Charles Lamb (1775 - 1834)

Charles Lamb was little more than a footnote to me, a minor English Romantic in the shadows of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, three whom I actually read once. What passed by in online browsing was the flat criticism that Lamb's essays were trivial and not to be used in teaching the art of writing. So, I got a book. In fact, Lamb is so out of favor that the University of Texas library shelves him only in the old Dewey decimal stacks. I took home the Modern Library edition, Complete Works and Letters (1935; Introduction by Saxe Commins). It required some adjustment but I found him as readable and enjoyable as Jane Austen and much more aligned to my prejudices than Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Herman Melville. 

Frontispiece in The Letters of Charles Lamb Newly Arranged,
With Additions, Edited with an Introduction and Notes
by Alfred Ainger, vol 1., New York, A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1888.
(From The Intenet Archive)

It is not so much the topics and subjects which must exist in a context. Lamb visits galleries, views paintings, reading them like essays of their own, which is the proper way to tour. Most people in my time walk through as fast as the crowd will allow as if these were television commercials. His correspondents knew the works first hand. I have to google them. And so, too, with most of the subjects.

The unstated complaint from the academics is that Lamb did not have a manor of nominally free serfs allowing him to compose and publish. Lamb was "forced to work as accountant" for the British East India Company when he could have shone  as brilliantly as his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Nevertheless, in this collection, Letter CXCII to Coleridge bears the heading "The Accountant's Office, April 26, 1816." I also confess that to find this book in the library, I was out of my assigned district when I stopped my patrol twice to visit the library, search for his works, and request this one. 

Lamb's intelligence allowed him to be prolific. He got a lot done. The tragedy of his early death - as with very many - was the lack of antibiotics or merely effective antiseptics: walking the street, he fell, scraped his face, and died of sepsis. 

For myself, it is not so much the essays and poems, each in its own entirety, as it is the phrases of which they are built. Language today has been abraded into Orwellian cant. (IMHO.) Of course, YMMV. So, I cannot pick a single passage that will sway any reader. I only offer an example that pleased me. (I am not going to insert a Smiley: even I have limits.) 

From “The Illustrious Defunct” (1825)

Never can the writer forget when, as a child, he was hoisted upon a servant's shoulder in Guildhall, and looked down upon the installed and solemn pomp of the then drawing Lottery. The two awful cabinets of iron, upon whose massy and mysterious portals, the royal initials were gorgeously emblazoned, as if after having deposited the unfulfilled prophecies within, the King himself had turned the lock and still retained the key in his pocket;—the blue-coat boy, with his naked arm, first converting the invisible wheel, and then diving into the dark recess for a ticket;—the grave and reverend faces of the commissioners eyeing the announced number;—the scribes below calmly committing it to their huge books;—the anxious countenances of the surrounding populace, while the giant figures of Gog and Magog, like presiding deities, looked down with a grim silence upon the whole proceeding,—constituted altogether a scene, which combined with the sudden wealth supposed to be lavished from those inscrutable wheels, was well calculated to impress the imagination of a boy with reverence and amazement. Jupiter, seated between the two fatal urns of good and evil, the blind Goddess with her cornucopia, the Parcæ wielding the distaff, the thread of life, and the abhorred shears, seemed but dim and shadowy abstractions of mythology, when I had gazed upon an assemblage exercising, as I dreamt, a not less eventful power, and all presented to me in palpable and living operation. Reason and experience, ever at their old spiteful work of catching and destroying the bubbles which youth delighted to follow, have indeed dissipated much of this illusion, but my mind so far retained the influence of that early impression, that I have ever since continued to deposit my humble offerings at its shrine whenever the ministers of the Lottery went forth with type and trumpet to announce its periodical dispensations; and though nothing has been doled out to me from its undiscerning coffers but blanks, or those more vexatious tantalizers of the spirit, denominated small prizes, yet do I hold myself largely indebted to this most generous diffuser of universal happiness. Ingrates that we are! are we to be thankful for no benefits that are not palpable to sense, to recognise no favours that are not of marketable value, to acknowledge no wealth unless it can be counted with the five fingers? If we admit the mind to be the sole depositary of genuine joy, where is the bosom that has not been elevated into a temporary elysium by the magic of the Lottery? Which of us has not converted his ticket, or even his sixteenth share of one, into a nest-egg of Hope, upon which he has sate brooding in the secret roosting-places of his heart, and hatched it into a thousand fantastical apparitions?

(MISCELLANEOUS PROSE BY CHARLES AND MARY LAMB EDITED BY E. V. LUCAS WITH A FRONTISPIECE

METHUEN & CO LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON; First Published in this form (Fcap. 8vo) in 1912; This Work was first Published in Seven Volumes (Demy 8vo) in 1903-5. (From Project Gutenberg) (Just to note that the Frontispiece in that work is not the one above. The book from Methuen showed Lamb in the attire of a Venetian senator.) 

Financing our governments with lotteries is voluntary, which taxation is not. In our time, American states launched them to pay for public education but the revenues always fall short of the demands and that can be  a subject for a different blog post. 

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