status of freedom and self-sufficiency therefore works in the contemporary context to preclude reformist assumptions about the poor subject. By portraying the figure in positive, emancipated terms Elia counters the very sentimentality that justifies the beggar’s removal. This is because pity in the Society’s eyes amounts to a misplaced sympathy that makes a dupe of the virtuous donor and perpetuates rather than relieves mendicity. Pity is also removed from the charitable act in the anecdotal, real-life instance: taking the materialistic angle, Elia suggests from a newspaper story about a bank clerk who was left £500 in a blind beggar’s will that the reward for the credulous donor might be more tangible than expected. The plight of the blind beggar – ‘in what withering poor-house do they endure the penalty of double darkness … far from the sound of the cheerful and hope-stirring tread of the passenger?’ (p. 533) – also highlights the curious notion of communal interdependence in Elia’s metropolis. In Book VII of The Prelude (1805), between the mysterious faces of the crowd and the sub-human maelstrom of St Bartholemew’s Fair, the apparitional blind beggar impresses upon the poet a sense of the ineffability of the human condition against which

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he must pit his poetic insight. So strikingly symbolic of metropolitan alienation is this still, inscrutable figure, the barest details of his life pinned to his chest, the 53 poet feels ‘As if admonished from another world’. Lamb’s equivalent is typically the reverse of Wordsworth’s example. As ‘dial-mottos’, ‘spital sermons’, ‘books for children’ or the apocryphal Tobit (p. 533), Elia’s is a patently legible and meaningful figure who works against alienation, and who would admonish only if removed from the metropolis. The pièce de resistance of Elia’s complaint, however, is the ‘Elgin Marble’ beggar. Echoing the biographical sketches in Smith’s Vagabondia, this is the most vehemently lamented of the Society’s purported victims. Elia dwells at length here on a celebrated local character who presents a paradoxical embodiment of self-sufficiency. Having lost both legs in the Gordon Riots of 1780, prior to being removed from the streets under a charge of imposture this figure had wheeled himself around for forty years upon ‘a machine of wood’ (p. 534). A remnant of past civil disturbance since safely converted into metropolitan spectacle, thus ambiguously denoting something between edification and entertainment, his removal suggests an element of paranoid conservatism to the Society’s actions. Evoking some mythical beast, the beggar’s intimidating ‘portentious’ appearance as ‘half a Hercules’, with a ‘tremendous voice thundering and growling’ (p. 535), frightens passing horses. The sense of his belonging in and to the city, and drawing his very strength from it, is conveyed by the impression created of a human ‘mandrake’, literally rooted to the ground beneath the pavement: ‘He seemed earth-born, an Antaeus, and to suck in fresh vigour from the soil which he neighboured’ (p. 535). Pity is negated most effectively, however, through one particular topical reference among numerous other terms denoting self-sufficiency. The reference to him as ‘a grand fragment; as good as an Elgin marble’ (p. 535) suggests a curious sense of completeness, in addition to questioning a society which values classical, foreign art over a salutary element of local humanity. In the previous issue the London celebrates the acquisition of the ancient Greek sculptures, with a frontispiece illustration of the Ilissos and Hazlitt’s elaboration on an earlier essay of the ten aesthetic principles to be derived from the collection. In the first essay, appearing in the London in February 1822, Hazlitt focuses on the Ilissos to propose that the genius of the marbles lay in their being at once faithful and ideal copies of nature. They are, to Hazlitt, comparable to ‘nothing but human figures petrified’, with ‘every appearance of absolute facsimiles or casts taken from nature’ (LM, 5, p. 153). From the life-like quality of the ancient fragments, Hazlitt hypothesizes on the ‘proportions of entire limbs and divisions of the body’ that would originally have existed if the figures had indeed been formed from casts: these ‘complete’ figures, so strongly suggested to Hazlitt by the ‘majestic, colossal’ fragments, ideally combine ‘grandeur of design and exactness of detail’ (p. 154) in a principle expanded upon in the May essay.

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The two essays on the Elgin marbles amply demonstrate what Tom Paulin has observed of the significance of the Ilissos to Hazlitt: that his writings effect the anomaly of making what is a headless statue with partial limbs into 54 the ideal, or complete, work of art. Joshua Reynolds’s dictum that grandeur of design and exactness of detail are ‘incompatible’ is indeed ‘crippled’ by the example of the Elgin marbles, as expressed in Hazlitt’s apt choice of metaphor: ‘with [the marbles’] whole ponderous weight to crush it, it will be difficult to set this theory on its legs again’ (p. 154). Hazlit’s paradoxical notion of the whole and complete fragment is reused to deflect pity for the poor subject: the strength from the beggar’s ‘reft legs and thighs’ having ‘only retired into his upper parts’ (LM, 5, p. 535). Just as Hazlitt’s Ilissos represents a model of artistic perfection or completeness, so Elia’s mighty Elgin Marble beggar is represented as the ideal of self-sufficient humanity. Demonstrating the greater dexterity as essayist, Lamb effectively takes Hazlitt’s Illissos out of the museum and into the street, appropriating abstract theory and high art to the immediate and ‘low’ life of the metropolis. Relocated with it, perhaps, is the contemporary poetic vogue for the fragment, in an act of urban, prosodic appropriation which emphasizes Lamb’s centrality to a Romantic metropolitanism. The legless beggar’s self-sufficiency is, of course, the reason why he now suffers in ‘the restraint of the poor-house’, or ‘one of those houses (ironically christened) of Correction’ (p. 535). Having maintained relatively robust health, purportedly saved money for his child, and been seen to enjoy a repast with ‘a club of his fellow cripples’ (p. 535), he is deemed to have been acting disingenuously – or, simply to have been acting – and is accordingly charged before a House of Commons Committee. Fastidiously to evaluate authenticity in this way is, for Elia, to be blind to the bigger picture of the beggar’s metropolitan role: Was a daily spectacle like this to be deemed a nuisance, which called for legal interference to remove? or not rather a salutary and a touching object, to the passers-by in a great city? Among her shows, her museums, and supplies for ever-gaping curiosity (and what else but an accumulation of sights – endless sights – is a great city; or for what else is it desirable?) was there not room for one Lusus (not Naturae, indeed, but) Accidentium? … whom had he injured? whom had he imposed upon? The contributors had enjoyed their sight for their pennies. (p. 535)

A pivotal moment in the essay, Elia argues that donations to such supposedly undeserving cases should not be treated as abuses of good will but as remunerative pieces of street theatre or edifying spectacle, like any other in the city. Again, this is where Lamb’s urban beggar defines itself against Wordsworth’s rural model, in this case the old Cumberland beggar. Wordsworth’s variety is seminomadic, wandering over a wide district and stimulating the charitable instincts of small, isolated communities. As discussed in Chapter 2, like Wordsworth’s

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own ‘steadfast’ London beggar in The Prelude Lamb’s metropolitan beggars are conversely stationary, or at least confined to and associated with a single locality. They perform thus their edifying, redemptive role – whether or not from genuine need is immaterial – amongst the shifting, transient non-community that is the crowd. This ‘mandrake’ rootedness in an environment of constant flux makes the beggar not simply useful to, but constructive of, the metropolis, an anomalously permanent feature of its ever-changing ‘accumulation of sights – endless sights’. Elia’s complaint, then, seeks to balance the conflicting requirements of modern metropolitan life: to accommodate both modernity and tradition, and the material attractions of consumerism and spectacle with the fundamental need for meaningful human interaction and individual agency. Indeed to find an answer to the question, just what ‘is a great city’?

Theatre and Conscience Introduced by the Elgin Marble beggar, therefore, the purportedly abusive, aberrant figure of the impostor is vindicated by naturalization within the city’s theatrical constitution. Through ambiguously defining the metropolis in terms of ‘shows … and supplies for ever-gaping curiosity’, Elia argues for the utility of this supposedly parasitic social element. In so doing, a variation occurs on a muchdiscussed theme in literary representations of the beggar. Steele’s apparently condemnatory July 1712 piece for the Spectator on London’s ‘many Impostors’ is opposed by Elia’s view, yet still points the way to the city-as-theatre ethos prevalent in metropolitan writing a century later. Although Steele disapproves of beggarly imposture and espouses pity for the misery of genuine beggars, he anticipates Elia’s implicit concern about an increasingly cynical public: ‘I know not which of the two misapplies his Senses most, he who pretends himself blind to move Compassion, or he who beholds a miserable Object without pitying it’. Also, Steele’s self-undercutting sense of boredom with the impostor’s lack of originality foreshadows Elia’s condoning of ‘counterfeit’ begging as a mode of performance: ‘If we have nothing else for our Money, let us have more Invention to be cheated with’.55 Yet the alms-giver too is required to act in Elia’s theatre of charity. This is highlighted by the contrast Elia’s donor presents with the performance of Goldsmith’s model, notably in a rural setting, in The Citizen of the World (1762). In Letter 26, the philosophical Chinese narrator living in London is accompanied on a trip into the country by the self-contradictory ‘man in black’, a character of impulsively charitable tendencies he unsuccessfully attempts to conceal with statements of intolerance. He sternly opines on how poor relief in Britain seems only to encourage ‘idleness, extravagance, and imposture’, cautions against being ‘imposed upon by false pretences’ and recommends that impostors all be thrown

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in prison. His speech is interrupted, however, by the begging of a man supposedly ‘forced into the shameful profession to support a dying wife and five hungry children’.56 While the sceptical narrator remains unaffected, the man in black cannot disguise being deeply moved, and on noticing this the narrator discreetly looks the other way so that his companion can save face and surreptitiously relieve his charitable instinct whilst maintaining the appearance of hard-heartedness that marks an imposture of his own. Two similar occurrences follow before the next letter reveals the story behind the man in black’s inconsistent behaviour, one where experience has taught him the virtue of a scepticism his innate character finds impossible to put into practice. Immediately apparent here is the notion of charity as a natural human impulse, or the ‘effect of appetite rather than reason’.57 Goldsmith’s attitude is therefore pragmatic, and essentially Augustan: it implies that, although an admirable sentiment, the philanthropic urge must be controlled in a corrupt world if it is not to make of the subject a complete fool. For Lamb, however, in a post-Revolution age in which the reasserted power of reason as expressed in utilitarian reform threatens to overwhelm the spontaneous gesture, charity needs to derive from the essentially artificial source of acting or performance in order to survive. Unlike the part of unconvincing miser performed in a country setting by Goldsmith’s charitable figure, this is pretence along with the impostor’s which Elia is able to naturalize by locating it within a living environment of masquerade and theatre, the city. Perhaps epitomizing the mature, city-as-theatre aesthetic in Elia’s own time, however, is Pierce Egan’s hugely successful, serialized book, Life in London; or The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorne, Esq., and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis (1821). On one level, Egan’s and Lamb’s texts share an ambivalent notion of the impostor as just another of London’s shows. Yet the titular theme of complaint in Elia differentiates his essay as an ironic or knowing appropriation of the city-as-theatre detachment of Life in London. In one episode the eponymous adventurers are disguised as beggars in order to infiltrate a party of ‘cadgers’, thus immediately undermining any class superiority by implicating themselves in the same metropolitan propensity for performance as the low-life characters they observe. Here, at a disreputable inn, there is a raucous gathering of all manner of scamming beggar-types – including men supposedly blind or crippled, and women previously seen with starving children they had hired for the day – celebrating their ill-gotten gains. Like Steele’s piece a century earlier, Tom’s comments prior to the spree on an epidemic of cadging ostensibly express moral indignation: it almost staggers belief that mankind can be so debased; that hypocrisy should be so successful; and that the fine feelings of the heart should become so blunted as to laugh at the charitable and humane persons who have been imposed upon to relieve

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The organizations struggling against this tide of imposture are cited as the parish officers, the police and the Mendicity Society, as the same impersonal and transitory features of metropolitan life that justify the existence of Elia’s valorized beggar here facilitate the successful escape of an aberrant, criminal model. Yet despite his apparent disgust, Tom grandly presents the cadgers’ party to Jerry as a scene to outdo any of the other ‘rich scenes’ they have witnessed, ‘the Grand Carnival, or the Masquerade at the Opera House [being] nothing to it, in comparison.’59 There is indeed a jovial, chaotic vitality to the scene, as it appears in the accompanying illustration by George and Robert Cruikshank, the caption for which places Tom and Jerry as the principal performers, ‘masquerading it’. Finally, once they have escaped from the cadger’s party, Egan’s eponymous ‘heroes’ are more concerned with self-congratulation and the glib ‘enjoyment of such a portraiture of the versatility of the human character’,60 than any serious moral reflection. Typifying the representation of low urban life in the early nineteenth century, therefore, the image of theatre can indeed be seen to pervade Egan’s text, suggesting, in accordance with Epstein Nord’s analysis, ‘not only entertainment and performance but also a relationship of distance and tentativeness between spectator and the action on the stage’.61 But if the city-as-theatre aesthetic undermines Tom’s moral protestation about impostors, it instead works to support Elia’s converse complaint about attempts to eliminate them. Elia’s essay concludes with a direct address to the reader, who is told not to be ‘frightened at the hard words, imposition, imposture’, and exhorted to ‘give, and ask no questions’ (LM, 5, p. 536), whilst creating a reciprocal, simultaneous performance as credulous audience and knowing actor: Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the ‘seven small children,’ in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If he be not all he pretendeth, give, and under a personate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When they come with their counterfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which, concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether they are feigned or not. (p. 536)

The command to ‘act a charity’ calls for an imaginative investment in the city like that of believing in the noble ancestry of a sweep, and provides an alternative expression of Coleridge’s oft-used concept of ‘that willing suspension of disbe-

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lief which constitutes poetic faith’.62 Unlike the non-reflexive maskers, Tom and Jerry, therefore, Elia knowingly uses a notion of the city-as-theatre to attack as irrelevant the Society’s implicit search for authenticity. Such a liberal, tolerant attitude to imposture is, of course, entirely in keeping with Elia’s own propensity for identity play and its emancipative possibilities. Whereas Egan’s text presents the cadger as another of London’s shows simply for the reader’s entertainment, Lamb’s ostensibly similar treatment is integral to the defence of a particular notion of the city against the threat perceived from an opposing idea. This returns us finally, once again, to Lamb’s rural counterpart, Wordsworth. The social dynamic of Lamb’s metropolitan beggar may differ from that of Wordsworth’s rural variety, but a similar sense of pleasure in the impostor’s performance is curiously found in another Wordsworth poem. In the 1807 poem ‘Beggars’, although disbelieving the tale of woe he hears from a woman begging alms the speaker is still beguiled into charity by her exotic and proud beauty. He next encounters two healthy children happily playing, whom he is convinced are the woman’s offspring and not the orphans they claim to be when they too beg alms. Although this time he refuses and accuses them of telling lies, the speaker remains charmed by the blithe sense of innocence that belies their deceitfulness, thus leaving his own moral position ambiguous. Like Lamb, therefore, Wordsworth’s indulgent speaker challenges the reformist hostility towards imposture by viewing it instead as theatre. In ‘Night-Fears’, we recall, Elia ruefully reflects that ‘credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength’ (LM, 4, p. 385). In his ideal metropolitan world, however, credulity redeems adulthood. In appearing to dehumanize the beggar as part of the ‘accumulation of sights – endless sights’ of metropolitan spectacle, the city-as-theatre is not inimical but integral to social complaint, the beggar’s removal from sight representing for Elia an immediate threat to the basis of human interaction in the metropolis. Such a device therefore represents neither the conservative moral failure nor the magazine callousness that it at first appears to. Equally apparent in the figure of the laughing sweep and the performing beggar, the city-as-theatre becomes in Elia a practical means of engagement with the metropolis, through ironic detachment, the common language of the metropolis. In this way the sweep and beggar essays effectively reverse the approach for combating reformist zeal adopted in the ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ essay. In that instance, because the reformist position is predicated on condemnation of the subject Lamb enlists the reader’s sympathy by appropriating the affective first-person discourse of confessional literature. As a converse attitude of pity informs the reformist position over sweeps and beggars, however, Lamb’s response this time involves a pose of detachment which constructs an ostensibly unsympathetic reader-as-spectator. Lamb’s ethical position is therefore quite clear. The question of how to retain the agency of the individual amidst a nascent mass culture and the alienating tendency it gen-

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erates towards institutional systems of governance is the highly prevalent social issue with which Elia engages. In a rapidly expanding metropolis as the site of an ethically complex age of reform, it is not Lamb who is bemused into callousness, but the disaffected reader in Elia’s appropriate, and appropriative, response.

5 LAMB, THEATRICALITY AND THE FOOL

Did any of our readers ever notice the class of people, who hang about the stagedoors of our minor theatres in the daytime? You will rarely pass one of these entrances without seeing a group of three or four men conversing on the pavement, with an indescribable public-house-parlour swagger, and a kind of conscious air, peculiar to people of this description. They always seem to think they are exhibiting; the lamps are ever before them. Charles Dickens, ‘Astleys’, in Sketches by Boz (1836)1

Through a proliferation of theatre in a range of cultural forms, the London of Elia’s time represents a bona fide example, or historical actualization, of what has perhaps become a clichéd and over-abstracted association between the city and the theatre. Attempts at evoking the quintessential urban experience through the image of theatre can be easily undermined by the argument, deriving from the Freudian idea of the ego, that all human interaction involves performance of some description. The difference with early nineteenth-century London, however, is that beyond hypotheses on the historical prevalence of theatre in the city, a behavioural cult of ‘theatricality’ has been identified. Not only did theatre in this period arguably spawn the prototype for modern celebrity in the shape of Edmund Kean – a larger-than-life actor the fame (and infamy) of whose performances and personality alike rivalled that of those other subjects of the town’s talk, Beau Brummel and Lord Byron2 – but it seems to have permeated metropolitan society as social discourse. In the last chapter Elia was read in the context of a stylistic and abstract concept of theatre, as a literary mode of representing the city distinct from and unrelated to the actuality of the theatre in 1820s London. Some more broadly cultural studies, however, have described theatricality in terms of social behaviour and political activity derived from precisely that actuality, as instinctually appropriated from the model of stage and audience specific to early nineteenth3 century London. Theatricality in the present study combines both notions, in proposing a cultural discourse emanating from the contemporary stage and articulated in the periodical text. It involves the appropriation of imagery from – 149 –

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theatre to the representation of life inside, in the immediate vicinity and in the city beyond the playhouse. What emerges is a mode of writing in which theatre’s prominence in the city is indicated by its use as figurative language to evoke the experience of the city. So, what specifically constitutes this preternaturally theatrical city to which Lamb responds? In addition to the productions of the patent and numerous minor theatres there was a ubiquitous variety of performance, from fair and pleasure garden theatres, to penny gaffs, mountebanks, emotive sermons in Methodist chapels, and declamatory House of Commons speeches.4 Something of the magic of theatre could even be brought into the home, in the form of the hugely popular and impressively detailed toy theatre, or ‘juvenile drama’.5 The imposture of cadgers on the streets might even be included, blurring as it does the very distinction between theatre and city, and perhaps, after all, representing something more real than the sophistry of Lamb’s anti-reformist agenda. Here a dimension of meta-theatre is apparent, with the cadgers featuring in Moncrieff ’s highly successful stage adaptation of Pierce Egan’s Life in London at the Adelphi in 1821, as the city’s theatricality becomes itself the subject of the theatre. The role of the theatre itself in cultic theatricality is exhibited in the curious manner in which, according to Marc Baer, the ‘O. P.’ (Old Price) rioters of 1809 assumed the actor’s role in their attempts at disrupting the on-stage performance. In addition to the verbal replacement of an actor’s lines with those of their own, and masquerading in various props such as ‘red or white nightcaps, military hats, barrister’s wigs, large false noses, and coachmen’s coats’, Baer informs us, when the curtain rose the rioters ‘stood up and put their hats on’, and when it dropped ‘they sat down and uncovered their heads’.6 Instead of a violent departure from current norms of social behaviour, as the term ‘riot’ more typically implies, the paradoxically orderly disorderliness of the O. P. disturbances represents a natural extension, informed as they were by the ‘ritualized behaviour’ practised from the highest to the lowest orders of society, from the House of Commons to annual public events and national occasions.7 Corresponding with the theatricality of life outside the playhouse a form of social theatre was conducted within: as normal practice during the performance itself, there was ‘talking, laughing (but not at the stage), flirting, eating, drinking, walking about, condemning and praising with equal vociferousness, and a dozen other practises that gave life and colour 8 to the house’. Theatricality is therefore ideological, in that such public performance represents an unconscious social norm, determining a shared, mass identity. The theatre indeed recognized and pandered to the theatricality of its audience, the reciprocal relationship perpetuating the ideology. In 1821 the competitively spectacular Coburg installed a gigantic mirror-curtain, which, as Jane Moody observes, ‘brilliantly dissolved the boundary between the consumer and the

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object of consumption, allowing the spectators to become the subject of their own spectacle’.9 The most important criterion of theatricality for our purposes is, of course, how writers respond to it. Wordsworth’s encounter with the blind beggar in Book VII of The Prelude is once again highly informative. Along with the minimal life story pinned upon his chest, the ‘steadfast face and sightless eyes’ of the blind beggar constitute an ambiguous dumb show for the poet who as audience incorporates the ‘spectacle’ within the crowd’s ‘moving pageant’. The blind beggar and the crowd are in turn circumscribed by the perplexed poet of nature within an amoral maelstrom of social theatre: of ‘executions’, ‘a Street on fire, Mobs, riots, or rejoicings’ and, most memorably, a phantasmagorical St Bartholemew’s Fair, comprising ‘a type not false / Of what the mighty City is itself ’.10 Contrast the disorientation induced here by the surfeit of spectacle, to the feeling of peace and tranquillity Wordsworth ironically experiences when the city is eerily, unnaturally asleep, as in the sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ (1802). As will become apparent, the blurring of the boundary between the city and the theatre, and between theatre and theatricality, or legitimate and illegitimate theatre, disturbs Lamb too, but for the opposite reason. Whereas Wordsworth responds with bemusement to the city-as-theatre Lamb is inspired by it, with Elia’s aversion to domestic melodrama amounting to a rejection of its opposite, ‘the theatre as city’. Emerging equally from cultic, social theatricality and a body of dramatic criticism with a distinctly anti-theatre tendency, instigated earlier by Lamb himself and variously followed by Hazlitt, Hunt and Coleridge, Elia exchanges a ritualized and superficial audience response for a more meaningful reader response. An elitist sense of alarm from among Lamb and his peers, over the dissolution of theatre as high art amidst popular culture, is thus countered by the later, Elian Lamb, in a characteristic reconfiguration of theatricality from mass to individual terms. Therefore, because Lamb initiates opposition to a theatricality he later appropriates, the key peer figure against which Lamb’s metropolitanism is defined in this chapter is Lamb himself. The importance of the playhouse to this process of conversion, as another educative metropolitan enclosure, is highlighted in ‘My First Play’, a Prelude-in-miniature narrative describing the maturation of a theatrical consciousness.

