The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 · Chapter 61£12 1 6. Chas. Lamb
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This shows that Lamb's salary was half a guinea weekly, paid half-yearly. His brother John was already in the service of the Company, where he remained till his death, rising to Accountant. It has been conjectured that it was through his influence that Charles was admitted, with the view of picking up book-keeping; but the real patron and introducer was Joseph Pake, one of the directors, whom we meet on page 92. Whether Lamb had ideas of remaining, or whether he merely filled a temporary gap in the Examiners' Office, we cannot tell. He passed to the East India House in the spring of 1792.
The South Sea Company was incorporated in 1710. The year of the Bubble was 1720. The South-Sea House, remodelled, is now a congeries of offices.
Page 2, line 11. Forty years ago. To be accurate, twenty-eight to thirty.
Page 3, line 1. Accounts … puzzle me. Here Elia begins his "matter-of-lie" career. Lamb was at this time in the Accountants' Office of the India House, living among figures all day.
Page 3, line 7 from foot. Evans. William Evans. The Directories of those days printed lists of the chief officials in some of the public offices, and it is possible to trace the careers of the clerks whom Lamb names. All are genuine. Evans, whose name is given one year as Evan Evans, was appointed cashier (or deputy-cashier) in 1792.
Page 4, line 4. Ready to imagine himself one. Lamb was fond of this conceit. See his little essay "The Last Peach" (Vol. I.), and the mischievous letter to Bernard Barton, after Fauntleroy's trial, warning him against peculation.
Page 4, line 7. Anderton's. Either the coffee-shop in Fleet Street, now Anderton's Hotel, or a city offshoot of it. The portrait, if it ever was in existence, is no longer known there.
Page 5, line 17. John Tipp. John Lamb succeeded Tipp as Accountant somewhen about 1806.
Page 5, line 27. I know not, etc. This parenthesis was not in the London Magazine, but the following footnote was appended to the sentence:—
"I have since been informed, that the present tenant of them is a Mr. Lamb, a gentleman who is happy in the possession of some choice pictures, and among them a rare portrait of Milton, which I mean to do myself the pleasure of going to see, and at the same time to refresh my memory with the sight of old scenes. Mr. Lamb has the character of a right courteous and communicative collector."
Mr. Lamb was, of course, John Lamb, or James Elia (see the essay "My Relations"), then (in 1820) Accountant of the South-Sea House. He left the Milton to his brother. It is now in America.
Page 6, line 5 from foot. Henry Man. This was Henry Man (1747-1790), deputy-secretary of the South-Sea House from 1776, and an author of light trifles in the papers, and of one or two books. The Miscellaneous Works in Verse and Prose of the late Henry Man was published in 1802, among the subscribers being three of the officials named in this essay—John Evans, R. Plumer, and Mr. Tipp, and also Thomas Maynard, who, though assigned to the Stock Exchange, is probably the "childlike, pastoral M——" of a later paragraph. Small politics are for the most part kept out of Man's volumes, which are high-spirited rather than witty, but this punning epigram (of which Lamb was an admirer) on Lord Spencer and Lord Sandwich may be quoted:—
Two Lords whose names if I should quote, Some folks might call me sinner: The one invented half a coat, The other half a dinner.
Such lords as these are useful men, Heaven sends them to console one; Because there's now not one in ten, That can procure a whole one.
Page 7, line 13. Plumer. Richard Plumer (spelled Plomer in the directories), deputy-secretary after Man. Lamb was peculiarly interested in the Plumers from the fact that his grandmother, Mrs. Field, had been housekeeper of their mansion at Blakesware, near Ware (see notes to "Dream-Children" and "Blakesmoor in H——shire"). The fine old Whig was William Plumer, who had been her employer, and was now living at Gilston. He died in 1821.
The following passage from the memoir of Edward Cave (1691-1754), which Dr. Johnson wrote for the Gentleman's Magazine (which Cave established) in 1754, shows that Lamb was mistaken about Plumer:—
He [Cave] was afterwards raised to the office of clerk of the franks, in which he acted with great spirit and firmness; and often stopped franks which were given by members of parliament to their friends; because he thought such extension of a peculiar right illegal. This raised many complaints, and having stopped, among others, a frank given to the old dutchess of Marlborough by Mr. Walter Plummer, he was cited before the house, as for breach of privilege, and accused, I suppose very unjustly, of opening letters to detect them. He was treated with great harshness and severity, but declining their questions by pleading his oath of secrecy, was at last dismissed. And it must be recorded to his honour, that when he was ejected from his office, he did not think himself discharged from his trust, but continued to refuse to his nearest friends any information about the management of the office.
