The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 · Chapter 60W. . . . " 45 [23
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Dr. T——e . " 46 [24] Dr. Trollope.
Th. . . " 47 [24] Thornton.
S. . . " 47 [24] Scott, died in Bedlam.
M. . . " 47 [24] Maunde, dismiss'd school.
C.V. le G. . " 48 [25] Chs. Valentine le Grice.
F. . . . " 49 [25] Favell; left Camb'rg because he was asham'd of his father, who was a house-painter there.
Fr. . . " 50 [26] Franklin, Gramr. Mast., Hertford.
T. . . " 50 [26] Marmaduke Thompson.
K. . . " 59 [30] Kenney, Dramatist. Author of Raising Wind, &c.
S.T.C. . . " 60 [31] Samuel Taylor Coleridge. [Not in Lamb's autograph.]
Alice W——n . " 63 [32] Feigned (Winterton).
*** . . " 64 [32] No Meaning.
**** . . " 64 [32] No Meaning.
*** . . " 64 [32] No Meaning.
Mrs. S. . . " 87 [44] Mrs. Spinkes.
R. . . . " 98 [50] Ramsay, London Library, Ludg. St.; now extinct.
Granville S. . " 98 [50] Granville Sharp. [Not in Lamb's autograph.]
E.B. . . " 130 [65] Edward Burney, half-brother of Miss Burney.
B. . . . " 141 [71] Braham, now a Xtian.
*********** . " 170 [85] Distrest Sailors.
J——ll. . " 195 [97] Jekyll.
Susan P. . " 198 [99] Susan Peirson.
R.N. . . " 206 [103] Randal Norris, Subtreasr, Inner Temple.
C. . . . " 216 [108] Coleridge.
F. . . . " 222 [111] Field.
B.F. . . " 238 [118] Baron Field, brother of Frank.
Lord C. . " 243 [121] Lord Camelford.
Sally W——r . " 248 [123] Sally Winter.
J.W. . . " 248 [123] Jas. White, author of Falstaff's Letters.
St. L. . . " 268 [133] No meaning.
B., Rector of —— " 268 [133] No meaning.
The London Magazine, with John Scott (1783-1821) as its editor was founded in 1820 by Baldwin, Cradock & Joy. Its first number was dated January, 1820, and Lamb's first contribution was in the number for August, 1820. Lamb had known Scott as editor of The Champion in 1814, but, according to Talfourd, it was Hazlitt who introduced Lamb to the London Magazine.
John Scott, who was the author of two interesting books of travel, A Visit to Paris in 1814 and Paris Re-visited in 1815, was an admirable editor, and all was going exceedingly well until he plunged into a feud with Blackwood's Magazine in general, and John Gibson Lockhart in particular, the story of which in full may be read in Mr. Lang's Life and Letters of Lockhart, 1896. In the duel which resulted Scott was shot above the hip. The wound was at first thought lightly of, but Scott died on February 27, 1821—an able man much regretted.
The magazine did not at first show signs of Scott's loss; it continued to bear the imprint of its original publishers and its quality remained very high. With Lamb and Hazlitt writing regularly this could hardly be otherwise. But four months after the death of Scott and eighteen months after its establishment the London Magazine passed into the hands of the publishers Taylor & Hessey, the first number with their imprint being dated August, 1821. Although for a while no diminution of merit was perceptible and rather an access of gaiety—for Taylor brought Hood with him and John Hamilton Reynolds—yet the high editorial standards of Scott ceased to be applied. Thenceforward the decline of the magazine was steady.
John Taylor (1781-1864), senior partner in the firm of Taylor & Hessey, was known as the identifier of Sir Philip Francis with the author of "Junius," on which subject he had issued three books. Although unfitted for the post, he acted as editor of the London Magazine until it was again sold in 1825.
With the beginning of 1825 Taylor made a change in the magazine. He started a new series, and increased the size and the price. But the experiment did not answer; the spirit had evaporated; and in the autumn he sold it to Henry Southern (1799-1853), who had founded the Retrospective Review in 1820. The last number of the London Magazine to bear Taylor & Hessey's name, and (in my opinion) to contain anything by Lamb, was August, 1825. We have no definite information on the matter, but there is every indication in Lamb's Letters that Taylor was penurious and not clever in his relations with contributors. Scott Lamb seems to have admired and liked; but even in Scott's day payment does not seem to have been prompt. Lamb was paid, according to Barry Cornwall, two or three times the amount of other writers, who received for prose a pound a page. But Lamb himself says that the rate for him was twenty guineas a sheet, a sheet being sixteen pages; and he told Moore that he had received £170 for two years' Elia. In a letter to Barton in January, 1823, Lamb remarks: "B—— [Baldwin] who first engaged me as 'Elia' has not paid me up yet (nor any of us without repeated mortifying appeals)."