The Growth of a Theatre-Lover’s Mind Appearing in the same December 1821 issue of the London as ‘My First Play’ is a John Hamilton Reynolds drama review, the unconscious theatrical discourse of which serves to emphasize a converse notion of individuation in Elia’s account of audience membership. Whereas Elia’s essay is about the potential for illusion and transcendence in theatre, Reynolds’s piece describes the brute annihilation

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of this attraction by theatricality. The audience’s unruly behaviour during an evening at Covent Garden for a new melodrama, The Strangeress, demands as much of Reynolds’s attention as the disrupted, legitimate performance on stage. In the description of a crush at the theatre doors ‘a pale frightened girl, gasping for breath, looks imploringly at her arm-pinioned father, who, black in the face from pressure, tells her “not to mind;” while a good-natured old stager desires her to push against him and ease her chest’ (LM, 4, p. 670). Reynolds’s dramatized audience ironically eclipses the insipid performance on stage, with the leading lady’s muted acting explained as a direct result of the audience’s presence: ‘There was a grief, but it was a grief comme il faut; restrained by the presence of spectators’; the ‘natural dignity’ and ‘evident want of vocal power’ make her seem as if scarcely acting at all in comparison with the audience, whose dramatic force is emphasized by ‘the well-meant but alarming tempest of encouragement which seems shaken like a hail-storm from every bench and rafter against the aspirant’ (p. 667). Growing impatient with the inactivity of the play’s hero one man attracts Reynolds’s attention with his own act, ‘winking his eyes, taking snuff, blowing his nose, and performing other little attempts at indifference till he could bear it no longer’ (p. 667). The jocular threat of violence from this performing audience member – ‘Zounds man! take her in your arms, and make an end, or we must fire the house to prevent being drowned!’ (p. 667) – prefaces the actual disruption of the play. The manager’s appearance on the stage to quell riotous demands for The Stranger to be performed is then itself presented as an integral part of the evening’s entertainment; his red and black attire ‘painted his temporary temper to the life’, as Reynolds, as if describing a ‘real’ performance, ‘cannot recollect ever seeing him put on such an angry, fighting face’ (p. 669). There is no hint that Reynolds’s alternative focus is deliberately ironic, that he or the audience he is describing were compensating for a lack of performance on the stage. The impression is created of superficial social observation instead of dramatic criticism, and that the reviewer would have been more interested in illegitimate than legitimate performance even if the former had not disrupted the latter. It is indeed uncertain as to the extent to which the audience and manager were themselves behaving in a theatrical manner, or Reynolds’s prose confers theatricality upon them. At any rate, there is collusion between a theatrical mode of behaviour and the writing which describes it. Although untypical of contemporary drama reviews per se this is a collusion which nevertheless manifests theatricality in the periodical, metropolitan text. ‘My First Play’ initially parallels Reynolds’s drama review by including a theatricalized representation of metropolitan life occasioned by a legitimate performance on stage. In other words the essay’s discourse of theatricality appears to emanate from the theatre itself, as the essay’s subject. Yet unlike Reynolds’s impersonal observational piece, Elia’s autobiographical account establishes the

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audience experience in terms of individuation as opposed to social conditioning. The dramatic character of Elia describes its own process of maturation into a theatre-lover, in which, after his initial obliviousness to its conventions, the child moves through disillusionment towards an adult’s appreciation of the artificiality of theatre. The essay thus culminates in a synthesis of two formative stages of audience response that reflexively describes the mature Elia as an empowered appropriator of theatricality, as a player of the fool. The sight of the doorway to the Old Drury theatre transports the ever-nostalgic Elia back forty years to the titular drama, to a rainy afternoon eagerly awaiting a promised visit to the theatre. The tickets have been procured by Elia’s godfather, ‘F.’ (Francis Fielde), a supplier of oil for theatre lamps, who, like the Old Drury’s doorway – ‘a portal of some architectural pretensions’ despite now being merely the entrance to a wine vault – has ‘pretensions above his rank’, in a self-fulfilling performance of grandeur which wins him the ‘highest parochial honours’ of his parish (pp. 603–4). F.’s friendship with the comic actor John Palmer is close enough to involve mutual and reciprocal mimicry, while F.’s house at Holborn, with Elia’s parents present, is claimed to have hosted the famous elopement of Sheridan and Maria Linley. Theatre is indeed highly infectious, as reliving the excitement of his initiatory theatrical experience seemingly causes Elia to perceive everything from that time, people, places and objects alike, in terms of theatre. And yet, as suggested in the previous chapter and emphasized in this one, theatre is a permanent or default mode of perception for Elia. His own theatrical tendencies emerge in his adoption of F.’s grandiloquence when visiting the Hertfordshire house bequeathed by his godfather. Echoing his emancipative identity-play at Oxford, Elia recalls the ‘stately habits of the donor descending upon me’, striding ‘with larger paces over my allotment of three-quarters of an acre, with its commodious mansion in the midst, with the feeling of an English freeholder that all betwixt sky and centre was my own’ (p. 604). Such impromptu ‘acting to the self ’ represents for Elia an integral part of everyday life, a superficially comical yet fundamentally human resource for extracting pleasure from even the most unpromising circumstances. It is the wholeheartedness of this acting that matters, for as Elia tells us in referring to the South-Sea accountant John Tipp, ‘He is the true actor, who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity’ (LM, 2, p. 144). The eccentric figures of the SouthSea clerks, the Old Benchers and Captain Jackson, in addition to Elia himself at Oxford and as the eponymous convalescent, are the essays’ clearest exponents of this ostensible foolishness. From a theatricalized domestic life, the essay turns to the experience of the theatre itself. The credulous child has no concept of its artificiality, as the glistening pilasters appear to him as ‘sugar candy’ (LM, 4, p. 604). Of the play itself, Artaxerxes, Elia recalls:

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine It was being admitted to a sight of the past. I took no proper interest in the action going on, for I understood not its import … All feeling was absorbed in vision. Gorgeous vests, gardens, palaces, princesses, passed before me. I knew not players. I was in Persepolis for the time; and the burning idol of their devotion almost converted me into a worshipper. I was awe-struck, and believed those significations to be something more than elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a dream. (pp. 604–5)

Elia is similarly awed on his next two visits. He comprehends neither the ‘clownery and pantaloonery’ nor the oblique social satire of pantomime, and the ‘hysteric affectations’ of Lady Wishfort’s character in Way of the World are misinterpreted as sincere self-expression (p. 605). The child’s inability to unpick the layers of meaning in these dramas about metropolitan life equates to an as yet undeveloped capacity to interpret the city in theatrical terms. Elia aptly likens his childhood response to pantomime to a bemusement over the ‘grotesque Gothic heads’ in the Temple (p. 605): both are metropolitan art forms which in their apparent banality lie beyond the child’s unsophisticated comprehension. This recalls the notion found elsewhere in Elia of an advantageous loss of innocence, in which acting, as ever, is crucial. Although the child’s response as audience matches the commitment of the childlike characters found elsewhere in the essays, for these innocent-experienced figures self-delusive performance is a desirable means of coping with the pressures of adult, metropolitan life. Elia’s reluctance to abandon the self to other-worldly fantasy reminds us of the ‘Night-Fears’ and ‘Blakesmoor’ essays, where such a realm is represented in terms respectively of nightmare and psychological crisis. Elia’s disappointment therefore at the dull reality the theatre presents on his return ‘six or seven’ years later – ‘In that interval what had I not lost!’ – merely marks an inevitable stage in his progress towards enjoying the theatre ‘upon a new stock’: I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist. The same things were there materially; but the emblem, the reference, was gone! – The green curtain was no longer a veil, drawn between two worlds, the unfolding of which was to bring back past ages, to present ‘a royal ghost,’ – but a certain quantity of green baize, which was to separate the audience for a given time from certain of their fellow-men who were to come forward and pretend those parts. (p. 605)

Like another metropolitan enclosure of Elia’s childhood, the Inner Temple, the ‘temple’ of the Old Drury enacts its educative function through a world where innocence and experience, and fantasy and reality coexist. The ‘green baize’ of the curtain is material, both in the sense of interwoven fabric and being of physical reality, yet the realization of this by the audience does not prevent the 11 play’s fabricated world from transcending that reality. The curtain’s green baize equates to the ‘drab pasteboard’ of the playing cards in ‘Mrs Battle’s Opinions on Whist’: just as dispensing with the pictures would eliminate ‘the beauty of cards’,

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Elia argues, and reduce the game to its utilitarian function as ‘mere gambling’ (LM, 3, p. 163), so a materialistic perception of the curtain as simply a means of dividing the theatre into audience and actors precludes the pleasure of stage illusion. Elia thus overcomes a sense of disillusionment in which the actors appear merely as ‘men and women painted’ (LM, 4, p. 605), to enjoy the theatre as theatre. Developing this Coleridgean suspension of disbelief subsequently enables Elia to respond with ‘genuine emotions’ to the performance of Mrs Siddons in Isabella (p. 605). Elia’s typical sense of balance here unsurprisingly departs from Lamb’s earlier ‘Play-house Memoranda’ (Examiner, December 1813), from which the idea for ‘My First Play’ apparently grew. Reappearing in the Indicator in December 1820 – thereby emphasizing the contrast between the earlier Lamb and the later Elian model – Lamb similarly recollects the ‘enchantment and a dream’ of his first play, yet conversely ends the essay with unmitigated anguish at his lost innocence: What should I have gained by knowing … that the royal phantoms which passed before me, were but such common mortals as I could see every day out of my father’s window? We crush the faculty of delight and wonder in children, by explaining everything.12

As a self-conscious association with the figure of the fool further illustrates, Elia’s scepticism towards the redemptive claims of unalloyed innocence expresses an altogether more sophisticated and fundamentally metropolitan character.

Palliation and the Fool As the eclectic guest list for Elia’s feast of fools in ‘All Fool’s Day’ suggests, Lamb’s interest in this figure adds to a long literary tradition, from Erasmus, Rabelais and Shakespeare, through Laurence Sterne, to Lamb’s contemporaries Southey and Wordsworth, and their respective poetic treatments of the idiot. The broader cultural heritage from which, in turn, such literature emanates exists in the idea itself of the Feast of Fools. Suppressed in the Reformation this was a burlesque of the clerical mass, a saturnalia dating back to the Middle Ages. Like the sweeps’ annual feast at St Bartholemew’s Fair it was an essentially carnivalesque event, and the appearance of both feasts in Elia provides evidence in Lamb of at least a tentative interest in such traditional, festive means of challenging the established order. However, it is the fool’s incarnation in comedic theatre, in pantomime and, as discussed later, artificial comedy, with which Elia’s love of this figure most clearly resonates. Along with melodrama, a new metropolitan version of pantomime had become hugely popular by the 1820s. Elia’s belated realization in ‘My First Play’ that Lun’s Ghost represented a ‘satiric touch’ (p. 605) upon John Rich’s cele-

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brated productions, indicates that the genre typically functioned at another level to that of buffoonery. The vanities and follies of female fashion and male dandyism were typically mocked, and in the ventriloquist songs of Grimaldi’s clown the speech rhythms and superficial patter or idiom of the town dramatized.13 Moreover, the city’s capacity for consumption of all manner of things, from the domestic to the cultural, is grotesquely imaged in the clown’s voracious appetite for food and drink: for him, Jane Moody observes, ‘London simply provided a glorious, inexhaustible miscellany of objects, both from nature and from culture, to be consumed or re-imagined through acts of comic reconstruction’.14 Elia’s own often humorous gourmand-motif suggests a similar ambivalence towards metropolitan consumerism, while the fool’s significance to Lamb’s essayistic persona seems also to be informed by the current state of comedic theatre: both by the dearth of artificial comedy lamented by Elia himself (as discussed later), and, conversely, the immense popularity of Grimaldi, who promoted the English 15 character of clown to the central figure of the Harlequinnade. Moreover, Elia’s polyphonic dexterity in ‘All Fool’s Day’ echoes something of Grimaldi’s pattering style, and Elia’s predilection for identity-play parallels that of Harlequin. Harlequin first appears in England as a magician with the power to transform himself into someone else, then through the Harlequinade as the transformed figure of a persecuted lover. While earlier being used to describe a story told in mime and dance, ‘pantomime’ in England originally meant ‘a player of several different parts’.16 Elia can be described in similar terms, as demonstrated by Phil-Elia’s reference to his ‘friend’ as an oddly inverted egoist for whom the ‘first person’ was merely a whim, ‘his favourite figure’ (LM, 7, p. 20). Phil-Elia alludes to Elia’s appropriation of the identity (Coleridge’s) of a poor country boy in the essay on Christ’s Hospital as an example of a propensity to ‘imply and twine with his own identity the griefs and affections of another’, thereby ‘making himself many, or reducing many unto himself ’ (p. 20). Evoking the fool’s imbecility within this characteristic, Elia’s admission in ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ that ‘I cannot sit and think’, that books ‘think for me’ (LM, 6, p. 33), suggests a mind preternaturally both blank and receptive, hence predisposed to a clown-like, playful juxtaposition of different voices. The fool’s epistemological uncertainty as a simultaneously mindless and insightful figure clearly informs, in Phil-Elia’s analysis, Elia’s irresponsible play with irony’s ‘dangerous figure’ and his indecorous habit of interrupting ‘the gravest discussion with some light jest [which is] yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it’ (LM, 7, p. 20). Moreover, Elia’s habitual pose of self-belittlement, or a ‘general aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable character’ (pp. 20–1), suggests, crucially, not so much the fool itself as a desire to identify with this figure, hence to enjoy both his freedom from worldly cares and his license for social critique. As we have seen, Elia draws heavily on the

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image of the emancipated beggar as a politically expedient means of opposing the utilitarian reformers bent on the incarceration of this socially aberrant figure. Elia’s similar admiration for the less vulnerable fool proper, however, seems to be more genuine or unconditional: the declaration, ‘I love a Fool – as naturally, as if I were of kith and kin to him’ (LM, 3, p. 362), evokes the intimacy of the rela17 tionship and naturalness of the act. Phil-Elia himself embodies the propensity he identifies in his ‘friend’ to thus play or act the fool: that is, to incorporate the figure into a more rounded or complex character. In the first half of ‘All Fool’s Day’ Elia invokes in an erratic and pantomimically irreverent style a range of famous fools and self-consciously exploits the traditional paraphernalia of cap and bells, baubles and hobby-horse. Foolery indeed permeates the essay in its skittish intertextuality, the playful manner in which acts of folly are alluded to and in the use of a clown-like, irregular and polyphonic patter. Opening with a seasonal greeting to his ‘worthy masters’, Elia claims the day as a ‘general festival’ of carnivalized social relations: Many happy returns of this day to you – and you – and you, Sir – nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another? what heed of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch of that same – you understand me – a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. (p. 361)

Recalling the emancipatory spirit of his Oxford vacation, Elia declares his liberation for the day from an oppressive corporate identity. The addressees are his disconcerted social superiors, the corporation’s worthy masters suddenly confronted with the levelling ‘motley’ of universal humanity. The acting that Elia exhorts them to is again pivotal: instead of masking an implicit notion of genuine selfhood, as in the negative, more usual definition, in common with the ‘Night-Fears’ theory it accesses a primal or childlike consciousness denied by an adult world of self-aggrandizement. As Hazlitt argues in his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1818), such suppressive egoism is shown in a tendency to laugh only at the other and deny the laughable in the self: We laugh to shew our satisfaction with ourselves, or our contempt for those about us … We laugh at fools, and at those who pretend to be wise … at that in others which is a serious matter to ourselves … at those misfortunes in which we are spectators, not sharers.18

Within the parallel sense of superiority generated by the imperial metropolis, ‘with four quarters of the globe on our side’ (p. 361), Elia and his masters can surely, the argument goes, afford one day in the year to relieve the pressure of worldly responsibility by laughing at themselves.