I borrow from Canon Ainger an interesting note on Walter Plumer, written in the eighteen-eighties, showing that Lamb was mistaken on other matters too:—
The present Mr. Plumer, of Allerton, Totness, a grandson of Richard Plumer of the South-Sea House, by no means acquiesces in the tradition here recorded as to his grandfather's origin. He believes that though the links are missing, Richard Plumer was descended in regular line from the Baronet, Sir Walter Plumer, who died at the end of the seventeenth century. Lamb's memory has failed him here in one respect. The "Bachelor Uncle," Walter Plumer, uncle of William Plumer of Blakesware, was most certainly not a bachelor (see the pedigree of the family in Cussans' Hertfordshire).
Page 7, line 10 from foot. M——. According to the Key to the initials and blanks in some of the essays, which Lamb filled in for a curious correspondent, M—— stood for one Maynard. "Maynard, hang'd himself" is Lamb's entry. He was chief clerk in the Old Annuities and Three Per Cents, 1788-1793.
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Page 8. OXFORD IN THE VACATION.
London Magazine, October, 1820, where it is dated at the end, "August 5, 1820. From my rooms facing the Bodleian." My own belief is that Lamb wrote the essay at Cambridge, under the influence of Cambridge, where he spent a few weeks in the summers of 1819 and 1820, and transferred the scene to Oxford by way of mystification. He knew Oxford, of course, but he had not been there for some years, and it was at Cambridge that he met Dyer and saw the Milton MSS.
Concerning a visit to Oxford (in 1810), Hazlitt had written, in his Table Talk essay "On the Conversation of Authors," in the preceding (the September) number of the London Magazine:—
L—— [that is, Lamb] 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."
The quotation is a reference to Lamb's sonnet, "I was not Trained in Academic Bowers," written at Cambridge in 1819:—
Yet can I fancy, wandering 'mid thy towers, Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap; My brow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap, And I walk gownèd.
Page 8, line 6 from foot. Agnize. Lamb was fond of this word. I have seen it stated ingeniously that it was of his own coinage—from agnus, a lamb—but the derivation is ad gnoscere, to acknowledge, to recognise, and the word is to be found in other places—in "Othello," for example (Act I., Scene 3, line 232):—
I do agnise A natural and prompt alacrity.
Page 9, middle. Red-letter days. See note on page 351. The holidays at the India House, which are given in the London directories of Lamb's early time there, make a considerable list. But in 1820 the Accountants' Office, where Lamb was, kept only five days in the year.
Page 10, line 11. I can here … enact the student. Lamb had distilled the matter of this paragraph into his sonnet, "I was not Trained in Academic Bowers," written at Cambridge in August of the preceding year (see above and Vol. IV.).
Page 11, line 12 from foot. Unsettle my faith. At this point, in the London Magazine, Lamb appended the footnote:—
"There is something to me repugnant, at any time, in written hand. The text never seems determinate. Print settles it. I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty—as springing up with all its parts absolute—till, in evil hour, I was shown the original written copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the Library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them, after the latter cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. 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! I will never go into the work-shop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture, till it is fairly off the easel; no, not if Raphael were to be alive again, and painting another Galatea."
In the Appendix to Vol. I., page 428, I have printed a passage from the original MS. of Comus, which there is reason to believe was contributed to the London Magazine by Lamb.
Page 11, line 9 from foot. G.D. George Dyer (1755-1841), Lamb's friend for many years. This is the first mention of him in the essays; but we shall meet him again, particularly in "Amicus Redivivus." George Dyer was educated at Christ's Hospital long before Lamb's time there, and, becoming a Grecian, had entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He became at first an usher in Essex, then a private tutor to the children of Robert Robinson, the Unitarian, whose life he afterwards excellently wrote, then an usher again, at Northampton, one of his colleagues being John Clarke, father of Lamb's friend, Charles Cowden Clarke. In 1792 he settled in Clifford's Inn as a hack; wrote poems, made indexes, examined libraries for a great bibliographical work (never published), and contributed "all that was original" to Valpy's classics in 141 volumes. Under this work his sight gave way; and he once showed Hazlitt two fingers the use of which he had lost in copying out MSS. of Procrus and Plotinus in a fine Greek hand. Fortunately a good woman took him under her wing; they were married in 1825; and Dyer's last days were happy. His best books were his Life of Robert Robinson and his History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge. Lamb and his friends laughed at him and loved him. In addition to the stories told by Lamb in his letters and essays, there are amusing characteristics of Dyer in Crabb Robinson's diary, in Leigh Hunt, in Hazlitt, in Talfourd, and in other places. All bear upon his gentleness, his untidiness and his want of humour. One of the most famous stories tells of Dyer's criticism of Williams, the terrible Ratcliffe Highway murderer. Dyer, who would never say an ill word of any one, was asked his opinion of this cold-blooded assassin of two families. "He must," he replied after due thought, "be rather an eccentric character."