The following references to the London in Lamb's letters to Barton tell the story of its decadence quite clearly enough. In May, 1823:—"I cannot but think the London drags heavily. I miss Janus [Wainewright]. And O how it misses Hazlitt—Procter, too, is affronted (as Janus has been) with their abominable curtailment of his things."
Again, a little later, in September:—"The 'London' I fear falls off.—I linger among its creaking rafters, like the last rat. It will topple down, if they don't get some Buttresses. They have pulled down three, W. Hazlitt, Procter, and their best stay, kind light-hearted Wainwright, their Janus."
In January, 1824, at the beginning of his eight months' silence:—"The London must do without me for a time, a time, and half a time, for I have lost all interest about it."
Again, in December, 1824:—"Taylor & Hessey finding their magazine goes off very heavily at 2s. 6d., are prudently going to raise their price another shilling; and having already more authors than they want, intend to increase the number of them. If they set up against the New Monthly, they must change their present hands. It is not tying the dead carcase of a Review to a half-dead Magazine will do their business."
In January, 1825 (to Sarah Hutchinson):—"You ask about the editor of the Lond. I know of none. This first specimen [of a new series] is flat and pert enough to justify subscribers, who grudge at t'other shilling."
Next month Lamb writes, again to Barton:—"Our second Number [of the new series] is all trash. What are T. & H. about? It is whip syllabub, 'thin sown with aught of profit or delight'. Thin sown! not a germ of fruit or corn. Why did poor Scott die! There was comfort in writing with such associates as were his little band of scribblers, some gone away, some affronted away, and I am left as the solitary widow [in one of Barton's poems] looking for watercresses."
Finally, in August, 1825:—"Taylor has dropt the 'London'. It was indeed a dead weight. It was Job in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand like Christian with light and merry shoulders."
In addition to Lamb and Hazlitt the London Magazine had more or less regular contributions, in its best days, from De Quincey, Allan Cunningham (Nalla), T.G. Wainewright, afterwards the poisoner, but in those days an amusing weaver of gay artificial prose, John Clare, Bernard Barton, H.F. Cary, Richard Ayton, George Darley, Thomas Hood, John Hamilton Reynolds, Sir John Bowring, John Poole, B.W. Procter; while among occasional writers for it were Thomas Carlyle, Landor and Julius Hare.
The essay, "Stage Illusion," in the number for August, 1825, was, I believe, the last that Lamb contributed. (In this connection see Mr. Bertram Dobell's Sidelights on Charles Lamb, 1903.) Lamb then passed over to Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, where the "Popular Fallacies" appeared, together with certain other of his later essays. His last contribution to that magazine was dated September, 1826. In 1827 he was chiefly occupied in selecting Garrick play extracts for Hone's Table Book, at the British Museum, and for a while after that he seems to have been more interested in writing acrostics and album verses than prose. In 1831, however, Moxon's Englishman's Magazine offered harbourage for anything Lamb cared to give it, and a brief revival of Elia (under the name of Peter) resulted. With its death in October, 1831, Lamb's writing career practically ceased.
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Page 1. THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE.
London Magazine, August, 1820.
Although the "Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People," "Valentine's Day," and "On the Acting of Munden," were all written before this essay, it is none the less the first of the essays of Elia. I have remarked, in the notes to a small edition of Elia, that it is probably unique in literature for an author to find himself, as Lamb did, in his forty-fourth year, by recording impressions gathered in his seventeenth; but I think now that Lamb probably visited his brother at the South-Sea House from time to time in later years, and gathered other impressions then. I am led to this conclusion partly by the fact that Thomas Tame was not appointed Deputy-Accountant until four or five years after Lamb had left.
We do not know exactly what Lamb's duties were at the South-Sea House or how long he was there: probably only for the twenty-three weeks—from September, 1791—mentioned in the receipt below, discovered by Mr. J.A. Rutter in a little exhibition of documents illustrative of the South Sea Bubble in the Albert Museum at Exeter:—
Rec'd 8th feby 1792 of the Honble South Sea Company by the hands of their Secretary Twelve pounds 1s. 6d. for 23 weeks attendance in the Examiners Office.