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Elia’s wistful identification with the fool’s privileged position as he sees it, accords with Enid Welsford’s observation that, just as ‘the Stage-clown … is … naturally detached from the play’, and ‘the Court-fool is detached from social life’, so ‘the fool’s most fitting place in literature is as hero of episodic narrative, or as the voice speaking from without and not from within the dramatic plot’.19 This is a detached role that once again complements the formal and commercial conditions of writing for the London Magazine. Elia’s identification with the fool effects a casual essaying of human insight, commensurate with the suggestiveness of the essay form and the urbanity of the magazine’s projected self-image. His avoidance of narrative continuity, an avoidance that removes Elia from ‘the fluctuations of fortune in fiction – and almost in real life’ (LM, 4, p. 28), is reflected equally in the desultoriness of and between the essays, the extra-essayistic plurality of his identity, and in the fool’s marginal social position. As host to a feast of fools, Elia calls into a circle in the London’s contemporary metropolitan environment a collection of the world’s greatest fictional and factual examples. Mastery of and enthusiasm for the subject is evident in a dense, rapid succession of irreverent, skittish references and allusions to mythological and historical narratives, and polarized notions of depth and height to suggest the sheer scale of man’s ability both to celebrate and commit folly: Empedocles’s dive into the fiery depths of Etna to prove himself a god is paralleled with a cliff-top scene in King Lear, and Cleombrutus’s plunge into the sea to find Plato’s Elysium contrasts with Gebir’s construction of the doomed tower of Babel in Landor’s poem. To allow the fool’s idiom full expression, moreover, all rational discourse is mocked or forbidden. The weeping Alexander is ridiculed thus, ‘cry, baby, put its finger in its eye, it shall have another globe, round as an orange, pretty moppet!’ (LM, 3, p. 362), and a more immediate subject, Hazlitt – significantly changed to the less metropolitan Duns Scotus in the collected version – is told ‘I cannot indulge you in your definitions’, with the added edict, ‘We will have nothing said or done syllogistically this day’ (p. 362). Elia’s knowledge and skilful stage-management are also apparent in his grouping together of Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s ‘golden age’ Elizabethan fools, and Empedocles, Cleombrutus and Landor’s Gebir all being linked by Milton’s ‘Paradise of Fools’ in Book III of Paradise Lost. This amiable and inclusive fool’s banquet is therefore humorously incongruous with Milton’s admonishing and excluding Paradise of Fools. Instead of being cast out, to ‘Fly o’er the backside of the world far off / Into 20 a limbo large and broad’, Elia’s feast reclaims the fool’s rightful place in a fallen world. That this festival, again like the sweeps’ feast, is relevant to the modern metropolis, is suggested above all by the immediate equivalent Elia finds in the notorious Monument on Fish Street Hill to the tower of Babel, as a monument to human vanity.21

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Having hosted his fool’s banquet, Elia explains the fool’s attraction for him. His affinity typically emanates from childhood and an unorthodox sympathy instinctively felt towards the fools in the Parables: from the ‘kindliness, that almost amounted to a tendre’ of the child’s feelings towards the five virgins, emerges the adult’s experience of finding true friendship only with those, ideally like G. D., who have ‘some tincture of the absurd in their characters’ (pp. 362– 3). Despite having grown ‘sophisticated’ as he describes it in ‘New Year’s Eve’, Elia readily ascribes to himself in that essay the characteristics of the fool: ‘light, and vain, and humorsome … a stammering buffoon … [a] stupid changeling of five-and-forty’ (LM, 3, p. 6). The importance of the fool to Elia’s metropolitanism is clear. Above all this figure dissolves defensiveness and the mercenary mindset: ‘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. I love the safety which a palpable hallucination warrants’ (LM, 3, p. 363). The fool’s negated ego translates into the self-empowering, inverted ego of Elia’s artificial version, again historically positing Elia as antidote to the implosive competitiveness Lamb witnessed in the Cockney dispute and the magazine milieu out of which it grew. Such alternative metropolitanism is further illustrated by the mock Chinese parable in ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’. The fool here is a ‘great lubberly boy’, Bo-bo, whose name evokes the Spanish theatrical tradition of the Bobo or Booby.22 Like the Spanish model, Elia’s Bo-bo is a country lout who acts as a butt or foil to more serious characters. When Bo-bo accidentally burns down his father’s pig farm, he equally inadvertently discovers roast pig: first the boy then his initially furious father succumb to gluttony, so to feed their appetite they repeatedly rebuild then raze the farm to the ground. They are acquitted at a court in Peking when the judge and jury taste the roast pig for themselves, leading to a pig-burning anarchy with house-fires spreading across the land and insurance businesses closing down, until the safer domestic practice of cooking the meat eventually prevails. In thus causing a chaotic, destructive epidemic of sensual gratification, the fool functions in this essay less as a pantomimic satire on consumerism than as a sort of safety valve for the relentless, soul-destroying work ethic of an industrialized or urbanized society. As Elia concludes in ‘The Superannuated Man’, ‘A Man can never have too much time to himself, nor too little to do’, before expressing his wish for a literally seismic event to destroy industry once and for all: ‘Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those accursed cotton mills?’ (LM, n.s. 1, p. 73). The ‘Roast Pig’ essay indeed effects an ironic twist on Welsford’s proposal that the ‘serious hero focuses events, forces issues, and causes catastrophes; but the Fool by his mere presence dissolves events, evades issues, and throws doubt on the finality of fact’.23 As previously observed, the same deflationary folly is apparent in ‘Mrs Battle’s Opinions on Whist’, in Elia’s potentially endless ‘idle folly’ of ‘sick whist’ (LM, 3, p. 165), and in the self-

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mockery of the convalescent, whose hypochondria demonstrates ‘How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself !’ (LM, 12, p. 376). Thus emerges the anomaly of the fool, that there is nothing ultimately threatening about his indecorous behaviour. As Roy Porter says of the fictional version in relation to the ‘mad outsider’ or ‘authentic’ fool: ‘it challenged order, but it dissolved its own rebellion in laughter’.24 Anarchy only descends in ‘Roast Pig’ when everyone behaves like Bo-bo, or would do so if All Fool’s Day were celebrated every day. Whether we laugh at the fool for being intrinsically derisory or with him for deriding society, his very existence depends on the dominance of that society. Elia’s ‘Guy Faux’ essay (November 1823) suggests that the real threat to the social order comes not from the carefree and careless species, but from a dedicated conspirator whose fanaticism disguises him as a fool or a madman (LM, 8, p. 477). Instead of striving to destroy an oppressive system and replace it with a supposedly more equitable one, as Guy Faux does, the fool implies that all such systems are evidence of man’s natural tendency to self-oppression. ‘The Fool does not lead a revolt against the Law’, proposes Welsford, but instead ‘leads us into a region of the spirit where, as Lamb would put it, the writ does not run’: the existence of the Saturnalia and the Feast of Fools, and the popularity of Falstaff, Eulenspiegel, Punch and Bertie Wooster, all suggest that the fool may act as a social preservative by providing a corrective to the pretentious vanity of officialdom, a safety valve for unruliness, a wholesome nourishment to the sense of secret spiritual independence of that which would otherwise be the intolerable tyranny of circumstance.25

The fool reconciles rather than reforms, as implied by Elia’s care ‘not to protract our Fool’s Banquet beyond its appropriate day’ (LM, 3, p. 362). Celebrating All Fool’s Day serves the same purpose for Elia as watching artificial comedy. Equally in their own way they access ‘a world with no meddling restrictions’ (LM, 5, p. 306), as a means for reconciling the middle-class manin-the-street – a desk clerk like Elia himself – to his wage-earning yoke or more generally the everyday mundane. As Elia assures us, ‘I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom’ (p. 306). As a species of foolery, artificial comedy indeed works to sharpen or refresh the conscience, a vital faculty which if ‘stimulated with perpetual appeals [becomes] dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be’ (p. 308). The fool alleviates alike middle-class angst and the greater suffering of the poor subject, the latter suggested by the Hogarthian sweep’s ‘joy, snatched out of desolation’ (LM, 5, p. 406) over Elia’s clownish tumble in the street. In fact, the individual act of charity with which Elia opposes the institutional solution to poverty can be said to pit palliation, a temporary respite from suffering, against the more

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ambitious concept of melioration, the desire to improve life by eradicating suffering (or, less honourably but of equal ambition, removing it from sight). Leigh Hunt’s melioristic, radical sense of the fool’s place in metropolitan life highlights Lamb’s palliative model. The fool affords Elia’s metropolitan subject a precious but innocuous illusion of superiority, an innocent pleasure which seems at first to accord with Hunt’s celebration of pantomime in the Examiner on 5 January 1817: The Clown is a delightful fellow to tickle our self-love with. He is very stupid, mischievous, gluttonous, and cowardly, – none of which, of course, any of us are, especially the first; and as in these respects, we feel a lofty advantage over him, so he occasionally aspires to our level by a sort of glimmering cunning and jocoseness, of which he thinks so prodigiously himself, as to give us a still more delightful notion of our superiority … We have a right to enjoy a good notion of ourselves in a pleasant way, and as long as we are all merry together; and here we enjoy it with all the advantages of harmlessness. We imagine our superiority, and that is enough …26

Hazlitt’s more negative view of laughter a year later, as the egoistic impulse to assert superiority over the other, inverts Hunt’s positive notion of its political potential, in which such a supposedly ‘harmless’ pleasure is claimed as a libertarian ‘right’. The capacity which Hunt sees in pantomime to dramatize human rights indicates a radicalist agenda, a position confirmed in a further piece on pantomime three weeks later. Pantomime is seen here as currently offering ‘the best medium of dramatic satire’, with Hunt gleefully imagining Harlequin’s wooden sword administering deserving blows to a procession of politically suggestive miscreants, including ‘the hypocritical’, ‘the traitorous’, ‘the canting’, ‘the oppressing’ and ‘the cloaker of conscious ill by accusation’.27 To ‘cloak’ is a cognate of palliation, so the difference between Lamb’s and Hunt’s idea of the fool is clear, with Lamb opposing Hunt’s politicization of the fool as a contradiction of its defining spirit. The warning to the reader which ends ‘All Fool’s Day’, against making a fool of himself by finding meaning in Elia’s words ‘beyond their fair construction’ (LM, 3, p. 363), goes against what Hunt asks of his reader. Appearing between the two pieces on 12 January is an editorial by Hunt which, in the wake of Waterloo, damns Europe’s ‘half-witted despots and the breakers of promises’.28 Harlequin’s chastising thumps are thus made to appear even more suggestive, through the specific interposition of this political context. Unlike Lamb, therefore, Hunt sees potential in the theatrical fool for subversion. Elia’s warning against abuse of the fool’s innocence conversely implies that its role is, again, that of palliation and reconcilement. Yet fool or not, the reader naturally is inclined to guess at what lies behind the ‘fair construction’ of Elia’s words, indeed to recognize as Viola does of the clown in Elia’s favourite Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night, that through using a 29 fool-loving persona Lamb is ‘wise enough to play the fool’. The issue of the

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degree to which Elia plays with ‘that dangeous figure, irony’ constantly arises; how sincere the assertion of ‘literary dignity’, mortification at the ‘poverty’ of his dreams, or confessional anguish as the drunkard. Through the inverted ego and a whimsical, indirect style, Elia’s seriousness – or the fool’s innocence – is always in doubt, the essays’ layered meaning frequently playing with the reader’s expectations and undermining any sense of interpretive control, or perhaps more appropriately, authority. What the above warning seems to allude to, then, is the importance of the actor to the act of writing, and implicitly, of course, reading. As we have seen, Elia repeatedly encourages the reader to take his words at face value before later words reveal that they have formed an educative imposture, and makes great, often extra-essayistic, play of having fooled the reader into a misreading. A reflexive echo of Elia’s reader-fooling propensity is sounded by his admiration for Robert Bensley’s capacity to deceive the audience, as in his Iago: ‘No spectator from his action could divine more of his artifice than Othello was supposed to do’ (LM, 4, p. 174). Acting the fool and fooling the audience/reader through acting are interchangeable and equally integral to Bensley’s and Elia’s theatrical art. Lamb self-consciously plays the fool in the interests of a more sensitive, ‘deeper’ reading, by correctively making fools of superficial, ‘bad’ readers, and rewarding existing ‘good’ readers with a laugh at recognizing the joke. The model here is surely that of the theatre, with the essayistic figure of ludic imposture replacing the actor, and the attentive or inattentive, sometimes querulous reader, the audience. One particular pre-Elian essay indicates that the relationship between writing and performance, and reading and spectatorship, was of great and long-standing interest to Lamb. In his essay for Hunt’s short-lived magazine, the Reflector, ‘On the Acting of Garrick and the Plays of Shakspeare [sic] Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation’, Lamb famously proposes that the psychological complexity of characters such as Hamlet and Lear cannot be adequately represented on stage, because ‘there is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do’. Theatre audiences respond largely to the surface effects of the performance, Lamb asserts, ‘the impressions we take in at the eye and ear at the playhouse’, as opposed to the deeper ‘truth’ of Shakespeare’s characters to be gained by reading the plays.30 Lamb thus privileges the reader’s experience over the audience’s, a position Elia ironically maintains through a reader-response model which instead parallels the audience’s. Elia achieves this through evoking a native and corporeal presence amid the cityscape: at Christ’s Hospital, the Temple, the South-Sea House and the Old Drury, or by traversing the city as in ‘The Old and the New Schoolmaster’. This sense of corporeality is encapsulated in the ‘Stones of old Mincing-lane’ in ‘The Superannuated Man’, which, Elia tells us, ‘I have worn with my daily pilgrimage for six and thirty years’ (LM, n.s. 1, p.

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72). Margaret Russett notices the same illusory physicality in her likening of the opium-eater to Elia as a ‘magazinist’ persona, the ludic ‘impersonations’ of which achieve for its creator the status of ‘minor author’: ‘Allured by familiar places and objects … the reader’s gaze is arrested just short of full identification by a refusal of contractual presence’,31 or, the revelation of the author’s true identity. The imagined metropolitan reader is thus beguiled into an impression of Elia as a real person, as real as the London he supposedly inhabits and the quotidian world to which the reader himself belongs. This placement of the reader in an audiencelike mode of perception – according to Lamb’s own definition in the essay on Shakespeare – is offset by those various invocations of fictive licence, as discussed in Chapter 3, that bring the narrow materialism of his own vision to the reader’s attention. Lamb thus uses Elia to subvert theatricality, or the appeal of the body as spectacle, to redeem the audience-like reader from the theatricalized crowd by making him into an ideal, imaginative reader, and in the process empowering the ‘minor’ periodical author as a phantasmal, emancipatory figure.

The Anti-Theatrical Reader Janet Ruth Heller has claimed of Lamb’s Shakespeare essay that it is consistent with the author’s overall advocacy of reading as a creative, empowering act, and argues that the essay therefore anticipates seminal twentieth-century theories on reader response and film narrative by Wolfgang Iser and Seymour Chatman.32 It might be added that through Elia’s implied reader Lamb puts into practice that which he merely preaches in his earlier essayistic incarnation. Lamb’s appropriation of theatricality and the fool to a notion of the readerly text combines an earlier ‘anti-theatre’ sentiment which privileges the reader’s experience over the audience’s, with an alternative celebration of artificial comedy and comic actors. Four years prior to the Shakespeare essay, the above sentiment is implicit in Charles and Mary’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807), a project designed essentially to introduce children to the nation’s greatest playwright through the erasure of theatre. Equally indicative is the fact that Lamb himself had failed as a playwright, with the only one of his four attempts to make it onto the stage, the farce Mr H., lasting in Britain for just the one famously disrupted performance at Drury Lane in 1806.33 Perhaps this personal disappointment informs to some degree the stance Lamb takes in 1812, in the Shakespeare essay. Certainly, Lamb’s unfulfilled intention, as stated at the end of the Reflector version of the essay, to reapply its principles at a later date to the comedies, is only partially explained by the untimely demise of Hunt’s magazine in 1812. It also indicates, perhaps, a pre-Elian uncertainty in Lamb as to the cultural role of comic theatre, or indeed an uneasy sense of theatre’s contamination through this genre by mass theatricality.

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The removal of Garrick’s name in the revised title of Lamb’s essay for the Works edition of 1818, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation’, pushes Shakespeare’s name to the fore and signals the essay’s anti-theatre sentiment. The essay opens with a negative sense of theatre’s detachment from everyday life, the very feature Elia celebrates in his essay on artificial comedy. Whilst walking in Westminster Abbey Lamb is struck by the inappropriateness of the monument to Garrick, which within this sobering environment takes on the pantomimic image of a ‘harlequin figure’: ‘I was not a little scandalized’, Lamb complains, ‘at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities’. The ‘farrago of false thoughts and nonsense’ of the inscription puffs the actor up to the same level of genius as the playwright, Garrick being credited with breathing new life into what had become the dead ‘forms’ of Shakespeare: this leads Lamb to condemn the city’s theatrical misappropriation of Shakespeare from Garrick’s day onwards, whereby ‘every performer in his turn, that has had the luck to please the town in any of the great characters of Shakspeare’ is eulogized as ‘possessing a mind congenial with the poet’s’.34 Lamb then denigrates theatre itself for having been contaminated by theatricality, by implying that the former represents little more than an extension of the city’s inane propensity for spectacle. This association becomes clearer when we refer to the Oxford English Dictionary’s similarly derogatory definition of theatricality, as behaviour ‘extravagantly or irrelevantly histrionic; stagy; calculated for display, showy, spectacular’. Implicitly, that is, the gratuitously spectacular, inane progeny of the relatively profound and sophisticated ‘high’ art of theatre itself. The ‘juvenile pleasure’ Lamb recalls from first seeing Shakespearian tragedy performed by Kemble and Siddons proves costly, as the spectacle of the actors’ performance thereafter disables his imagination. Theatre is therefore little more to Lamb than a cheap metropolitan trick that satisfies only temporarily and leaves behind a jaded spectator: When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance. How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions thus crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness, with which we turn to those plays of Shakspeare which have escaped being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the same writer which have happily been left out in performance.35

Hence to Lamb’s famous verdict that ‘the plays of Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever’.36 Ironically enough, given the character’s own obsession with theatre, Hamlet’s

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complexity in particular prescribes for Lamb a sanctified, homogenous relationship between the reader and the anti-theatre text. Almost all of Hamlet’s character, Lamb claims, involves dialogue with himself. Just as Hamlet’s most profound moments arise from ‘the effusions of his solitary musings, which he retires to holes and corners, and the most sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth’,37 so the most meaningful engagement with the play is to be achieved by retiring, away from the theatre and the city, to a quiet, secluded environment in which to read the text. In typical fashion, Elia adapts and assimilates this earlier, un-metropolitan model of reading to a coherent, metropolitanized self. Lamb’s disillusionment over theatre’s ‘flesh and blood’ materialism parallels the immature Elia’s sense of ‘men and women painted’ (LM, 4, p. 605) in ‘My First Play’, and the generic ‘strait-lacing actuality’ of tragic theatre in the essay on Shakespeare becomes for Elia a modern malaise against which is set the unreality of artificial comedy. But perhaps most revealing of Elia is Lamb’s sense of the naturalness of Shakespeare’s plays. In disputing the common usage of this term to suggest Shakespeare’s accessibility, Lamb asserts that the plays ‘are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies out of the reach of most of us’.38 This shallow-minded crowd, epitomized by the ignorant audience for whom the theatre makes only a vulgarized Shakespeare accessible, implies a post-Garrick society so conditioned by theatre that it is no longer capable of recognizing the human insight a non-performed Shakespeare offers. The pre-Elian Lamb therefore presents an essentially conservative model of theatre, a plebeian entertainment confined to a legitimized stage without its crass, mass artificiality contaminating public life. The essay implies, therefore, that the very act of reading has the potential to liberate the individual from the city’s ritualized performances. This is a message that obviously concurs with the fact of Elia’s written form, even while his more positive notion of theatricality argues that acting is integral and not inimical to metropolitan life. In the intervening years between the Shakespeare essay’s first appearance in 1812 and Elia’s arrival in 1820, Lamb’s reservations over theatre are variously taken up by Hunt, Hazlitt and Coleridge, so that it becomes a defining tenet of 39 Romantic criticism. The proliferation of closet drama in the early nineteenth century has similarly been seen as the effect of a Romantic hostility to, or at least problem with, theatre, as an expression of either shifting values in criticism or changes undergone by the theatre itself.40 As far as the latter is concerned, in response to changes in the nature and demands of the audience it seems likely that the theatre really had, in a sense, become more theatrical, hence less conducive to the subtle nuances of drama. An account in 1816 by ‘Dramaticus’ complains that:

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine at theatres where [the public] can neither hear nor see, they must have the stimulus of perpetual and expensive variety to make them come at all, and to keep them in tolerable good humour when they are there, their sense of hearing is only to be gratified by noise, and their sense of seeing by glare.41

The reverse may also be true, that a different type of audience was created out of changes in the organization and physical structure of theatre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Covent Garden and Drury Lane were enlarged and rebuilt in this period and the minor theatres began to challenge their monopoly, changes that perhaps ‘necessitated spectacle, performing animals and coarsened acting styles in order that spectators distant from the stage could hear and see properly’.42 Whatever the reason/s, the relatively decorous, classical style of theatre epitomized by the acting of Charles Kemble was being eclipsed at this time by a trend for more energetic performance and spectacular entertainment, a trend reflected in the huge success of Edmund Kean. Theatricality indeed seems to have absorbed its progenitor, the theatre, and from such satiety of spectacle, the very act of reading becomes reactive. In each of the anti-theatre writings, the genius of Shakespeare exposes theatre’s supposed limitations. In the Examiner for 26 February 1815, visiting a playhouse for the first time since his release from prison to see Kean’s Richard III, Hunt’s expectations that the latest stage sensation would deliver the theatre from ‘the artificial style of the actors lately in vogue’, are frustrated: Kean, whose controversial originality had led Hunt to believe that the actor might do greater justice to Shakespeare than the classicism of the Kemble school, is deemed no better than ‘a first-rate actor of the ordinary, stagy class’, who only occasionally touches the ‘truth and originality’ of Richard’s character.43 In the same magazine’s review of Kean’s Richard II on 16 March, Hazlitt also echoes Lamb’s anti-theatre stance. In addition to Siddons’s, Kean’s acting is cited as the only exception Hazlitt is prepared to make to an intention never to see Shakespeare acted. Like Lamb, Hazlitt sees the theatre’s instantaneous appeal to the senses rather than the reflective mind as precluding the empathetic depth of experience gained only by reading the plays: Not only are the more refined poetical beauties and minuter strokes of character lost to the audience, but the most striking and impressive passages, those which having once read we can never forget, fail comparatively of their effects except in one or two rare instances indeed. It is only the pantomime part of tragedy, the exhibition of immediate and physical distress, that which gives the greatest opportunity for ‘inexpressible dumb show and noise’ which is sure to tell, and tell completely on the stage.44

In his 1818 Lecture on The Tempest, Coleridge adds his name to the anti-theatre group with an assertion that the ‘sympathetic imagination’ is stimulated

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‘from within’, without the aid of stage illusion ‘where so much is addressed to the mere external senses of seeing and hearing, [that] the spiritual vision is apt to languish’.45 Admittedly, for all the unintentionally pantomimic qualities of Kean’s tragic performances, Hazlitt shows an appreciation of the actor’s spectacular ‘energy, ingenuity, and animation’.46 However, this is clearly considered a second-rate success: Kean only excels within the showy, degraded milieu of contemporary theatre, a (regrettably) dominant world he epitomizes. Only in Lamb is there a later change of direction towards theatricality. This inheres in a difference of approach to the same fundamental issue, that of the crowd and the mass culture it engenders. The pre-Elian Lamb blames theatre for creating mass culture, whilst the Elian incarnation locates in theatre a means of salvation. The change in Lamb’s essayistic practice, furthermore, reflects the belief behind Elia that the crowd can, and should, be educated, or turned into sympathetic readers. Without Elia’s readerly, ludic self, the earlier Lamb is implicitly not interested in converting readers from the theatricalized mass. Despite the Shakespeare essay’s trenchant advocacy of readers over audiences, the relatively remote figure of the essayist here suggests he would not have things any other way. He remains aloof by preaching only to the converted, ensuring that a selfjustifying distance between high and low culture is maintained. Lamb therefore changes with Elia from writing in resistance to theatre, to the use of theatre in writing against mass culture.