Page 12, line 10. Injustice to him. In the London Magazine the following footnote came here, almost certainly by Lamb:—
"Violence or injustice certainly none, Mr. Elia. 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—such is our unfeigned respect for G.D.—might, we think, much better have been omitted. Such was that silly joke of L[amb], who, at the time the question of the Scotch Novels was first agitated, gravely assured our friend—who as gravely went about repeating it in all companies—that Lord Castlereagh had acknowledged himself to be the author of Waverly! Note—not by Elia."
Page 12, line 11. "Strike an abstract idea." I do not find this quotation—if it be one; but when John Lamb once knocked Hazlitt down, during an argument on pigments, Hazlitt refrained from striking back, remarking that he was a metaphysician and dealt not in blows but in ideas. Lamb may be slyly remembering this.
Page 12, line 15. C——. Cambridge. Dyer added a work on Privileges of the University if Cambridge to his History.
Page 12, line 8 from foot. Our friend M.'s. Basil Montagu, Q.C. (1770-1851), legal writer, philanthropist, editor of Bacon, and the friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Mrs. M. here referred to was Montagu's third wife, a Mrs. Skepper. It was she who was called by Edward Irving "the noble lady," and to whom Carlyle addressed some early letters. A.S. was Anne Skepper, afterwards Mrs. Bryan Waller Procter, a fascinating lady who lived to a great age and died as recently as 1888. The Montagus then lived at 25 Bedford Square.
Page 13, line 17. Starts like a thing surprised. Here we have an interesting example of Lamb's gift of fused quotation. Wordsworth's line in the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality,"
Tremble like a guilty thing surprised,
and Shakespeare's phrase in "Hamlet" (Act I., Scene 1, line 148),
Started like a guilty thing,
were probably both in his mind as he wrote.
Page 13, line 24. Obtruded personal presence. In the London Magazine the following passage came here:—
"D. commenced life, after a course of hard study in the 'House of pure Emanuel,' as usher to a knavish fanatic schoolmaster at ***, at a salary of eight pounds per annum, with board and lodging. Of this poor stipend, he never received above half in all the laborious years he served this man. He tells a pleasant anecdote, that when poverty, staring out at his ragged knees, has sometimes compelled him, against the modesty of his nature, to hint at arrears, Dr. *** would take no immediate notice, but, after supper, when the school was called together to even-song, he would never fail to introduce some instructive homily against riches, and the corruption of the heart occasioned through the desire of them—ending with 'Lord, keep thy servants, above all things from the heinous sin of avarice. Having food and raiment, us therewithal be content. Give me Agar's wish,'—and the like;—which to the little auditory, sounded like a doctrine full of Christian prudence and simplicity,—but to poor D. was a receipt in full for that quarter's demands at least.
"And D. has been under-working for himself ever since;—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. He has published poems, which do not sell, because their character is inobtrusive like his own,—and because he has been too much absorbed in ancient literature, to know what the popular mark in poetry is, even if he could have hit it. And, therefore, his verses are properly, what he terms them, crotchets; voluntaries; odes to Liberty, and Spring; effusions; 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. If his muse of kindness halt a little behind the strong lines, in fashion in this excitement-craving age, his prose is the best of the sort in the world, and exhibits a faithful transcript of his own healthy natural mind, and cheerful innocent tone of conversation."
The foregoing passage called forth a protest from one W.K. necessitating the following reply from Lamb, which was printed in the London Magazine, under the "Lion's Head," for December, 1820:—
"Elia requests the Editor to inform W.K. that in his article on Oxford, under the initials G.D., it is his ambition to make more familiar to the public, a character, which, for integrity and single-heartedness, he has long been accustomed to rank among the best patterns of his species. That, if he has failed in the end which he proposed, it was an error of judgment merely. That, if in pursuance of his purpose, he has drawn forth some personal peculiarities of his friend into notice, it was only from the conviction that the public, in living subjects especially, do not endure pure panegyric. That the anecdotes, which he produced, were no more than he conceived necessary to awaken attention to character, and were meant solely to illustrate it. That it is an entire mistake to suppose, that he undertook the character to set off his own wit or ingenuity. That, he conceives, a candid interpreter might find something intended, beyond a heartless jest. That G.D., however, having thought it necessary to disclaim the anecdote respecting Dr. ——, it becomes him, who never for a moment can doubt the veracity of his friend, to account for it from an imperfect remembrance of some story he heard long ago, and which, happening to tally with his argument, he set too hastily to the account of G.D. That, from G.D.'s strong affirmations and proofs to the contrary, he is bound to believe it belongs to no part of G.D.'s biography. That the transaction, supposing it true, must have taken place more than forty years ago. That, in consequence, it is not likely to 'meet the eye of many who might be justly offended.'