All the City’s a Stage The account of Elia’s maturation as a theatre-lover in ‘My First Play’, in December 1821, is followed in 1822 by an intermittent series of three essays celebrating the theatre and actors of the previous generation. These essays focus on comedians and artificial comedy, as a bygone era of conscience-free foolery is presented against the stifling moral seriousness of contemporary theatre. However, as in the psychological reconstruction of Blakesmoor, return is occasioned by elegy and the fool’s erasure from contemporary theatre ironically initiates a reincarnation in Elia’s theatricalized city. The first of these essays, ‘On Some of the Old Actors’ (February 1822), begins with the principally tragic actor Robert Bensley and follows with sketches of the comedians John Palmer and James Dodd. In tragedy, Bensley is praised for his self-negating, ‘straight’ acting, which produces the antithesis of Garrick’s egoistic theatricality in the Shakespeare essay: He was totally destitute of trick and artifice. He seemed come upon the stage to do the poet’s message simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity as the nuncios in Homer deliver the errands of the gods. He let the passion or the sentiment do its

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Bensley is appreciated in other words for the integrity of an underplayed, or in a sense readerly mode of acting, which pays due deference to authorial genius without the vulgar street-vendor antics that the earlier Lamb identifies with the Garrick school. An actor’s ‘artifice’, or ‘secret correspondence’ with the audience, whilst the ‘bane and death of tragedy’, produces an ‘extremely happy effect … in the more highly artificial comedy … where the absolute sense of reality … is not required, or would rather diminish your pleasure’ (p. 178). This ‘old actors’ essay starkly contrasts with the Shakespeare essay, in which by implication all theatre, including tragedy, is defined by a gross theatricality, because theatricality is clearly distinguished from theatre, where, in the appropriate circumstance of artificial comedy, theatricality is deemed beneficial. Moreover, in the other circumstance of tragedy, theatre is even seen to approximate the experience of reading. Elia’s love of the fool is particularly apparent, unsurprisingly, in his empathetic response to comic performance. With its dissembling identity-play and the idiotic-wisdom of the clown, Twelfth Night is a comedy of obvious appeal for Elia. His enthusiasm for the self-delusion of Bensley’s Malvolio is revealing: ‘How he went smiling to himself ! with what ineffable carelessness would he twirl his gold chain! what a dream it was! You were infected with the illusion, and did not wish that it should be removed!’ (pp. 176–7). So important to Elia is the imperviousness of this admirable rather than pitiable ‘lunacy’ to a spoiling or ‘unseasonable reflection of morality’ (pp. 176–7), that it is taken up in the next ‘old actors’ essay, on artificial comedy. Of still greater significance, Elia’s legitimate old actors appear to be one of a kind with his illegitimate actors outside the playhouse, in the city at large. Bensley’s ridiculous ‘trumpet’ voice and ‘uncouth and stiff ’ gait (p. 174) recall the thunderous ‘growl’ and ‘elephantine’ step of the old bencher Thomas Coventry, and the sheer ‘intensity’ with which he plays the ‘fine madness’ of Hotspur in Henry IV and Pierre’s gleeful ‘transports’ in Venice Preserved seem to partake of the same spirit as the ostensibly insane acts of self-delusion of Thomas Tame or Captain Jackson. The intensity of Dodd’s performance as Aguecheek, ‘as it came out of nature’s hands’ (p. 177), similarly inverts the simpleton Tame’s consummate performance of the nobleman in ‘The South-Sea House’. Of Dodd’s Aguecheek, Elia recalls with exquisitely periphrastic delight: In expressing slowness of apprehension this actor surpassed all others. You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing slowly over his countenance, climbing up by little and little, with a painful process, till it cleared up at last to the fullness of a twilight conception – its highest meridian. (p. 177)

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Whereas Dodd achieves greatness for an ability to act the fool, the genuine fool, Tame – ‘his intellect was of the shallowest order’ – is celebrated for an ability to act greatness: ‘While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy. The conference [or performance] over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you’ (LM, 2, p. 144). With Dodd from the playhouse and Tame from the house of commerce, in their respective metropolitan enclosures, Elia’s theatrical city is constructed around the interchangeable roles of ‘acting the fool’ and ‘the fool as actor’. However tragic its narrative on stage or the life it palliates off stage, theatre for Elia is ultimately pleasurable. ‘Spleen, irritability – the pitiable infirmities of old men, which produce only pain to behold in the realities, [when] counterfeited … please by being done under the life, or beside it; not to the life’ (LM, n.s. 2, pp. 600–1), as Elia opines in ‘Imperfect Dramatic Illusion’. The pleasure of theatre inheres in teasingly playing with, as opposed to reproducing or simulating, reality, and consummate acting is as important to the ‘real’ life of the city as it is to effective theatre. The city and the theatre become interchangeable. Just as Bensley’s performances transform the disturbing reality of madness into pleasurable spectacle, so the apparent insanity of Elia’s metropolitan actor-type momentarily frees the performer from an oppressive reality. It is as if Elia were taking to its logical conclusion Hazlitt’s sense of the social value of theatre to the metropolis, as expressed in the first edition of the London in January 1820: ‘The stage … is particularly wanted in great cities (where it of course flourishes most) to take off from the dissatisfaction and ennui, that creep over our own pursuits from the indifference or contempt thrown on them by others …’ (LM, 1, p. 65). Equally suggestive of Elia’s theatrical city is an encounter with the comic actor Dodd outside the playhouse, in the gardens at Gray’s Inn. On seeing a melancholy countenance behind Dodd’s performing mask, Elia still dramatizes this reality: There is something strange as well as sad in seeing actors – your pleasant fellows particularly – subjected to and suffering the common lot – their fortunes, their casualties, their deaths, seem to belong to the scene, their actions to be amenable to poetic justice only. We can hardly connect them with more awful responsibilities. (LM, 4, p. 178)

The terminally ill Dodd is retired from the stage and takes his solitary walks, Elia surmises, as a means of removing ‘by degrees the buffoon mask which he might feel he had worn too long’ – but only, in turn, for ‘rehearsing for a more solemn cast of part’ (p. 178). There is apparently no end to the theatre of, and in, Dodd’s life, as one kind of performance replaces another with no notion of a core or ‘genuine’ self beneath the theatrical layers. He retains the role of actor outside the playhouse, to enable him to cope with real life. In Elia, therefore, the city-

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as-theatre is once again about detachment belying social engagement, as acting becomes a means of experiencing life at one depressurizing remove. At the very point in the essay where the mortal world outside the playhouse reasserts itself, theatre is used both to describe and address that reality. In ‘Reminiscences of Elliston’, appearing in the Englishman’s Magazine in August 1831, the late actormanager’s metaphorical portable theatre emphasizes this vision: You had a spirited performance always going on before your eyes, with nothing to pay. As where a monarch takes up his casual abode for a night, the poorest hovel which he honours by his sleeping in it, becomes ipso facto for that time a palace; so wherever Elliston walked, sate, or stood still, there was the theatre. He carried about with him his pit, boxes, and galleries, and set up his portable playhouse at corners of streets, and in the market-places. Upon flintiest pavements he trod the boards still; and if his theme chanced to be passionate, the green baize carpet of tragedy spontaneously rose 47 beneath his feet .

The delusion is equally of Elia’s and Elliston’s making, of both the imaginative will of the audience and the consummate skill of the actor. By performing outside as well as inside the playhouse, moreover, Elliston like Dodd blurs the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate theatre, or the theatre and the city. To reinforce the notion of a theatrical city in the first ‘old actors’ essay it ends with Elia back inside the theatre bemoaning the opposite scenario to that of Dodd. John Bannister’s transcendent performance as the sailor Ben in Congreve’s Love for Love, a ‘delightful phantom – the creature dear to half-belief ’, is reduced by a modern actor to ‘a downright concretion of a Wapping sailor’ (p. 179). It seems to Elia as if ‘a real man has got in among the dramatis personae, and puts them out’, a spoiling intruder from urban reality who does not belong on the stage: ‘We feel that his true place is not behind the curtain, but in the first or second gallery’ (p. 179). The pleasure of theatre for Elia inheres in the proximity of the performance to real life, so that it becomes a reality-play and not, like domestic melodrama, a play about reality. This reaction against the city’s obtrusion into the palliative foolery of theatre implies the converse desire for a city infused with such foolery, an idea developed further in the next ‘old actors’ essay.

The Return of Artificial Comedy In lamenting the demise of the comedy of manners or ‘artificial comedy’, in the next ‘old actors’ essay, in April 1822, Lamb is once more critical of contemporary theatre, this time – as befitting Elia’s love of the fool – for a tyrannous didacticism. Resonating with Gatrell’s ‘city of laughter’, the present is described as an ‘age of seriousness’ (LM, 4, p. 308), in which the innocuous pleasure afforded by artificial comedy has been lost to the overbearing moral prescription of sentimental comedy and the new melodrama. Although the term is never actually

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used, Elia’s attack on ‘the eternal tormenting unappeasable vigilance, the “lidless dragon eyes”, of present fashionable tragedy’ (p. 309) seems to be principally aimed at the popular new brand of English domestic melodrama in the 1820s.48 Coupled with this was a dearth of new comedy with which to replace the obsolete artificial comedy, a situation which can be seen in the context of increased government pressure since the Revolution for comedy to prioritize instruction 49 over delight for the potentially volatile lower orders. Typifying this new moral climate, which in the wake of Luddite unrest and Peterloo was still prevalent in the 1820s, we find in the 1805 edition of the Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor the following attack on theatre in general and artificial comedy in particular: They who are disposed to consider the DRAMA as the amusement merely of the higher or middle classes of life, will hardly be persuaded how much the character of the poor is injured by profane and immoral representations on the stage. The many who occupy the gallery of a theatre, bring with them no antidote against the poison that is offered to them; but view the scene before them, with a full persuasion that it is a true and faithful picture of human life and manners … their principles, their language, and their habits of life, are inevitably corrupted, not only by the plays of the profligate age of the second Charles, but by some more recent productions: – and thousands of deluded wretches have been initiated in vice and villainy, and have been brought to a fatal and ignominious end, by the licenced representation of the Beggar’s Opera.50

In emphasizing a unique freedom from empathy in artificial comedy, Elia’s essay could be specifically arguing against the Society’s lumping together of such theatre with the new melodrama to propose that both alike corrupt through the appeal of realism. But Elia’s argument also, once again, reworks a long-standing theme for Lamb. Predating the essay on Shakespeare’s tragedies, the note to Middleton and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel, in Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets (1808), begins with an attack on the ‘insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is tied down’. ‘A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us’, Lamb protests, ‘instead of the vigorous passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present us’.51 Taking up a similar argument fourteen years later, Elia claims: We have been spoiled with – not sentimental comedy – but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all-devouring drama of common life; where the moral point is every thing; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy) we recognise ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies, – the same as in life, – with an interest in what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgement, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment. (LM, 5, p. 305)

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Moncrieff ’s modernizing of Shakespeare in The Lear of Private Life in 1820 might be the sort of play Elia has in mind. In 1823, Fitzball’s Jonathon Bradford; or The Murder at the Roadside Inn and five years later Jerrold’s Fifteen Years of a Drunkard’s Life (1828) also typify the trend for plays based on domestic situations and real-life crimes. The comedy that did survive into the early nineteenth century is of the bland, sentimental kind Elia blames for starting this trend, as in Colman’s John Bull; or An Englishman’s Fireside (1803). Appearing as a correlative to cultic theatricality outside the playhouse, Elia’s concern is that theatre’s invasion by the ‘all-devouring drama of common life’ defeats its palliative object as he sees it. The quotidian, domestic environment from which Elia finds respite in artificial comedy is found not only in sentimental comedy and English melodrama, but also, of course, in the familiar essay. The importance of such a mode of theatre for Elia is therefore clear. The role of theatrical foolery in the extra-essayistic figure prevents the familiar tipping into the tyrannical realism which Elia finds in sentimental comedy and melodrama, by undercutting the seriousness of autobiographical sincerity and the materialism of the corporeal body with an ironic and phantasmal performance of the self.52 Artificial comedy creates, moreover, the same kind of free critical and moral space which we have seen that Elia himself is inclined to occupy: ‘all that neutral ground of character which stood between vice and virtue; or which, in fact, was indifferent to neither, where neither was properly called into question’ (p. 305). Like the ‘downright concretion of a Wapping Sailor’ modern theatre tends to ‘substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly … in our courts from which there is no appeal to the dramatis personae, his peers’ (p. 305). Similar in effect to the pitiless approach towards the poor subject, the conscience is relieved in artificial comedy because the characters have no empathetic value: ‘No good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays … is alike essentially vain and worthless’ (p. 306). The Way of the World typifies this anomalous attraction, with compelling ‘characters for whom you care absolutely nothing – for you neither hate nor love’ them (p. 306). The relief of the conscience is expertly effected in the third ‘old actors’ essay by the comedian ‘Dicky’ Suett, whom Elia acclaims for the ideal performance of Shakespeare’s ‘fools and jesters’ (p. 350). Suett’s achievement is revealingly paralleled with that of a contemporary, alternative style of comedian, ‘Jack’ Bannister. Where Bannister is ‘beloved’ for his moralistic characters the less empathetic Suett is merely ‘liked’ for playing simple characters with no such bombast. However, Suett ultimately, if narrowly, prevails over his comic counterpart for the complete absence of an appeal to the conscience: ‘Your whole conscience stirred with Bannister’s performance of Walter in the Children in the Wood – how dearly

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beautiful it was! – but Dicky seemed like a thing as Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is’ (p. 350). The absence of empathy in Suett’s fool and in artificial comedy overall appeals to Elia as the ideal metropolitan state of being, of vicarious feeling, whether for defusing the competitive ego to allow the free expression of imperfect sympathies, or for relieving the conscience through empathy with a figure absent of empathy. Such a realm of foolery usefully parallels the supposed foolishness of primitive society in the ‘Night-Fears’ essay. Congreve’s and Wycherley’s characters can be ‘[t]ranslated into real life’ as ‘profligates and strumpets, – the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry’, but this is to ‘do them wrong in so translating them’ (p. 306), Elia argues, thus rejecting the high moral ground of satire. The claim that ‘No such effects are produced in their world’ and the caution that ‘We are not to judge them by our usages’ (pp. 306–7) together echo the sentiment in ‘Night-Fears’ that ‘We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools … for their creed of witchcraft …There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised’ (LM, 4, pp. 384–5). Within their own epistemological universes, therefore, Elia’s invocations of artificial comedy and primitive society alike serve to mock the impertinence of a supposedly enlightened, sophisticated society which considers them foolish. The notion of return in Elia is highlighted when artificial comedy is interpreted as satire, by Hazlitt in Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819). As a social purgative, Hazlitt proposes, artificial comedy eventually fell victim to its own success: Comedy naturally wears itself out – destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at. It holds the mirror up to nature; and men, seeing their most striking peculiarities and defects pass in gay review before them, learn either to avoid or conceal them. It is not the criticism which the public taste exercises upon the stage, but the criticism which the stage exercises upon public manners, that is fatal to comedy, by rendering the subject-matter of it tame, 53 correct, and spiritless.

The difference in phrasing between Hazlitt’s ‘comedy of artificial life’ and Lamb’s ‘artificial comedy’ is crucial. Lamb reverses Hazlitt’s suggestion that it is the city that is artificial (or at least the town, its most fashionable part), and not the comedy, through which the city’s follies are purged. Whilst Hazlitt describes an obsolete comedy of the artificial city, Lamb’s all too real, contemporary city has never been in greater need of artificial comedy. For all Elia’s despair, then, without such a deterministic explanation of its disappearance his model of theatrical foolery allows the possibility, in some form, of a return. This possibility is dramatized through a recreation of the fool’s leavening spirit amidst the very architecture of metropolitan self-importance. In locations such as the Inner

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Temple’s law courts or the ‘irksome confinement’ (LM, n.s. 1, p. 67) of an office, theatricality keeps at bay an otherwise encroaching world of ‘meddling restrictions’ (LM, 5, p. 306). The fool’s contemporary, metropolitan incarnation in the figure of Elia is imaged also in ‘The Old and the New Schoolmaster’ (May 1821). In contrasting himself with the new schoolmaster Elia begins by implicitly identifying with the fool: a trivial, fragmentary knowledge acquired from desultory reading habits is allied to a congenital intellectual incapacity, leaving Elia in dread of meeting his antithesis, the ‘sensible, well-informed man’ (LM, 3, pp. 492, 493). Sharing a coach across London with the new schoolmaster, Elia is perplexed at having thrust upon him by way of conversation a succession of local and metropolitan subjects. With each place they pass on their way across the city the new schoolmaster picks a topical item, only to be frustrated by Elia’s apparent lack of awareness of or interest in the immediate world about him. Before the final abandoned topic, that of a recent expedition to the North Pole, an embarrassed Elia struggles to maintain conversation on Smithfield market, the price of cotton at Norton Falgate, London shop rents, and levels of poor relief at sighting some almshouses near Shoreditch. The typically self-belittling Elia’s failure to engage with the immediate world allegorizes Lamb’s consciencerelieving approach to the metropolitan reader. Presented thus in incongruously brief, perfunctory terms, the allusion to the mendicity problem in particular resonates with social context. It is not, of course, that Elia’s world is so insular and his mind so feeble that even this ‘hot’ topic cannot engage him in conversation: rather that this is a disarming act of mild imbecility designed to reassure the reader over his or her own sense of inadequacy in the face of the seemingly relentless, multifarious exigency of the present – or, rather, a virulent periodical press which tends to exacerbate such an angst. In Elia the relieved conscience itself becomes a matter of social concern, or becomes integral to addressing the issue/s pressing upon it, as indeed confirmed when the issue of mendicity is, very fully, tackled, in the ‘Decay of Beggars’ essay. The guise of the fool perfectly facilitates the power of suggestion, and although against didacticism and political trenchancy neither is Lamb’s position that of the socially irresponsible aesthete, the valorization of artificial comedy albeit suggesting a certain prototypical association. Elia’s conception as a performer to be read instead of spectated is configured in the anecdote with which the essay on artificial comedy concludes. One of Kemble’s more ‘sluggish’ performances meets with a predictably unruly audience response, as the kind of superficial engagement Lamb identifies in the Shakespeare essay, to ruin Godwin’s tragedy Antonio. Lulled by Kemble’s passionless delivery, the moment where Antonio stabs his sister in the heart almost causes a riot by the totally unprepared audience, who react as if to a real murder. A

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chastened Godwin is in the audience and subsequently ‘abandon[s] a precarious popularity’ to return to the writing of political doctrine, ‘the drama in which the world was to be his tiring room, and remote posterity his applauding spectators at once, and actors’ (LM, 5, p. 311). Godwin’s re-empowerment as a political writer after his failure as a playwright is thus ironically imaged as the management of his own theatre. Conceived himself by a failed playwright, Elia similarly represents Lamb’s ‘management’ of theatre on his own terms, an appropriation of its palliative power to the unspectacular figure of the periodical essayist.

The School of Munden and Hogarth The actor who most seems to have captured Lamb’s imagination, and who therefore serves above all others to delineate the author’s appropriation of theatricality, is the celebrated comedian and personal friend Joseph Munden. As the one ‘old actor’ still alive and performing in Elia’s day, Munden’s imminent retirement (occurring in 1824) marks the final act in the decline of the stage fool, as a manifestation of the residual ‘city of laughter’ in an emergent age of moral seriousness. Lamb first met Munden shortly before the birth of Elia, with the third ‘old actors’ essay first appearing in the Examiner (minus a few minor alterations) on 7–8 November 1819. The essay’s appearance under Elia’s name for the London in October 1822 is followed in February 1825 by a skit in the same magazine, ‘Autobiography of Mr. Munden’, in which, as the title suggests, Lamb assumes the actor’s performing identity, complete with mimicry of the Munden idiom. Then, in the Athenaeum in February 1832 is a eulogy on ‘The Death of Munden’ under Lamb’s own name. The prominence of this particular actor in Lamb’s consciousness immediately prior to and during the Elia years is therefore clear. Appropriately through a range of periodical identities, including one of Munden himself, Lamb both pays tribute to and associates himself with an actor whose key attribute is a facility with different ‘faces’. By Elia’s time Munden’s faces were indeed almost as famous as those of Hogarth. Hunt somewhat disparagingly observes in 1807 ‘an innumerable variety of as fanciful contortions of countenance as ever threw woman into hysterics’; Hazlitt delightedly records in September 1817 that Munden’s ‘face was in full play, and presented, in its incessant evolutions, as many malicious grimaces of an extreme unction as are to be found in a whole shop-window of caricatures’; Reynolds’s review of Munden’s farewell performance for the London in July 1824 mourns the loss of 54 his ‘bunch of countenances – the banquet of faces’ (LM, 10, p. 89). For Elia, however, whose appreciation of Munden is reflected in his own self-pluralizing elusiveness, the actor does much more than pull comic faces: he virtually changes identity with each one, none of which ‘you can properly pin down and call his’:

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This intense, eulogistic appreciation of Munden’s dextrous use of physiognomy as a creative power bordering on the extra-theatrical – thus ironically approximating the genius of the Shakespearian playwright – is reiterated in Lamb’s ‘Death of Munden’, in February 1832. ‘It was not acting’, Lamb claims, adding in reference to the Elia essay that ‘He was not one of my “old actors.” It might be [he was] better. His power was extravagant.’55 Munden’s importance to Elia is confirmed by his being associated with Hogarth, Lamb’s favourite portrayer of metropolitan life. The pleasure of visiting a portrait gallery of actors from the Restoration onward is equalled only by that of a previous visit made to a Hogarth gallery. The actor’s multitudinous faces are likened to the ‘richness and variety’ of Hogarth’s (p. 351), as Elia proposes that a Munden gallery be opened to complement the Hogarth one. Elia’s love of artificial comedy in general, and moreover his Blakean sense of the moral complacency of pity, is all of a piece with Lamb’s appreciation of Hogarth. In the Reflector essay on Hogarth in 1811, the counterfeit mourning of ‘that wonderful assemblage of depraved beings … without a grain of reverence or pity in their perverted minds’ in the final plate of The Harlot’s Progress ironically elicits from Lamb, in anticipation of Elia, a more empathetic response than would a depiction of the genuine emotion: I am as much moved to sympathy from the very want of it in them, as I should be by the finest representation of a virtuous death-bed surrounded by real mourners, pious children, weeping friends, – perhaps more by the very contrast.56

Also in the Hogarth essay Lamb identifies with the common city dweller’s wish for a pencil to hand and the artist’s ‘power’ with which to immortalize ‘those grotesque physiognomies which we sometimes catch a glance of in the street’.57 Elia similarly wishes he had had a pencil and the artistic talent to capture the Munden faces which appear to him in a dream, when on returning from a Munden performance the image of the actor’s ‘queer visnomy – his bewildering costume’ keeps Elia awake until eventually ‘the passion of laughter, like grief in excess’ brings relief and sleep (LM, 6, p. 351). But then a still more vivid vision appears. Like his prosaic dreams in ‘Night-Fears’, however, despite the ‘perplexing’ image of hundreds of Munden faces ‘dancing before us, like the faces which … come when you have been taking opium’ (p. 351), this dream is, typically, a more Mund-ane experience than the drug-induced visions of Coleridge and De Quincey.

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Across the eleven years separating the Hogarth and Munden essays, then, Lamb expresses the continuing desire to be possessed by the face-making genius of these two favoured figures of metropolitan culture. Like the elegy for artificial comedy, furthermore, the essay’s apparent ruling-out of a Munden and Hogarth ‘school’, in which foolery is elevated into ‘“the sublime of farce”’ (p. 351), belies the notion of return. ‘Munden stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth’, Elia claims, adding that ‘Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers’ (p. 351). Because this and the declaration that the ‘school of Munden began, and must end, with himself ’ (p. 351) come from a nostalgic figure like Elia who advertises his own preternatural capacity for appropriating the identity of others, and whose professions of lameness encode self-empowerment, an embodied revival is again implicit. By substituting the pencil and the stage for the pen and the periodical text, Lamb harnesses through Elia the theatrical art of the Hogarth-Munden school to his own metropolitan vision. As a final expression of Elia’s advertised facility for ‘making himself many, or reducing many unto himself ’ (LM, 7, p. 119), his encomium on Munden functions as a highly effective analogy for Lamb himself. James Treadwell observes that, like the Munden with which he presents us who has no face ‘that you can pin down and call his’, Elia’s dramatic use of ‘local attachments’ and the ‘commonplace materials of life’ creates attraction without the singular, fixed identity that such an autobiographical appearance implies.58 This appropriation from theatre as much as autobiography returns us, in conclusion, to Elia’s departure from Lamb’s earlier anti-theatre stance. Mary Jacobus proposes that the essay on Shakespeare amounts to a fundamental, rearguard desire for authorial primacy: The attempt to keep Garrick and Shakespeare apart is a way of preventing the disappearance of the playwright into his plays, and thus of maintaining an imaginary poetic integrity … Lamb’s anti-theatrical prejudice manifests a desire to save the author from the multiplicity of the dramatic text in performance, thereby preserving ‘the very idea 59 of what an author is’.

Yet where Lamb’s own Munden-esque performance as Elia is concerned, a very different, more radical idea of the author is surely presented. As a reflexive figure of the collaborative and commercial periodical text, Elia revels in states of impermanent or dubious identity that are the antithesis of the earlier, unselfconsciously stable and static self of the Shakespeare essay. The Elian self clearly challenges traditional notions of what Jacobus identifies in the Shakespeare essay as ‘integrity of self ’ and ‘corruption through multiplicity’, thus through this metropolitan ontology subverting rather than preserving the very idea of what an author is.

CONCLUSION

Anxiety and Romantic Metropolitanism The manifold irony of the essayistic figure confirms Riehl’s assessment of Lamb as the ‘ultimate eiron’.1 Condemned as a primary cause of superficial, extensive reading, as a sign of creeping metropolitanism, the metropolitan periodical text is appropriated to a cultural ideal of intensive or ‘deep’ reading; emancipation is espoused not through the open spaces coveted by the flâneur, but the domestic enclosure cherished by the hypochondriac; altruism is enacted through detachment; theatricality opposes the superficiality of spectacle. But implementing all the above is the irony of Lamb’s melodramatic self-belittlement and its critical implications. This key characteristic of Elia amounts to a contrived marginality, an art of the peripheral which – ironically – situates Lamb at the centre of a Romantic metropolitan genre. Lamb curiously comes into being as the definitive metropolitan author not through outright opposition, as suggested by Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age portrayal, but through instances of appropriation and adaptation which represent subtle ontological expressions of the marginal Elian figure. Hunt induces anxiety from within periodical writing, an anxiety to which Hazlitt ambivalently responds, but it is Lamb’s unique exploitation of that crucial distance between himself and his persona which diffuses that anxiety. De Quincey’s opium-eater initiates the nineteenth-century phenomenon of the flâneur, but in Elia’s converse domesticity Lamb removes from such detachment the tendency to isolation and alienation. Egan’s amoral swells typify city-as-theatre hedonism, whilst Elia assimilates this aesthetic to a notion of social responsibility. The grist to the mill of Lamb’s eiron, however, lies not in the simple arrogance of the alazon but more complexly in the anxiety inherent in the concept of the metropolis in the Romantic period. If anxiety is defined as a crisis of identity ensuing from an indeterminate or transitory position, then Lamb forges his own identity out of the anxiety of the Romantic metropolis. This is a growing and changing city caught between the conflicting ideologies of a residual paternalism and an emergent utilitarianism, between the interests of commerce and com– 179 –

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munity as a consequence of the general urbanization of society, and between the claims of escapism and conscience in its art. Deriving its meaning from ‘urbanity’, a conversely stable and harmonious notion of identity associated with the generic city, metropolitanism ultimately describes the ‘character’ of sociability, sophistication and confidence with which an author such as Lamb appropriates instead of resists the culturally and ontologically fraught periodical text. Whilst anxiety surrounds the notion of metropolis in the 1820s, metropolitanism is the appropriative response which defeats that anxiety. As I suggest at the end of Chapter 5, there are implications here for the very definition of ‘author’. If Lamb is the author of irony then the monolithic model of author implicit in the idea of anxiety is surely precluded. Lamb’s form of urbanity becomes clearer still if we apply Harold Bloom’s idea of anxiety as a literary condition, or rather precondition.2 Bloom’s hypothesis is predicated on an image of the lone, heroic poet against whom the sociability, inverted ego and amorphous figure of Lamb’s ‘prosaic’ periodical writer clearly defines itself. Bloom’s author can find his identity only through a struggle to learn the sociability of inter-textual dialogue with antecedent authors, whereas Lamb’s model represents, as it were, a natural, a self born into and nurtured by the sociability of a collaborative and commercial print culture and its attendant anxieties. Indeed, the example of Lamb suggests that the typical pose of self-deprecation in the periodical author does not necessarily signify an inferiority complex, as is usually assumed. It can equally function as an inverse statement of the collaborative self and an implicit critique of the egoism to which other forms of authorship are more susceptible. In so doing Lamb’s metropolitanism emerges not only from the essayistic group of Hazlitt, Hunt, De Quincey and Egan, but equally, as I have stressed, against the rural solipsism of Wordsworth and the Lake School. Not, of course, that Lamb rejects entirely the principles of the coterie to which he was once peripherally, as usual, attached: Elia’s claims for childlike innocence and the redemptive imagination are in effect transplanted more or less whole from the country to the city. On the periphery also of the Jacobins and the Cockneys and a problematic, marginal figure within the Romantic canon itself, as I have argued, it is how Lamb exploits this marginality which makes him prominent among the metropolitan ‘school’ and beyond. Nevertheless, authors respond to people as well as texts and however much his critical reputation may in the past have suffered from being the friend of luminaries such as Coleridge and Wordsworth, we cannot ignore the importance of friendship itself to Lamb’s work, especially given the overwhelming evidence in this regard of the author’s preternaturally sociable disposition.3 Although the metropolitan theme has by and large directed this study away from biography, the textual sociability I have identified in Elia – the intertextuality, acquiescent character and appropriative

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ontology – is no doubt linked to a significant degree not only to Lamb’s manifestly wide reading but to his famed personal sociability as a writer amongst assorted other writers and other people. Books and people, or literature and life, merge in the bookish yet sociable, autobiographical fiction that is Elia. However, in the life and the literature alike the metropolis emerges as the prime site or genius loci of Lamb’s sociability, so I argue that it is to the metropolis which we must always turn to understand his work properly. The metropolis above all implies power, and as his muse it empowers Lamb as author. Lamb achieves centrality not simply through self-deprecatory imposture, but by using metropolitan culture to question the very idea of a coherent, unified self. This is equally true of Elia’s existence as printed text and corporeal subject. As a figure in which the distinction between body and text dissolves, therefore, Elia loses something of that innovative existentialism when removed from the metropolitan environment of the periodical to one that seeks to efface it, the book. The example of Elia indicates that the periodical text is not necessarily a model site of heteroglot relativism, where, in a free-play of signification the author’s is merely one of numerous other, equally viable voices. From Phil-Elia’s mock obituary, to the dreams of Munden’s myriad faces, the Elian self consistently advertises its capacity to appropriate to the self, the very text that would assimilate it. Elia thus enacts a post-Barthesian ‘return of the author’. Referring to the carnivalesque or Menippean text’s ‘dissolution of hierarchies and the emergence of an anti-authoritarian discourse’, Sean Burke invokes Bakhtin to propose that the supposedly slain author ‘is profoundly active but this action takes on a specific 4 dialogic character’. If, as I have argued, dialogism can itself be ‘characterized’ as metropolitan, then Lamb emerges as the author of such a discourse. In summary then, Lamb’s authorial presence and his metropolitanism are inextricably linked, perhaps even amounting to one and the same thing. Put another way, we lose a vivid and vital dimension to Lamb’s work, one that conveys his primacy as metropolitan author, by treating Elia merely as the sum of the essays rather than as an extra-essayistic figure of the periodical text. This is not to say that there is a contradiction or conflict between Lamb’s periodical metropolitanism and his patent, sometimes trenchant bibliophilia. On the contrary his invention of an ironic, quintessentially periodical mode of authorship generates around it a sort of mock prestige which mimics that of the ‘named individualism’, to reuse Russett’s phrase,5 of book authorship.

Beyond Romanticism: Ineffable and Effable Cities But in the literature of the city outside the conjectural boundaries of the Romantic period, where or how do we situate Lamb? As established, Elia coincides with a time of transition both for the city and its representation. First published in

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December 1839, Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Man of the Crowd’ retrospectively encapsulates the ambivalent fascination that the city holds for Romantic authors, as a site on the one hand of spectacle and pleasure, and on the other, dark mystery and disturbance. From a London coffee-house window the convalescent narrator finds the pleasure of observing the evening crowd highly conducive to his recovery: by the time the lamps were well lighted, two dense and continuous tides of population were rushing past the door. At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me, therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion. I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the scene without.6

After an extended description of the various social types and classes comprising the crowd, very much in the periodical mode of detailed yet detached observation, the narrator’s attention is sharply arrested by the face of an old man. Relaxed survey gives way to obsessive focus over this hypnotic countenance of complex emotional and moral import. Detecting a dagger on the man’s person, the narrator is compelled to discover the story (surely) attaching to such an enigmatic figure and so follows the man to the point of exhaustion in the latter’s erratic and agitated movements across the city, into its most socially deprived recesses. Finally, the pursuer gives up and, after looking once more into the man’s face, is left to reflect thus: ‘This old man,’ I said at length, ‘is the type and genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the Hortulus Animae, and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that es last sich nicht lessen’ [it does not permit itself to be read].7

As the narrator himself would be required to ‘read’ the human heart in order to write it (or make it readable), the unreadable equates to the unwriteable, hence the ineffable. The enigma of the stranger, with its threat of criminality, equates to that of the city which facilitates his mysteriousness: both are texts which do not permit themselves to be either read or written. The appearance of the stranger marks the point at which the crowd changes from pleasurable spectacle when safely framed by the window through which the narrator gazes, to a potential incubator of unchecked criminality and even, by extension, anarchy. Poe’s city, moreover, combines the same restorative or medicinal property that Lamb’s ‘Londoner’ finds, with the capacity to disturb or perplex that Wordsworth describes in Book VII of The Prelude. It is as if these two polarized images of the Romantic-era metropolis as delineated in the present study, the one of pleasure the other of disturbance, meet in the same text.

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By the time of Poe’s short story, the unequivocal darkness of the urban Gothic had already appeared in Oliver Twist, in 1836–7, and would soon be successfully redeployed by G. W. M. Reynolds in The Mysteries of London, in 1846. With the sensationalist staples of labyrinthine, murky streets and a young woman held captive by irredeemable villains, Reynolds’s fiction has been described as representing ‘an urbanization of eighteenth-century Gothic, and a new consciousness of the city as inexplicable and impenetrable’.8 The overall fragmentary and tentative tenor of Lamb’s engagement with the Gothic, in addition to the related tenets of melancholy and the sublime, is, as we have seen, in keeping with an understandable wariness over handling the pathological or monomaniacal mind as an object of artistic contemplation. When as Elia Lamb does essay the Gothic, however, he evidently transplants it from the Radcliffian exotic locale, not more predictably to a metropolis the representation of which was already acquiring a darker tenor – through Blake’s ‘London’, Wordsworth’s ‘Residence in London’ (in The Prelude) and De Quincey’s Confessions – but instead to the ‘unspeakable rural solitudes’ (LM, 3, p. 6) of the British countryside. By thus situating the disturbing other in the country, as perhaps the one example of otherness that Elia does not appear to assimilate, Lamb emphasizes the fundamental effability of his city. Hence Lamb diverges from the nascent tradition of the ineffable and the since prevailing ‘narratives of perverse and pathological urbanism’ identified by Loretta Lees.9 However, the notion of a dawning consciousness in the 1840s, of the city as ‘inexplicable and impenetrable’, implies that Lamb’s representation had become obsolete by then, and that Wordsworth’s and De Quincey’s were, or are, the more prescient, therefore the superior literature. It implies, indeed, that Lamb’s effability belongs as itself an effete, residual expression to the eighteenth century and Rowlandson’s and Gillray’s carnivalesque ‘city of laughter’, and the boisterous, motley London of Hogarth’s ‘March to Finchley’ or Boswell’s London Diary. Lamb’s quaintness, his nostalgia and antiquarianism, and habitual self-deprecation have only increased this impression of obsolescence. Laments over the demise of St Bartholemew’s Fair and artificial comedy, and over the rise of utilitarian reform, appear almost Burkean in their elegiac rhetoric. Lamb’s notion of the effable city seems all of a piece with his anachronistic self-presentation. Published in 1933, moreover, Mario Praz’s influential book The Romantic Agony implicitly drew attention away from the effable by emphasizing the idea of Romanticism as being primarily about states of mind which cannot be described. Implicitly positing the prosodic Lamb as an inconsequential degenerate within the period to which he belongs, Praz proposes that ‘The Romantic exalts the artist who does not give a material form to his dreams. It is romantic to consider concrete expression as a decadence, a contamination.’10 Criticism therefore needs to address the tendency in studies of urban literature to sideline or ignore Lamb

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in two ways. Chronologically more recent responses to a supposedly more modern city, because they relate more closely to current preconceptions, should not be allowed to render Lamb’s response insignificant. Neither, as a somewhat perverse example of McGann’s ‘Romantic ideology’, should the irony be missed of Lamb’s self-deprecatory self, so that self-representation is ‘uncritically absorbed’ into critical discourse to keep Lamb on the periphery of Romantic and comparative discussions of urban literature. Indeed, his eighteenth-century predecessors also take precedence over Lamb as authors of the effable city, through the sense of modernity or absence of nostalgia which they share with their nineteenthcentury counterparts, the authors of the ineffable city. Yet Elia reminds us that nostalgia is itself, after all, an inherently and eternally modern condition, one which tells us as at least as much about the present as the past. Nostalgia also ideally lends itself to an engagement with the city, especially one as self-consciously defined as London is by layer upon living layer, or a ‘superfoetation’, of history. Through historically resonant buildings like the South-Sea House Lamb uses nostalgia very much in this way. By mediating nostalgia through a self-reflexive persona, however, Lamb is fully conscious of the seductive power of ‘antiquity’ for its own sake, just as he is sceptical over the vacuous fetishization of modernity, although his acerbic identification of the latter mentality above all, I would suggest, makes him speak loud and clear to the present. To appreciate fully Lamb’s effable city, however, we still need to look a little further into what comprises the ineffable in literature and how it operates. The term etymologically pertains to both incapacity and censure. In literature, this translates into the sense of there being something simultaneously inexpressible and withheld from expression, or sacred, in the ineffable object; that such an object renders language both inadequate or impotent, and capable of violation or defilement. There is indeed a suggestion that the ineffability, the mystery, is precious and must be preserved by the special agency of a ‘literary’ language, so that the act of reverence involved can in turn imbue the text with an enigmatic depth of meaning. However, like its cognate the sublime, the ineffable tends away from pleasure towards abject terror and the prospect of the abyss: the inability to impose through language some sense of order on a seemingly chaotic universe implies, in secular discourse at least, existential angst. Historically, a growing scientific interest from the mid-nineteenth century in the mind and an ongoing need to capture the experience of the metropolis seem in the text of the ineffable to exalt the complexity of both mind and metropolis. Amply discussed in the context of Victorian fiction,11 the emergence of Darwinian theory further eroded Western man’s relatively stable, religious sense of place. James ‘B. V.’ Thomson’s long poem The City of Dreadful Night (1870–3) seems best to illustrate the pathological correlative of mind and metropolis in this period:

Conclusion

185

The City is of Night, but not of Sleep; There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain; The pitiless hours like years and ages creep, A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain Of thought and consciousness which never ceases, Or which some moments’ stupor but increases, This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.12

Night, we recall, inspired Edward Young’s poetic melancholy over a century earlier. Appropriately for a later time after which, in addition, London had expanded at an unsurpassed rate, Thomson makes night synonymous with the city in a sort of updated, literally urban version of Young’s Night Thoughts. Thomson uses the night-shrouded city as a metaphoric device for writing what is the otherwise ineffable experience of melancholy, a reciprocal process that works to depict the city as commensurately unfathomable to all except, of course, the genius-poet of sensibility. To this effect the above stanza is replete with terms connoting to an absence of boundary or limit, or to potential infinity: pitilessness, termlessness, ceaselessness, increase and insanity. Such manifold, chaotic limitlessness does not, of course, lead to the emancipation we ironically find in the enclosed domestic spaces of Elia’s city, but instead incarceration within that psychological entity at the very end of the stanza – madness. Thomson’s poem therefore does not offer a cure for melancholy, nor does it seek to illuminate with a Lamb-like ‘distinctness of trace’ (LM, 4, p. 387) an intrinsically dark city. To do so would be to de-sanctify these sacred objects through which poetic power itself can be enacted. Through the implicitly unique sensibility of the poet, the poem offers instead the paradoxical compensation of ‘effing’ the ineffable, or writing for a special, select group of readers the otherwise unwritable concepts of melancholy and the city. Exposing the endless pathological alternation between these two concepts, Thomson’s poem curiously allows for alternative expressions of the urban experience. In the poem’s justification of such a nihilistic exploration of despair, Thomson refers, like Poe, to the unreadable text, but unlike his predecessor specifies his own poem, which, moreover, is not unreadable to everyone. ‘Surely I write not’, Thomson helpfully advises, ‘for the hopeful young’, those simply of a happy disposition, those who require only the superficial ‘shows of life’, or those who have their religion to sustain them: ‘For none of these I write, and none of these / Could read the writing if they deigned to try’. Thomson paradoxically acknowledges his own pathological state of mind by excluding but hardly condemning the above readers, and by projecting a more sympathetic, like-minded reader in their place: ‘some one desolate, Fate-smitten, / Whose faith and hopes are dead, and who would die’.13 One can easily imagine that the kind of reader who enjoys Elia would be one of those for whom Thomson’s poem is indeed unreadable. As we have seen, how-