"Finally, that what he has said of the Booksellers, referred to a period of many years, in which he has had the happiness of G.D.'s acquaintance; and can have nothing to do with any present or prospective engagements of G.D., with those gentlemen, to the nature of which he professes himself an entire stranger."
The result of the protest was that Lamb omitted the passage objected to when he collected Elia in 1823. It might well be restored now; but I have preferred to print everything in the body of this edition as Lamb arranged it for press.
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Page 14. CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO.
London Magazine, November, 1820.
This essay, which is based upon the "Recollections of Christ's Hospital" in Vol. I., is a curious blend of Lamb's own experiences at school with those of Coleridge. Both boys entered at the same time—on July 17, 1782: Coleridge was then nearly ten, Lamb was seven and a half. Coleridge was "clothed" on July 18 and went to Hertford for a while; Lamb was clothed on October 9. Lamb left the school in November, 1789, Coleridge in September, 1791.
The school which Lamb knew is now no more. The boys are now all in new buildings in the midst of green fields near Horsham, many miles from Lamb's city and its roar.
Page 14, line 15. The worthy sub-treasurer. Randal Norris (see note to "A Death-Bed"). I have not been able to discover the cause of his influence.
Page 14, lines 18, 19. Crug … piggins. Crug is still current slang. In the school museum one of these piggins is preserved.
Page 14, line 25. Three banyan days. Three vegetarian days. Coleridge complains (in a letter to Poole) that he was never sufficiently fed except on Wednesdays. He gives the following table of food:—
Our diet was very scanty. Every morning a bit of dry bread and some bad small beer. Every evening a larger piece of bread, and cheese or butter, whichever we liked. For dinner,—on Sunday, boiled beef and broth; Monday, bread and butter, and milk and water; Tuesday, roast mutton; Wednesday, bread and butter, and rice milk; Thursday, boiled beef and broth; Friday, boiled mutton and broth; Saturday, bread and butter, and pease-porridge. Our food was portioned; and, excepting on Wednesdays, I never had a bellyfull. Our appetites were damped, never satisfied; and we had no vegetables.
Page 14, line 8 from foot. Caro equina. Horseflesh. Mr. Pearce's chapter on food at the school in his excellent Annals of Christ's Hospital is very interesting, and records great changes. Rotten-roasted or rare, i.e., over-roasted or under-done.
Page 15, line 3. The good old relative. Aunt Hetty, or more properly, Sarah Lamb. Compare the "Lines written on the Day of my Aunt's Funeral," Vol. IV.:—
I have not forgot How thou didst love thy Charles, when he was yet A prating schoolboy: I have not forgot The busy joy on that important day, When, childlike, the poor wanderer was content To leave the bosom of parental love, His childhood's play-place, and his early home, For the rude fosterings of a stranger's hand, Hard, uncouth tasks, and schoolboys' scanty fare. How did thine eyes peruse him round and round And hardly knew him in his yellow coats, Red leathern belt, and gown of russet blue.
Page 15, line 13. I was a poor friendless boy. Here Lamb speaks as Coleridge, who came all the way from Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire (not Calne, in Wiltshire), and had no London friends. In John Woodvil Lamb borrowed St. Mary Ottery again (see Vol. IV.). Coleridge has recorded how unhappy he was in his early days at school.
Page 15, line 12 from foot. Whole-day-leaves. In this connection the following passage from Trollope's History of Christ's Hospital, 1834, is interesting:—
Those days, on which leave is given to be absent from the Hospital during the whole day, are called whole-day leaves…. A ticket is a small oval medal attached to the button-hole, without which, except on leaves, no boy is allowed to pass the gates. Subjoined is a list of the holidays, which have been hitherto kept at Christ's Hospital; but it is in contemplation to abridge them materially. Of the policy of such a measure great doubts may fairly be entertained, inasmuch as the vacations are so short as to give sufficient respite neither to master nor scholar; and these occasional breaks, in the arduous duties of the former more especially, enable him to repair the exhausted energies of body and mind by necessary relaxation. If those days, which are marked with an asterisk, fall on a Sunday, they are kept on the Monday following; and likewise the state holidays.