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Charles Lamb and the London Magazine

ever, instead of abandoning him Lamb willingly takes on the task of educating the shallow reader interested only in the ‘shows of life’. Lamb and Thomson are of course writing in rather different cultural and intellectual times, and are arguably responding to different cities, but I am referring not only to the implied reader in both of these texts. Criticism, it seems, has something to learn from Thomson’s self-undercutting pathology, by reading alongside and on an equal canonical footing with the ineffable city, its alternative, the effable model. Knowledge of the all too real insanity which blighted Charles’s life can make the very whimsy of Elia seem like a self-protective screen against the abyss. I have argued, however, that such a reading erroneously interprets the ineffable as something pre-existing or beyond an implicitly inadequate text, a phenomenon which cannot be convincingly accommodated to the text without prior knowledge of the author’s life. The unrepresentable in literature does not preclude representation: the literary ineffable does not confound language, but on the contrary functions as a trope to enable language. Thomson proves himself more than capable of evoking the horror of melancholy, for which the metropolis is both cause and metaphor, and uses the ineffable as an artistic device for achieving that end. As we have seen, Lamb’s prose rarely finds use for the ineffable and, apart from the ‘inutterable sympathies’,14 his early ‘Londoner’ finds with its ever-moving pageant, the experience of the city is never expressed through this trope. For all the essays’ brevity and suggestiveness, the Elian text luxuriates in the semiotic richness and plenitude of the English language. Things often resonate by being left unsaid, but nothing – least of all the domesticated city itself – is conferred the mystification of the unrepresentable. The prolonged descriptions of the Caledonian character, the poor relation or the emancipated beggar, exhibit a periphrastic prose style replete with synonym and simile, and evoke the sheer joy of exposition and elaboration. Against the use of language to mythologize the darkness and mystery of the city, Elia emphasizes the sociability of language and its capacity for illuminating and mapping a metropolitan environment which, in turn, inspires such discourse. Implicit also in Elia’s motifs of domesticity and consumption, therefore, Lamb’s is an explicable and penetrable city, a place where one can find emancipation without losing oneself, or others. The fundamental, classical values underpinning this city, of democracy, tolerance and liberty, remain as possible or impossible as they have always done. Like all the best literature, Elia is at once historically relevant and trans-historically resonant. More than an elegy for a disappearing city, Lamb’s metropolitanism engages with the present by responding to a concurrent tendency towards the ineffable, and provides a utopian or ideal model which is universal and timeless.

NOTES

Introduction 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930), vol. 11, pp. 178–9. See, in particular, J. Chandler and K. Gilmartin (eds), Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 19. The stated aim of this collection of essays is to ‘extend our understanding of Romanticism, not as a movement against the city, but as an aesthetic that developed along with – and contributed to – the ascendancy of metropolitan life’. The Complete Works of Hazlitt, vol. 11, p. 181. J. Bauer, The London Magazine: 1820–1829 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1953), p. 65. John Scott, ‘Cockney Writers’ ( January 1821), London Magazine, 3, p. 69. All further references to writings in the London Magazine will be given parenthetically within the main text (as LM, vol., page). J. J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 1. L. Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), p. 83. K. Campbell similarly posits in the Victorian period a mood of cultural anxiety over the low metropolitan values associated with periodical writing, in ‘Journalistic Discourses and Constructions of Modern Knowledge’, in L. Brake, B. Bell and D. Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 40–53. As argued by Parker more cogently in the earlier essay on which the theoretical principles of his later book are based: ‘Ideology and Editing: The Political Context of the Elia Essays’, Studies in Romanticism, 30 (Fall 1991), pp. 473–94. Parker’s book is entitled Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and his hypothesis essentially concurs with an earlier essay by M. Schoenfield, ‘Voices Together: Lamb, Hazlitt, and the London’, Studies in Romanticism, 29 (Summer 1990), pp. 257–72. The ‘non-periodicalist’ studies of Lamb to which I refer are: R. Frank, Don’t Call Me Gentle Charles! An Essay on Lamb’s Essays of Elia (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 1976); G. Monsman, Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer: Charles Lamb’s Art of Autobiography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984); J. Nabholtz, ‘My Reader My Fellow Labourer’: A Study of English Romantic Prose (Columbia, MO: Missouri Uni– 187 –

188

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Notes to pages 3–14 versity Press, 1986); T. McFarland, Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit of the Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); J. Aaron, A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). See R. Cronin, ‘Magazines and Romantic Modernity’, in S. Hull (ed.), The British Periodical Text, 1797–1835 (Tirril: Humanities EBooks, 2008), pp. 69–91. Cronin attributes a tendency to callousness or heartlessness in periodical writing of the 1820s to the advent of the modern condition of the crowd and urban alienation. See L. Lees, Introduction, The Emancipatory City: Paradoxes and Possibilities (London: Sage, 2005), p. 10: ‘people coped with the unceasing intensity of urban interaction by developing a blasé attitude of calculated reserve and detachment from others’. See J. Strachan, ‘Fighting Sports and Late Georgian Periodical Culture’, in Hull (ed.), The British Periodical Text, pp. 144–69. Strachan identifies a vibrant sub-genre of periodical writing in which a combination of mock-heroic idiom and slang terminology expresses a masculine-martial notion of national identity in the post-war years of the 1820s. The Complete Works of Thomas De Quincey, gen. ed. G. Lindop, 21 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001–3), vol. 6, p. 114. ‘On Murder’ first appeared in Blackwood’s in February 1827. Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism, p. 1. P. Manning, ‘Detaching Lamb’s Thoughts’, in K. Wheatley (ed.), Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture (London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 137–46, on p. 137. Schoenfield, ‘Voices Together’, p. 258. M. Elwin, introduction to The Essays and Last Essays of Elia, ed. M. Elwin (London: Macdonald, 1952), p. xxviii. J. Treadwell, Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783–1834 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 6. J. Wolfreys, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 6. Treadwell, Autobiographical Writing, p. 220. G. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 1. Lees, Introduction, The Emancipatory City, p. 5 See Brake, Subjugated Knowledges, p. 67. Referring to the ‘relatively few revisions of his periodical texts for book publication’ made by Matthew Arnold, Brake identifies a loaded concept of ‘finish’, involving the ‘careful suppression of topical allusions in order to enhance the illusion of timelessness of the new “art” text’. Treadwell, Autobiographical Writing, p. 211. C. De Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism and the Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Lamb as Critic, ed. R. Park (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 300. Lamb’s review of Table Talk is published for the first time in this collection. Ibid., p. 300. U. Natarajan, ‘The Veil of Familiarity: Romantic Philosophy and the Familiar Essay’, Studies in Romanticism, 42:1 (Spring 2003), pp. 27–44, on p. 27. See The Collected Works of S. T. Coleridge, ed. K. Coburn, 29 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978–2001), vol. 16, p. 352. W. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 9, 12.

Notes to pages 14–27

189

31. L. Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 4. 32. Cronin, ‘Magazines and Romantic Modernity’, p. 71. 33. Wolfreys, Writing London, p. 4. 34. From I. Armstrong’s review of Writing London, in Times Literary Supplement (19 February 1999), p. 26. 35. Lees, Introduction, The Emancipatory City, p. 4. 36. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 7 vols (London: Methuen, 1903– 5), vol. 1, p. 40. 37. The Complete Works of Hazlitt, vol. 7, p. 77. 38. J. Riehl, That Dangerous Figure: Charles Lamb and the Critics (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998), p. 163.

1 Consuming the Periodical Text 1.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

J. N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 24–5. Cox also quotes from the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, on p. 24. See P. T. Murphy’s essay, ‘Impersonation and Authorship in Romantic Britain’, English Literary History, 59 (1992), pp. 625–49. Murphy describes the infamous duel which killed Scott as a grotesque ‘parable’ of the attacks of Blackwood’s on the obtrusion of the vulgar, physical body into the abstract, rarified world of writing and authorship. This is because the Cockney label and similar examples of ad hominem criticism function in precisely this way, as a means to satirize just such a failing in their targets. G. Dart, ‘Romantic Cockneyism: Hazlitt and the Periodical Press’, Romanticism, 6:2 (2000), pp. 143–62. In identifying a cultural ‘ambivalence’ over the periodical writer, Dart departs from Klancher’s more deterministic model in The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), in which a self-reflexive tendency in magazine-writing in this period indicates an ideological attempt to construct a bourgeois middle-class audience. Dart, ‘Romantic Cockneyism’, p. 147. Ibid., p. 148. D. Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 4, 9. See Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2000), p. 3. Ibid., pp. 1–12. M. Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1, 98. Ibid., pp. 95–6. Ibid., p. 96. Higgins, Romantic Genius, p. 9. Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism, p. 94. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 275. T. Ross, ‘The Emergence of “Literature”: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century’, English Literary History, 63 (1996), pp. 397–422. Frank, Don’t Call Me Gentle Charles!, p. 20.

190 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

Notes to pages 28–34 The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 2, p. 202. Ross, ‘The Emergence of “Literature”’, pp. 403, 397, 410. Cronin, ‘Magazines and Romantic Modernity’, pp. 88–90. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 274. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 272, 274. See W. F. Courtney, Young Charles Lamb, 1775–1802 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982). Among other Anti-Jacobin examples, Courtney provides a detailed description of the 1798 Gillray cartoon and satirical poem, ‘New Morality’, which features a host of notorious radicals. Lamb is depicted as a frog, beside Charles Lloyd’s toad (pp. 186–202). This term was first used in Jeffrey’s review of Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes, in Edinburgh Review, 11 (October 1807), p. 214. M. Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 61–4. Quoted in L. Newlyn, ‘Coleridge and the Anxiety of Reception’, Romanticism, 1:2 (1995), pp. 206–38, on pp. 206–7. Ibid., p. 206. The Complete Works of Hazlitt, vol. 16, p. 211. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, p. 28. See P. B. Shelley, The Bodleian Manuscripts, 18 vols, ed. D. H. Reiman (New York and London: Garland, 1986), vol. 1, pp. 9–10. Shelley’s poetic response to both Wordsworth’s Peter Bell and J. H. Reynolds’s pre-emptive parody was not published, however, until 1839, seventeen years after the poet’s death. Although Shelley desired in 1819 that his Peter Bell be published, he requested to his publisher Ollier that the poem appear anonymously, as he considered its experimental attempt at satire ‘a little unworthy of me to acknowledge’. Due in no small part to the triumphal claim by William Maginn that Lockhart was ‘wet with the blood of the Cockneys’ (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 9 (1821), p. 62). Richard Woodhouse, Cause Book (1821), ed. R. Morrison, in Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s. 9:3 (1998), pp. 1–43, on p. 7. Elia’s neutrality can be readily accommodated to Lamb’s general habit of concentrating on the particular, rather than the bigger picture. See S. Burton’s biography of the Lambs, A Double Life (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 210: this trait ‘characterised [Charles’s] poetry and later his essays, but which was also evident in his non-literary thinking: his politics focused on individual issues rather than an over-arching philosophy; his religious feeling was instinctive and personal rather than conformist, even his humour – typically the one-off pun – spoke of a sudden incisiveness often unrelated to … the broader context’. L. Hunt, ‘Literary Notices’, Nos. 50 & 51, Examiner (21 and 28 March 1819), pp. 187, 206. See Riehl, That Dangerous Figure, p. 13. Riehl tell us that in the wake of Hunt’s 1819 review of Lamb’s Works Hunt’s ‘assertion of Lamb’s superiority over academic criticism was becoming a critical commonplace’. T. N. Talfourd, quoted in ibid., p. 12. Quoted in ibid., p. 17. As detailed by Riehl in ibid., pp. 17–18: Riehl makes the point that, whilst Blackwood’s include Lamb in their mocking of Cockneyism, through Wilson and Lockhart the magazine generated debate as to who discovered Lamb, as a critical prize apparently ‘worth fighting for’.

Notes to pages 34–51

191

39. Murphy, ‘Impersonation and Authorship’, p. 625. 40. R. Morrison, ‘Richard Woodhouse’s Cause Book: The Opium-Eater, the Magazine Wars, and the London Literary Scene in 1821’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 9:3 (1998), pp. vi– xxii, on p. xv, the introductory essay to the full reprinted Woodhouse text (see note 32 above). 41. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1 (October 1817), p. 39. 42. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 39. 43. Indicator, 1:15 (19 January 1820), p. 118. 44. Dart, ‘Romantic Cockneyism’, p. 152. 45. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1 (October 1817), p. 39. 46. As observed by Cox, in Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, pp. 24–5. 47. The Complete Works of Hazlitt, vol. 12, pp. 66–7. 48. As observed by Dart in ‘Romantic Cockneyism’. 49. The Complete Works of Hazlitt, vol. 12, p. 75. 50. Dart, ‘Romantic Cockneyism’, p. 156. 51. Aaron, A Double Singleness, pp. 183–4. 52. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 2, p. 202. 53. Aaron, A Double Singleness, p. 175. 54. Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, gen. ed. R. Morrison and M. Eberle-Sinatra, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), vol. 3, p. 176. 55. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 180. 56. L. H. Houtchens and C. W. Houtchens, introduction to Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, ed. L. H. Houtchens and C. W. Houtchens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), pp. 3–4. 57. Selected Writings of Hunt, vol. 3, p. 176. 58. Quoted in Courtney, Young Charles Lamb, p. 196. Courtney claims to have discovered this, ‘Lamb’s earliest known essay’, which was, she tells us, republished for the first time in an article Courtney wrote arguing for Lamb as its author: ‘New Lamb Texts from The Albion? Part I’, Charles Lamb Bulletin ( January 1977), pp. 6–11. 59. The Collected Works of Coleridge, vol. 3, p. 367. 60. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 2, p. 200. 61. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 220. 62. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 220. 63. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 221. 64. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 223. 65. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 225. 66. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 102. 67. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 225. 68. Coleridge’s article for the Morning Post, ‘Once a Jacobin, Always a Jacobin’, would seem to indicate as much. Also, Courtney tells us that by the time of Gillray’s ‘New Morality’ cartoon the Morning Post was a prime Anti-Jacobin target. See Young Charles Lamb, p. 196. 69. See Schoenfield, ‘Voices Together’, p. 259. Schoenfield observes that ‘Lamb is less direct than Hazlitt, allowing an anecdote to gather emotional power from the felt absence of a political explanation’.

192

Notes to pages 55–61

2 Domesticating the Flâneur 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

C. Baudelaire, The Poems in Prose, with La Fontarlo, ed. and trans. F. Scarfe, 2 vols (London: Anvil Press, 1989), vol. 2, p. 59. See Monsman, Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer, p. 55. Monsman also reads the ‘Old Benchers’ and ‘Night-Fears’ essays as being directed chiefly at De Quincey’s Confessions, by forming together ‘an ironic critique of that great hinge doctrine of romanticism, the possibility of access through the imagination to an ideal realm of plenitude’. A phrase used by Lamb himself, in a letter to Coleridge, 3 October 1796, in The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1935), vol. 1, p. 43. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 189–90, 188. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 131. The Collected Works of Coleridge, vol. 16, p. 352. Ibid., vol. 16, p. 352. C. Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 20. Ibid., pp. 20–1. K. Tester (ed.), The Flâneur (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 2–3. The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, pp. 198, 203. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 39. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 39–40. The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 240. Tester (ed.), The Flâneur, p. 5. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 39. In particular, see the chapter on ‘Lamb’s Low-Urban Taste’, in D. Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 89–116. Gigante similarly locates the emotional impetus to a gastronomic and urban rejection of ‘Lakeschool aesthetics’ in Lamb’s annoyance at a perceived attitude of ‘condescension’ in Coleridge’s poem. See also Judith Plotz’s chapter ‘Charles Lamb and the Child Within’, in her Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Plotz’s reading relates ‘Lamb’s obsessive concern with eating and drinking’ to a notion of childlikeness, and refers to other notable readings identifying a gastronomic theme by Lamb’s editor E. V. Lucas, and Fred Randel (p. 119). Regency excess is detailed in V. Murray, High Society: A Social History of the Regency Period, 1788–1830 (London: Viking/Penguin, 1998), chs 8–9; and also in A. Taylor, Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink, 1780–1830 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 40. Edmund Spenser, from ‘Prothalamion’, in Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 602. The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 315. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 315. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 223. Quoted in Gigante, Taste, p. 90. See ibid., pp. 89–116. The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 316. McFarland, Romantic Cruxes, pp. 34–6.

Notes to pages 61–80 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

193

Ibid., pp. 26–8. Ibid., pp. 44, 46. The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 316. Riehl, That Dangerous Figure, pp. 50–61. For a more comprehensive reader-response interpretation of this essay (together with ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ and ‘Blakesmoor, in H—shire’) and its manoeuvring of a materialistic ‘implied reader’, see ch. 2, ‘Elia and the Transformed Reader’, in J. Nabholtz, ‘My Reader My Fellow Labourer’, pp. 10–34. Lamb lived for ten weeks in lodgings at Dalston in 1816, and found his own ‘suburban retreat northerly’ when the Lambs lived at Colebrooke Cottage, Islington, from 1823 to 1827. J. Summerson, in Georgian London (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1988), pp. 12–13, describes how in George IV’s reign the ‘perimeter of London’ moved outwards ‘at a ramping, devouring pace. Every outward road, now, is lined with terraces and villas. In the wedges of country between, streets and squares are filling in, London’s satellite villages are villages no longer: Hackney, Islington, Paddington, Fulham, and Chelsea are suburbs.’ The Complete Works of Hazlitt, vol. 11, pp. 178–9. Nabholtz, ‘My Reader My Fellow Labourer’, pp. 11–12. J. Stevenson, London in the Age of Reform (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), pp. 117, 118. Ibid., pp. 116–18. Parker, ‘Ideology and Editing’, p. 476. Ibid., p. 482. Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, p. 128. As proposed by R. Winegarten, in Mme de Staël (Leamington Spa: Berg Publishing, 1985), p. 113. Edmund Burke argues as much in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ed. A. Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 43–5. Burke observes how political and religious power is exerted through fear of the unknown: ‘Those despotic governments which are founded on the passions of men – and principally upon the passion of fear – keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases of religion; almost all the heathen temples were dark.’ Monsman, Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer, p. 67. B. Woodbery, ‘Charles Lamb’s “Confessions of a Drunkard”: Constructing Subjectivity through Context’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 22:3 (2000), pp. 357–90. Woodbery subscribes to the theory that Leigh Hunt, who was good friends with James Mill, passed the essay on to him when its intended vehicle, Hunt’s Reflector, folded in 1811. Ibid., pp. 384, 358–9, 363. See S. M. Levin, The Romantic Art of Confession (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999). Levin proposes that Lamb and De Quincey among others ambivalently use the Confessions of Rousseau as a model, appropriating its religious form of confession for secular purposes while recoiling from its brutal honesty via a semi-fictional narrator. Unlike Woodbery, however, Levin does not read any of her chosen texts as being parodic. Woodbery, ‘Charles Lamb’s “Confessions of a Drunkard”’, pp. 373, 376. Although at this point it is no longer the 1821 London Magazine text but the 1822 book-text of De Quincey’s Confessions under discussion, in the interests of simplicity all quotations are referenced to the London. In opting for this policy, however, nothing

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49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Notes to pages 80–98 of any relevance or significance has been sacrificed in the way of accuracy, for as Grevil Lindop tells us of his Oxford edition of the London’s text, the subsequent one-volume duodecimo ‘was identical but for a small number of minor revisions’: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ed. G. Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xxiii. R. Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 208, 211. See Monsman, Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer, p. 22. Monsman ascribes to the lameness motif a literary manifestation of Charles’s own notion that the Lambs were stigmatized by the social pressures exerted on them by Mary’s illness. De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, p. 12. De Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit, p. 2. McFarland, Romantic Cruxes, p. 49. Aaron, A Double Singleness, p. 186. C. Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. and ed. P. E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 400. Aaron, A Double Singleness, pp. 180–1. Tester (ed.), The Flâneur, pp. 2–5. Wolfreys, Writing London, p. 104. Tester (ed.), The Flâneur, p. 3.

3 The Great Wen and the Rural Gothic 1.

J. Byng, Torrington Diaries, quoted in M. H. Port, ‘Town House and Country House’, in D. Arnold (ed.), The Georgian Country House: Architecture, Landscape and Society (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), pp. 117–38, on p. 117. 2. R. Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), p. 146. 3. A. C. Doyle, Beyond the City: The Idyll of a Suburb (1893; Chicago, IL: Donohue, Hennebury and Co., 1900), p. 11. 4. W. Wordsworth, Selected Prose, ed. J. O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 284. For a reading of Wordsworth’s hostility in the Preface towards metropolitanism – and more ambivalent attitude in the ‘Westminster Bridge’ sonnet – as manifested in concurrent spectacular art forms, see the introduction to Chandler and Gilmartin (eds), Romantic Metropolis, pp. 1–41. 5. Nabholtz, ‘My Reader My Fellow Labourer’, p. 21. 6. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 5, p. 55. 7. George Dyer (1755–1841) was an ardent advocate of political reform in the period of the Revolution. He too was educated at Christ’s Hospital, although unlike Lamb he went to university, at Cambridge. G. D. reappears in Elia in ‘Amicus Redivivus’ (December 1823), which describes an incident in 1823 when Dyer almost drowned after leaving Lamb’s house and walking straight into the New River. 8. Dyer’s philanthropy is perhaps best exhibited in Complaints of the Poor People of England (1793), or A Dissertation on the Theory and Practise of Benevolence (1795). The former is a strident call for reform influenced by Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2). 9. Dyer’s History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge was published in 1814. 10. Nabholtz, ‘My Reader My Fellow Labourer’, pp. 20, 27. 11. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 435.

Notes to pages 98–108

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12. For the historical background on the Christ’s Hospital controversy, I am indebted to J. Treadwell, ‘Impersonation and Autobiography in Lamb’s Christ’s Hospital Essays’, Studies in Romanticism, 37 (Winter 1998), pp. 499–521. 13. Quoted in ibid., pp. 504–5. 14. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 140. 15. Quoted in Treadwell, ‘Impersonation and Autobiography’, p. 505. 16. Quoted in ibid., p. 506. 17. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 140, 141. 18. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 146. 19. Treadwell, ‘Impersonation and Autobiography’, p. 505. 20. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 140. 21. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 142, 144, 146. 22. Treadwell, ‘Impersonation and Autobiography’, p. 513. 23. See C. S. Matheson, ‘Viewing’, in I. McCalman (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 187–97. These representations of scenes at print-shop windows suggest a quintessentially urban art form in that they reflect three of the city’s defining concepts; consumerism, spectatorship and the crowd. ‘Such works offered a means of engaging self-promotion for the printseller, as well as an opportunity to extend the spirit of satire from the prints displayed to the consumers themselves’ (pp. 195–6). A carnivalesque assortment of figures is typically featured, as in the anonymous lithograph of 1826, ‘Casualties of London Street Walking: A Strong Impression’, which depicts a fight outside a fashionable print shop between an errand boy and a sweep; alarmed middle-class pedestrians look on, including a dandy whose white trousers are being blackened by the sweep’s soot bag. 24. Lees, Introduction, The Emancipatory City, p. 6. 25. See T. S. Mole, ‘Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutics of Intimacy’ (PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, 2003), pp. 1–30. According to Mole, Byron’s readers invited the poet to visit, thus attempting ‘to shift their experience of him from the page to the flesh’ (p. 2). Lamb’s relatively minor celebrity as Elia yet suggests that the two writers shared a consciousness of being ‘both a producer of commodities and … in a sense, a commodity’ (p. 6). 26. For what remains an insightful appreciation of Wainewright’s contribution to the early success of the London, see Bauer, The London Magazine, pp. 167–73, 320–30. 27. The Complete Works of Hazlitt, vol. 8, p. 182. 28. According to Freud, ‘the uncanny’ is ‘that class of the frightening which leads us back to what is known of old and long familiar’. Freud associates the uncanny with the terms heimlich (homely) and unheimlich (unhomely): ‘Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’. S. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in The Penguin Freud Library, ed. J. Strachey, 14 vols (London: Penguin, 1990), vol. 14, pp. 340, 347. 29. D. Punter and G. Byron, The Gothic (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 261–2. 30. For the background material here on Lamb’s connections with Mackery End, Blakesware and the Plumer family, I have utilized both Lucas’s endnotes to the relevant essays (The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 2, pp. 358–9, 377, 405–6), and, supplementary to this, W. Page (ed.), The Victoria History of Hertfordshire, 4 vols (London: Constable & Co., 1902–23), vol. 3, pp. 321, 388–9. 31. Writing almost a century later, P. H. Ditchfield echoes Elia’s anguish over Blakesmoor in his condemnation of the destruction of old country houses in Lamb’s day: ‘At the begin-

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

Notes to pages 108–22 ning of the last century there was a veritable rage for pulling down old mansions. You can still see the terraces of the garden, the old fishponds and possibly the moat, but the house has gone, a prey to the vandalism of the age’: The Manor Houses of England (London: B. T. Batsford, 1910), p. 8. Quoted in Port, ‘Town House and Country House’, p. 117. Quoted in ibid., p. 117. Quoted in ibid., p. 118. Quoted in ibid., p. 119. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 25. The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 149. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 3, pp. 306, 311. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 25. Taken from the definition of ‘Gothic novel/fiction’ by J. A. Cuddon, in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 356. London’s commercialization of the Gothic was, of course, nothing new. It extends back almost to its very inception as a genre. The success of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 led to the founding of Horace Walpole’s private press at his mock-Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill, which he opened to the public. See Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, p. 114. For an inventive biographical interpretation of Elia’s ‘motif of lameness’ and its relation to the child-figure, see Monsman, Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer, pp. 20–36. See M. Johnson’s Housing Culture: Traditional Architecture in an English Landscape (London: University College London, 1993). Ibid., p. 183.

4 Utility and Pity 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

‘Summary Review of the Report and Evidence relative to the Poor-Laws’, Edinburgh Review, 33:65 ( January 1820), p. 91. See D. Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 19, 39; B. Maidment, Dusty Bob: A Cultural History of Dustmen, 1780–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); B. Maidment, ‘“Penny” Wise, “Penny” Foolish? Popular Periodicals and the “March of Intellect” in the 1820s and 1830s’, in Brake et al. (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media, pp. 104–21; V. Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), pp. 547–73. Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, pp. 39, 38. Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, pp. 101–28. See Lees, Introduction, The Emancipatory City, p. 10. Lees refers to the work of Georg Simmel in identifying a beneficial aspect to the archetypal detachment of the urban experience: such apparent alienation can free the individual from provincial narrowmindedness and create a ‘space of tolerance for individual difference’. See J. D. Marshall, The Old Poor Law, 1795–1834 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977), p. 12. Marshall details how the poor relief system was more extensively and rapidly reformed in this period than at any other time in its history. In 1795 ‘its administration was in the hands of some 15,000 separate parishes of England and Wales. Very few public men had any precise idea of the true situation throughout these nations over

Notes to pages 122–32

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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one salient fact; that it was generally felt that the cost of poor relief was increasing on an unprecedented scale.’ Ibid., p. 10. According to Marshall, the most significant amendment in the period up to the 1790s came in 1722–3 with the Workhouse or General Act, which allowed groups of parishes to erect workhouses and to impose a test whereby any person applying for relief was first required to register for work at such a place in return for food and shelter. Ibid., pp. 22–3, 12. See D. R. Green, From Artisans to Paupers: Economic Change and Poverty in London, 1790–1870 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 6–8. Marshall, The Old Poor Law, p. 23. Allowing for the possible inaccuracy of contemporary statistics, Marshall affirms that ‘between about 1784 and the years immediately following the termination of the French wars, expenditure on the poor rose between two and three times; from about two million pounds in 1784 to just short of six million in 1815’. S. King, Poverty and Welfare in England, 1700–1850: A Regional Perspective (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 25–6. K. H. Strange, The Climbing Boys: A Study of Sweeps’ Apprentices, 1773–1875 (London and New York: Alison & Busby, 1982), pp. 2–4. Marshall, The Old Poor Law, p. 15. The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. 2, no. 232 (1711), pp. 403, 404–5. Wordsworth, note to ‘Old Man Travelling’, in W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1800), ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 309. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. A. Gill, 2nd edn, 8 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), vol. 2, p. 41. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 41. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 41. Strange, The Climbing Boys, pp. 46–7. Ibid., p. 65. Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, p. 101. J. Swift, A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. A. Ross and D. Woolley (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 493. The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 239. W. Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789, 1794), ed. G. Keynes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 89, ll. 9–12. Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, pp. 95–7. Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, p. 38. N. Marsh, William Blake: The Poems (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 111–12. D. Reiman, Intervals of Inspiration: The Skeptical Tradition and the Psychology of Romanticism (Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1998), p. 66. Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, pp. 101–2. The Rev. Lisle Bowles, quoted in Strange, The Climbing Boys, p. 100. Two such examples are the anonymous engraving ‘A Crowd Outside a Print Shop’ (1790), and ‘Casualties of London Street Walking: A Strong Impression’ (1826). See note 23 to Chapter 3, above, for a description of the latter. See also Maidment, Dusty Bob, and ‘“Penny” Wise, “Penny” Foolish?’, p. 110. The sweep’s carnivalesque depiction in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century prints resembles that of another low-life, contagiously blackened, urban figure, the dustman. In ‘“Penny” Wise, “Penny” Foolish?’,

198

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Notes to pages 132–43 ‘All the prints [discussed by Maidment] agreed in using images of reversal, incongruity, and topsy-turvyness as their central mode of both structure and analysis’. Strange, The Climbing Boys, p. 95. R. Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 830. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, pp. 77–8. See G. Brulotte, ‘Laughter at Power’, in J. Parkin and J. Philips (eds), Laughter and Power, European Connections, 19 (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 11–18: ‘[Laughter] is a socially disruptive force that challenges customs, conventions, morality, logic, transgresses taboos and flouts laws, undermining civilization and learning. It gives voice to impropriety, disrespect, aggression and the absurd. With laughter, the social machine creaks, its herd-like unanimity falters, its habitual cohesion breaks up, and its mechanical reactions break down. Everything comes to a grinding halt. Sceptical, nihilistic, anarchic, it overturns the ambient system’ (p. 15). The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, pp. 77–8, 73. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 154. Gatrell, City of Laughter, pp. 4, 395. Spenser, Poetical Works, p. 602. P. Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Vintage/Chatto & Windus, 2000), pp. 149–50. See P. Cunningham (ed.), A Handbook of London (1850; West Yorkshire: EP Publishing, 1978), p. 34: Cunningham observes: ‘Bartholemew Fair, too long a real nuisance, with scarce a vestige of antiquity or utility about it, is now composed of a dozen toy-stalls and a few fruit-barrows. The Fair, in fact, cannot be said to exist’. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, p. 207. Reiman, Intervals of Inspiration, p. 72. Jeremy Bentham, quoted in ibid., p. 72. The aims of the Society were as follows: ‘the prevention of vice and contagion; – the promotion of virtue and industry; – and the general diffusion of moral and religious education’; The Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, 4 (London: W. Bulmer & Co., 1805), p. 4. See also Gatrell, City of Laughter, pp. 559–62, for the social background to the founding of the Suppression Society. A major reason why poor rates continued to rise after 1815, as identified by Gatrell, is that in the aftermath of war ‘discharged, crippled and pensionless servicemen’ were forced onto the streets (p. 360). William Godwin, quoted in Gatrell, City of Laughter, p. 563. Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. M. Hattaway (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 101, II.i.55–7. Gatrell, City of Laughter, pp. 557–8. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 337. Gatrell, City of Laughter, p. 555. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 2, p. 263. Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, p. 151. W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), Book VII, p. 260. T. Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 106: Paulin describes this anomaly in Hazlitt’s criticism as follows: ‘But he knew that the figure of Ilissos is unfinished in the sense that the twisting body has

Notes to pages 143–56

55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

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damaged limbs and no head. His prose has completed and perfected it. This is one of the functions of critical prose: it re-creates, re-imagines, goes beyond the boundaries of the aesthetic given. So the beautiful broken figure is the occasion for the perfect body of the prose statement.’ The Spectator, vol. 4, no. 430 (1712), p. 11. O. Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World (1762), in The Selected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. R. Garnett (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967), pp. 333, 334. Ibid., p. 396. P. Egan, Life in London; or The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorne, Esq., and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis (London: Sherwood, Neely & Jones, 1821), p. 343. Ibid., p. 342. Ibid., p. 347. Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, p. 20. The Collected Works of Coleridge, vol. 2, p. 6.

5 Lamb, Theatricality and the Fool 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

Dickens’ Journalism: Sketches by Boz and other Early Papers, 1833–39, ed. M. Slater (London: Phoenix, 1996), p. 110. See J. Kahan, The Cult of Kean (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Kahan argues that Kean’s iconic presence endures to this day, his ‘fictional figure’ having undergone in recent years a resurrection on both stage and screen. See M. Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late-Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992): E. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); J. Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); D. Worrall, Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship, and Romantic Period Subcultures, 1773–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and by the same author, The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787–1832 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Baer, Theatre and Disorder, p. 167. Toy theatre was hugely popular between 1815 and 1835, and consisted of often incredibly detailed kits, including drawings of actors and the scenery and properties of successful contemporary plays. Baer, Theatre and Disorder, p. 173. Ibid., p. 170. C. Leech and T. W. Craik (gen. eds), The Revels History of Drama in English, 8 vols (London: Methuen, 1975–83), vol. 6, p. 21. Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 152–3. Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book VII, pp. 252, 254, 256. For a close reading of this essay, one which hinges on the ‘tissue’ or ‘fabric’ of the curtain as a metaphor for Lamb’s autobiographical subterfuge with Elia, see Monsman, Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer, ch. 2. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 160. Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 217–18. Ibid., pp. 219–20.

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Notes to pages 156–65

15. P. Hartnoll (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 372. Also, Moody discusses at length Grimaldi’s innovative interpretation of the pantomime clown in Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 213–17. 16. Hartnoll (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, pp. 372, 624. 17. See Burton, A Double Life, pp. 150–1. Of the Lambs shared love of the fool Burton tells us that: ‘While both Charles and Mary were stimulated by people of outstanding intellectual and creative abilities, De Quincey noted that they also welcomed “numerous dull people, stupid people, asinine people, for no other reason upon earth than because [Charles] believed them to have been used or oppressed …” By Charles’s own assessment, their friends were indeed “for the most part, persons of an uncertain fortune” and “in the world’s eye a ragged regiment” … they often loved people not just regardless of their flaws, but precisely because of them.’ 18. The Complete Works of Hazlitt, vol. 6, p. 19. 19. E. Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (1935; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966), p. 324; see also S. Billington, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton: Harvester, 1984). Jane Aaron also briefly refers to Welsford’s book in noting how the role of fool helps Elia access ‘the ‘middle’ ground of play’ (A Double Singleness, p. 192). 20. J. Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. S. Elledge (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 77, III.494–5. 21. For a concise account of the Monument’s colourful history, including debate over its design, Pope’s damning description of it as a ‘tall bully’, and the many suicides it attracted, see the relevant entry in B. Weinreb and C. Hibbert (eds), The London Encyclopaedia (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983), p. 541. 22. Welsford, The Fool, p. 282. 23. Ibid., p. 324. 24. R. Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1987), p. 125. 25. Welsford, The Fool, p. 321. 26. Selected Writings of Hunt, vol. 2, p. 85. 27. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 87. 28. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 87. 29. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night or What You Will, ed. E. S. Donno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 109, III.i.50. 30. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, pp. 99, 98. 31. Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism, p. 122. 32. J. R. Heller, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama (Columbia, MO, and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990), pp. 115–27. 33. The story of the opening night of Mr H. parallels the calamity of Godwin’s Antonio, despite the respected Elliston playing the title role. At the denouement, when the mysterious protagonist’s real name is revealed as Hogsflesh, the audience’s barracking – in which Lamb himself enthusiastically joined – rendered the remainder of the play inaudible. 34. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 97. 35. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 98–9. 36. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 99. 37. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 100. 38. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 102. 39. See Park’s introduction to Lamb as Critic, pp. 1–42. Park places Lamb’s criticism of Shakespeare firmly at the vanguard of similar ideas expressed by Hazlitt and Coleridge. Because these latter writers did not commit their views to a ‘single full-length essay’ as

Notes to pages 165–76

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

201

Lamb did with his Reflector piece, Park argues, it is Lamb who is chiefly remembered – indeed blamed – for ‘divorcing [drama] from its performance on the stage’ (p. 20). See M. Jacobus, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theater’, Studies in Romanticism, 22 (1983), pp. 353–87. Jacobus attributes the reason for the removal of Shakespeare ‘into the closet, and if not Shakespeare, then at least action, acting, and actors’, to a conflicting notion of genius: ‘As the unveiling of a hidden truth, or prior text, dramatic representation must always lack self-sufficiency, like commanding genius … Not surprisingly, then, romantic criticism of Shakespeare – the type of myriad-minded, negatively capable, and God-like creator – tends to subordinate stage to page, and actors to text. The price of Shakespearian integrity and inwardness of imagination will be a corresponding denigration of the theatre’ (p. 375). Quoted in Leech and Craik (gen. eds), The Revels History of Drama, p. 7. Quoted in ibid., p. 7. Selected Writings of Hunt, vol. 2, pp. 20–1. The Complete Works of Hazlitt, vol. 5, pp. 221–2. The Collected Works of Coleridge, vol. 5, p. 269. The Complete Works of Hazlitt, vol. 5, p. 224. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 2, pp. 168–9. This essay first appeared in the Englishman’s Magazine, shortly after Elliston’s death, and was subsequently divided into two separate pieces, ‘To the Shade of Elliston’ and ‘Ellistoniana’, for Last Essays (1833). See J. Donohue, Theatre in the Age of Kean (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975). Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 180–1. Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, 4, pp. 15–16. In ‘On Actors and Acting’ (Examiner, 5 January 1817), Hazlitt whimsically indulges in a positive image of Restoration London itself as having been gay, elegant and conscience-free. Hazlitt’s and Lamb’s respective eulogies to Restoration culture, however, contrast sharply not only with the above society’s view, but with Shelley’s condemnation of the period in A Defence of Poetry (1821), in which he claims that ‘liberty and virtue’ were lost to a degraded drama and poetry which supported a tyrannical monarchy. See The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. R. Ingpen and W. E. Peck, 10 vols (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), vol. 7, p. 122. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, pp. 45–6. For an excellent recent study of Lamb’s ludic performance of autobiography that incorporates Elia’s reflexivity as a pseudonymous figure of the London Magazine, see Treadwell’s chapter on Elia in Autobiographical Writing, pp. 209–40. The Complete Works of Hazlitt, vol. 3, pp. 149–50. Hunt, Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres (1807), in The Dramatic Essays of Leigh Hunt, ed. W. Archer and R. W. Lowe (London: Walter Scott, 1894), p. 45; The Complete Works of Hazlitt, vol. 18, p. 247. His prolific interest in Munden is no doubt what caused Lamb for a long time to be suspected of authoring the Reynolds piece, which appeared in the London’s regular drama review. E. V. Lucas indeed appends it (as ‘Munden’s Farewell’) to the first volume of his edition of The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. However, F. P. Riga and C. A. Prance, in the Index to the London Magazine (New York and London: Garland, 1978), confirm the identity of the author as Reynolds, the magazine’s drama critic at the time. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 342. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 72. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 77.

202

Notes to pages 177–86

58. Treadwell, Autobiographical Writing, pp. 225–6. 59. Jacobus, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theater’, p. 381.

Conclusion 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Riehl, That Dangerous Figure, p. 163. H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). For a recent study of the significance of friendship in Lamb’s early writing, discussed within the context of the political and literary climate of the 1790s, see F. James, Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). S. Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 48–9. Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism, p. 96. E. A. Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, in Selected Tales, ed. D. Van Leer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 84–5. Ibid., p. 91. Trefor Thomas, quoted in R. Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 30. Lees, Introduction, The Emancipatory City, p. 4. M. Praz, The Romantic Agony (1933), trans. A. Davidson, ed. F. Kermode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 15. In particular, see G. Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge, 1985). J. Thompson, The City of Dreadful Night, ed. E. Morgan (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1998), p. 31, ll. 71–7. Ibid., p. 27, ll. 15–23, 27–8. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, p. 39.

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INDEX

Aaron, Jane, 3, 40, 83, 84 Ackroyd, Peter, 136 Addison, Joseph, 123–4 aestheticism, 4–5, 8, 11, 16–17, 35–6, 58, 61, 67, 128 Albion, 46, 48, 50, 51 Alcock, Mary, 132 Anti-Jacobin, 29, 46 anxiety, 3, 6, 12, 19–20, 21–6, 24, 30, 52, 105, 179–81 Arnold, Matthew, 73 Arundel Castle, 135 Athenaeum, 175 Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, 111 Persuasion, 109 authorship, 8–9, 15–17, 18, 20, 21–3, 25, 78, 177, 180–1 anonymity, 38 identity, 21 see also periodicals, writing for Baer, Marc, 150 Bannister, John, 170, 172 Bartholomew Fair, 135–6, 137, 141, 151, 183 Baudelaire, Charles, 55, 59, 83, 84, 85 Bauer, Josephine, 2 beggars, 58, 84, 121, 123–5, 137–44, 146–7 Bensley, Robert, 162, 167–8 Bentham, Jeremy, 138 Bible, 75 Blackwood’s, 6 ‘Chaldee Manuscript’, 35 dispute with London Magazine, 20, 21, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34–9, 41–2, 44, 45–6, 104

in, 1830s, 45 ‘King of Cockaigne’, 35 launched, 34–5 Blake, William, 4, 122 ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, 129, 130, 131 ‘The Human Abstract’, 141 ‘London’, 183 Blakesware, Hertfordshire, 88, 108, 109–10, 119 Bloom, Harold, 180 books, 13–14, 15–16, 43–4 London book market, 29, 45 see also readers and reading Boswell, James, 60, 183 Bourne, Vincent, 140 Brake, Laurel, 3 British Critic, 34 Browne, Sir Thomas, 13–14, 36, 43, 100 Religio Medici, 41 Burke, Sean, 181 Butler, Marilyn, 30 Byng, John, 87, 88, 109 Caroline, Queen, 13, 65–6, 67, 68, 73, 74 Champion, 33 charity, 98, 99, 121, 123–4, 132–3, 136, 144–8 Chatman, Seymour, 163 children and childhood, 68, 69, 70–3, 74, 75, 98, 122, 133, 136, 153, 154 chimney-sweeps, 123, 125, 127, 128, 129–32 ‘Dream-Children’, 84, 88, 97, 105, 107, 108, 111, 112–14, 115, 118–19 education, 98, 99–100 of the poor, 99, 125

– 211 –

212

Index

children’s literature, 13, 97–8, 132 chimney-sweeps, 121–2, 126–8, 129–37 feast at St Bartholomew’s Fair, 135–6, 137, 155 Christie, John, 20, 34 Christ’s Hospital, 13, 42, 73, 91, 96–7, 98–103, 116, 156 cities, 1–2, 9, 12, 16, 86, 101, 181–6 and country, 55–63, 100–1 and theatre, 5, 144–7, 149–51, 169–70 see also London; metropolis; metropolitanism Clare, John, 26 ‘Farewell to Mary’, 69 ‘Sonnet to Elia’, 2 Cobbett, William, Rural Rides, 87, 88, 123 Cockney School and Cockneyism, 17, 19–22, 34–40, 41, 42, 44, 47, 52–3, 75 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 8, 28, 30, 35, 55, 61–2, 84, 114, 146–7, 180 Biographia Literaria, 30 at Christ’s Hospital, 98–9, 101, 102 home at Keswick, 60 on Jacobins, 46 Kubla Khan, 76, 77 Lamb’s letters to, 58–9 on theatre, 166–7 ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’, 12, 55, 57–9, 97 Colman, George, John Bull, 172 comedy, 155–7, 160–1, 167–75 see also fools; pantomime Congreve, William, 173 Love for Love, 170 The Way of the World, 172 consumerism, 4–5, 17, 20, 26, 61, 86, 90, 93, 134, 156 copyright, 28 Cornwall, Barry ‘The Cider Cellar’, 2 ‘A Dream’, 77 ‘The Memoir of a Hypochondriac’, 2 Correggio, 81, 83 country houses, 86, 105–11 Covent Garden, 152, 166 Coventry, Thomas, 168 Cox, Jeffrey, 19, 31

criticism, 16, 43, 44, 186 of Lamb, 17 periodical, 3, 28–34, 45–7 Romantic, 165 Cronin, Richard, 14, 127 crowds, 22–3, 28, 55, 63, 85–6, 139, 141, 151, 167, 182 Cunningham, Allan, 111, 129–30 Dart, Gregory, 21–2, 36, 39–40 De Obaldia, Claire, 82 De Quincey, Thomas, 17, 31 ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, 4, 7, 12, 16, 17, 23, 31, 35, 55, 56, 76, 77, 79–80, 179, 183 ‘On Murder’, 4–5 de Staël, Madame, 74–5, 76 Dickens, Charles ‘Astleys’, 149 Oliver Twist, 183 Dodd, James, 167, 168–9 Doyle, Conan, Beyond the City, 87 Drury Lane, 163, 166 Old Drury theatre, 153, 154–5 Dyer, George, 9, 89, 93–6, 99 East India House, 57, 61 Edinburgh Review, 21, 24, 30, 35, 121 education, 98, 99–100 Egan, Pierce, Life in London, 5, 145–6, 147, 179 stage adaptation, 150 Elgin Marbles, 142–3 ‘Elia’ (pseudonym of Lamb) ‘A Character of the Late Elia’, 41 ‘death’, 114–15 identity, 4, 8–9, 11–12, 15, 24, 55, 89–91, 96–7, 103–5, 163 name, 61–2 Elia, F. Augustus, 12 Elliston, Robert, 170 Elwin, Malcolm, 6 Empedocles, 158 Englishman’s Magazine, 47, 170 Epstein Nord, Deborah, 121–2, 146 essay form, 9–11, 14, 15–16, 61, 62, 105

Index Examiner, 22, 31, 33, 39, 92, 155, 161, 166, 175 Fenwick, John, 46, 50, 51, 136 fiction, 3, 43 Field, Mary, 108, 112, 113 Fielde, Francis, 153 fools, 12, 155–62, 163, 168–9, 174, 175 Fox, Charles James, 125 Frank, Robert, 3, 27 French Revolution, 46, 50 Garrick, David, 164, 167, 168 Gatrell, Vic, 135, 137, 170 Gentleman’s Magazine, 98 George IV, King, 69 Gifford, William, 29 Gillray, James, 46, 183 Gilston Park, 108, 109 Godwin, William, 51, 66, 125, 138–9, 175 Antonio, 174–5 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Citizen of the World, 144–5 Gothic, 88, 105, 107–8, 109–10, 111–14, 115, 117–19, 183 Grimaldi, 156 Hazlitt, William, 3, 5, 19, 21, 25, 52–3, 63, 158, 161 on Elgin Marbles, 142–3 ‘The Fight’, 4 on Edmund Kean, 166, 167 Lectures on the English Comic Writers, 157, 173 on Munden, 175 ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, 4, 17 ‘On the Conversation of Authors’, 89 ‘On Going a Journey’, 105–6 ‘On Londoners and Country People’, 16–17, 35, 38–40, 41, 53, 102 ‘On the New School of Reform’, 124 ‘The Periodical Press’, 30 Reply to Malthus, 124 Spirit of the Age, 1, 2, 23, 34, 179 Table Talk, 10–11, 92 on theatre, 169 Heller, Janet Ruth, 163 Hertfordshire, 86, 105–11, 153

213

Higgins, David, 22, 24, 28 Hogarth, William, 135, 175, 176–7 ‘March to Finchley’, 133, 134, 183 Hogg, James, 35, 111 Hood, Thomas, 13, 57 ‘The Lion’s Head’, 26, 126 ‘Moral Reflections’, 126 Houghton, Bedfordshire, 109 Huguenots, 67 Hunt, Leigh, 9, 17, 19, 22, 31, 32, 34, 36–7, 53, 80, 99, 161, 179 ‘Account of a Familiar Spirit’, 4 on Edmund Kean, 166 in ‘King of Cockaigne’, 35, 36–7 on Munden, 175 ‘On Getting Up on Cold Mornings’, 4, 36 on pantomime, 161 review of Lamb’s Works, 33, 104 ‘Success of Periodicals’, 45, 47 imperialism, 103 Indicator, 33, 36, 104, 154 Industrial Revolution, 99, 123 Inner Temple, London, 60, 68–73, 117, 132, 154, 173–4 irony, 17–18, 44, 78, 111, 122, 156, 162, 179–80, 184 Iser, Wolfgang, 163 Jacobinism, 46, 47, 50 Jacobus, Mary, 177 Jarvis, Robin, 80 Jeffrey, Francis, 30, 31 Jews, 42 Johnson, Matthew, 118–19 Johnson, Samuel, 10 Kean, Edmund, 149, 166, 167 Keats, John, 8, 31, 34, 66, 129 Kemble, Charles, 164, 166, 174 Keswick, 60 Klancher, Jon, 5, 23 Lake District, 60–1, 62, 76 Lake School, 5, 20, 30–1, 34, 52, 55, 61, 88, 105 Lamb, Charles biography, 56–7, 60, 61, 68, 69, 85, 185

214

Index

letters, 57, 58–9, 60, 61, 62, 76, 78, 109–10 pseudonyms see ‘Elia’; ‘Lepus’; ‘Phil-Elia’ ‘All Fool’s Day’, 13, 155–61 ‘Autobiography of Mr. Munden’, 175–6, 177 ‘Blakesmoor, in H—shire’, 86, 107–10, 111, 114–19, 154, 167 ‘Captain Jackson’, 137 ‘A Chapter on Ears’, 9, 81, 104 ‘A Character of the Late Elia’, 8, 41, 114 ‘Child-angel’, 83–4 ‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’, 48, 96–8 ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars’, 7–8, 58, 84, 121, 137–144, 146–7, 174 ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’, 7, 56, 76, 77–9, 147 ‘The Convalescent’, 40, 83, 84 ‘The Death of Munden’, 175, 176 ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’, 6, 14, 15, 21, 25, 40, 43–4, 47, 84, 156 ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’, 59, 136, 159, 160 ‘Distant Correspondents’, 127–8 ‘Dream-Children’, 84, 88, 97, 105, 107, 108, 111, 112–14, 115, 118–19 ‘Edax on Appetite’, 59, 78 ‘Essay on Munden’, 34 Essays, 3 The Essays of Elia, 34, 94 ‘Guy Faux’, 160 ‘Imperfect Dramatic Illusion’, 169 ‘Jews, Quakers, Scotchmen, and other Imperfect Sympathies’, 8, 16, 21, 33, 36, 39, 40, 41–3, 44, 83, 100 Last Essays, 3, 47, 52, 86 ‘The Last Peach’, 110–11 ‘The Lion’s Head’, 97, 104, 114–15 ‘Mackery End, in Hertfordshire’, 81, 86, 106–8 ‘Mortifications of an Author’, 24–5 Mr H., 163 ‘Mrs Battle’s Opinions on Whist’, 27, 83, 132, 154–5, 159

‘My First Play’, 13, 48, 132, 151, 152–5, 165, 167 ‘My Relations’, 84 ‘New Year’s Eve’, 36, 57, 62, 159 ‘Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago’, 21, 45, 47–52, 63, 64–5, 67, 68 ‘No Man’s Time’, 49–50 ‘The Old Actors’, 33 ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’, 48, 56, 69–74, 97, 104–5, 116 ‘Old China’, 82, 83 ‘The Old and the New Schoolmaster’, 15, 162, 174 ‘On the Acting of Garrick and the Plays of Shakspeare’, 162, 163–5, 167, 168 ‘On Christ’s Hospital, and the Character’, 98, 99–100 ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’, 134, 176, 177 ‘On Magazine Writers’, 25–6 ‘On Some of the Old Actors’, 167–73 ‘On the Total Defect of the Faculty’, 47–51 ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare’, 164–5, 167, 168 ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, 8, 9, 15, 24, 27, 44, 88–9, 91–6, 116, 117 ‘Play-house Memoranda’, 155 ‘Poor Relations’, 40, 136–7 ‘The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers’, 7, 13, 16, 84, 121–2, 130–7, 138 ‘Readers against the Grain’, 15, 29 ‘Recollections of Christ’s Hospital’, 96 ‘Recollections of the South-Sea House’, 8, 12, 15, 48, 56, 62–8, 89–90, 168 ‘Reminiscences of Elliston’, 170 ‘Re-prints of ELIA’, 78 review of Table Talk, 10–11 Rosamund Gray, 12, 109, 111, 118 ‘The Superannuated Man’, 28, 85–6, 141, 159, 162 ‘A Sylvan Surprise’, 134 Tales from Shakespeare, 163 ‘That my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple are Models of the Genteel Style’, 27–8, 41, 47 ‘The Two Races of Men’, 14, 44, 50, 84, 136

Index ‘What is Jacobinism’, 46 ‘Witches and other Night-Fears’, 7, 10, 35, 56, 70, 74–7, 82, 110, 135, 140, 147, 154, 173, 176 Works, 33, 34, 96 ‘Written at Cambridge’, 89, 91–2 Lamb, Elizabeth (mother), 56 Lamb, John (father), 71, 75 Lamb, Mary (sister), 12, 56, 58, 118 ‘The Young Mahometan’, 110, 111 Langan, Celeste, 57–8, 80 Lees, Loretta, 16, 183 ‘Lepus’ (pseudonym of Lamb), 24–5, 29, 30 Liberal, 4 Lockhart, J. G., 22, 30–1, 34, 35 London, 2, 55, 59–60, 62–3, 80, 85, 89, 97, 99–100, 101, 122, 182, 184 book market, 29, 45 Common Council of City of, 98 growth, 87, 123 history, 67 Lambs’ homes, 56–7, 61 in literature, 16, 31 theatre, 149–56 see also metropolis London Magazine, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 15, 23, 25, 40, 52, 55–6, 60, 65–6, 73, 74, 76, 79, 88, 89, 93, 96, 97, 104–5, 110–11, 119, 158, 175 dispute with Blackwood’s, 20, 21, 29, 30, 31–41, 42, 44, 45–6, 104 ‘The Lion’s Head’, 26, 96, 97, 104, 112, 114–15, 126 launched, January 1820, 2, 26–7, 169 November 1820, 96, 97 December 1820, 96 September, 1821, 68–9 December, 1821, 151–2 January 1822, 111–12 February 1822, 142 May, 1822, 126, 127 August, 1822, 78 October 1822, 175 January 1823, 114 September 1824, 114–15 February 1825, 175 July, 1825, 124

215

London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, 137–8, 139, 141, 142, 146–7 London Society of Master Sweeps, 125 McFarland, Thomas, 61–2 McGann, Jerome, 3, 184 Mackery End, Hertfordshire, 81, 86, 88, 89, 105, 106–7, 113 Mackintosh, James, 51 Macpherson, James, 63–4 ‘Carthon’, 64 magazines see periodicals; individual titles Malthus, Thomas, 123, 125 Manning, Peter J., 6 Manning, Thomas, 60, 61, 62 Marsh, Nicholas, 130 Marvell, Andrew, ‘The Garden’, 70, 116–17 Maturin, Charles Robert, 111 metropolis, 1, 4, 8, 13, 16–17, 18, 67–8, 69–70, 86, 87–8, 98, 103, 122, 137, 144, 147–8, 180–1 see also cities; London metropolitanism, 2–14, 17, 20, 55–6, 62, 79–80, 88, 101–2, 105, 106–7, 122, 159, 179–81, 186 Milton, John, 14, 93 Paradise Lost, 158 Monsman, Gerald, 77 Montgomery, James, 122, 129–30, 131, 132 Monthly Magazine, 29 Moody, Jane, 150–1, 156 Moore, Thomas, 84 Morning Chronicle, 48 Morning Post, 46, 46, 48–50, 51–2, 59 Moxon, Edward, 47 Munden, Joseph, 175–6, 177 Nabholt, John, 3, 63, 90, 94, 96 Natarajan, Uttara, 11 nature, 60, 61 New Monthly Magazine, 4, 21, 27, 38, 105 New Times, 24–5 Newlyn, Lucy, 30

216

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newspapers, 14, 45–6, 47, 48, 49 ‘Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago’, 21, 45, 47–52, 63, 64–5, 67, 68 see also individual titles Old Drury theatre, 153, 154–5 Palmer, John, 153, 167 pantomime, 59, 154, 155–6, 161 Parker, Mark, 5–6, 23, 65–6, 68, 73, 78–9 parody, 10, 39, 44, 76, 79, 127 Gothic, 111 Shelley, 31 Swift, 128–9 pastoral, 1, 70, 73, 95, 101, 106, 118 Patmore, P. G., 21, 25–6 ‘On Magazine Writers’, 40 Paulin, Tom, 143 Peacock, Thomas, Nightmare Abbey, 111 penal settlements, 127–8 periodicals, 14–16, 28–9 criticism, 3, 28–34, 45–7 magazines, 14–15, 21–6, 28, 29 payment, 24 writing for, 3–4, 5–7, 10, 14, 19–26, 27, 30, 52, 78–9, 105, 115, 179 see also newspapers Petty, Sir William, 124, 128–9 Philanthropist, 78 ‘Phil-Elia’ (pseudonym of Lamb), 8, 41, 114 pity, 121, 126–35, 137, 140–4 Plotz, John, 23 Plotz, Judith, 73, 122, 131 Plumer, William, 108, 109 Poe, Edgar Allan, 85 ‘The Man of the Crowd’, 182, 185 Poor Law, 121–6 Port, M. H., 108, 109 Porter, Roy, 160 Powis Castle, 109 Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony, 183 Price, Leah, 14

Quarterly Review, 6, 21, 29, 32, 35, 78 readers and reading, 14–16, 23, 27, 28–30, 33, 43–4, 89–91, 130, 148, 162, 163, 179, 185–6 anti-theatrical, 163–7 see also books; periodicals Redding, Cyrus, 122 Reflector, 4, 33, 134, 162, 163, 176 Reiman, Donald, 130 Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition … of the Poor, 171 reviews, 29–34, 45 Reynolds, G. W. M., The Mysteries of London, 183 Reynolds, John Hamilton ‘The Literary Police Office’, 114–15 theatre review, 13, 151–2 Reynolds, Joshua, 134, 143, 175 Rich, John, 155–6 Riehl, Joseph, 17, 179 Romanticism, 1–3, 5, 7–8, 11, 16, 17, 55, 61–2, 122, 179–84 Ross, Trevor, 28 Rudder, Samuel, 108–9 Russett, Margaret, 23–4, 163 St Clair, William, 14 St Paul’s Cathedral, 13, 126 Schoenfield, Mark, 5, 68 Scots Magazine, 35 Scott, John, 2, 12–13, 21, 32, 65–6, 104 death, 20, 34 ‘The Literature of the Nursery’, 97–8 ‘On Cockney Writers’, 35, 37–8 Prospectus for London Magazine, 26–7 Shaftesbury, Lord, 27–8, 41, 47 Shakespeare, William, 13, 162, 163–5 As You Like It, 139 Hamlet, 44, 165 King Lear, 158 Macbeth, 131 Richard II, 166 The Tempest, 166 Twelfth Night, 161, 168 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 34 Adonais, 32 Peter Bell the Third, 16, 31–2

Index Skiddaw, 60, 62 Smith, J. T., Vagabondia, 139, 142 Society for Bettering the Condition … of the Poor, 138 Somerset House, 48, 51–2 South Sea Bubble, 13, 62, 63–5 South-Sea House, London, 12, 60, 62–8, 69, 73, 85, 91, 184 Southey, Robert, 30, 50, 109 Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets, 171 Spectator, 123–4, 144 Spenser, Edmund, 59–60, 70 Steele, Richard, 144 Stevenson, John, 65 Suett, Dicky, 172–3 suggestion, 7, 9 Swift, Jonathan, A Modest Proposal, 13, 124, 128–9 Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 33 Tame, Thomas, 168–9 Tatler, 45 Taylor, John, 12, 56, 68, 74 Temple, Sir William, 27–8, 41, 47 Temple, London, 69–73, 85, 154 see also Inner Temple, London Tester, Keith, 58 theatre, 44, 149–55 city as, 5, 145–6, 151, 169–70 and conscience, 144–8 O. P. rioters, 150 theatricality, 13, 149–54 anti-theatrical reader, 163–7 Thomson, James ‘B. V.’, The City of Dreadful Night, 184–6 Times Literary Supplement, 16

217

Treadwell, James, 6, 9, 101, 177 utilitarianism, 78, 81, 125, 138, 179 Vanbrugh, John, The Relapse, 43 Wainwright, T. G., 2, 26, 105 Waithman, Robert, 98 Welsford, Enid, 158, 159, 160 Westminster Abbey, 164 Williams, Raymond, 87 Wilson, John, 22, 31–2, 35, 45 Wolfreys, Julian, Writing London, 7, 16, 85 Woodbery, Bonnie, 78–9 Woodhouse, Richard, Cause Book, 31–2 Wordsworth, William, 4, 30, 31, 32, 35, 50, 57, 59, 114, 180 ‘Beggars’, 147 ‘The Brothers’, 125 ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’, 151 The Excursion, 76 ‘Extempore Effusion’, 59 letter, 124–5 Lyrical Ballads, 88 ‘Michael’, 125 ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, 58, 124, 129, 138, 143 The Prelude, 13, 16, 28, 60, 141–2, 144, 151, 182, 183 ‘Yarrow Visited’, 106 Young, Edward, Night Thoughts, 185 Younge, Iris Marion, 9