The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 · Chapter 68Thomas Greg
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Page 113, line 1. The maternal lap. With the exception of a brief mention on page 33—"the gentle posture of maternal tenderness"—this is Lamb's only reference to his mother in all the essays—probably from the wish not to wound his sister, who would naturally read all he wrote; although we are told by Talfourd that she spoke of her mother with composure. But it is possible to be more sensitive for others than they are for themselves.
Page 113, line 3. The play was Artaxerxes. The opera, by Thomas Augustine Arne (1710-1778), produced in 1762, founded on Metastasio's "Artaserse." The date of the performance was in all probability December 1, 1780, although Lamb suggests that it was later; for that was the only occasion in 1780-81-82 on which "Artaxerxes" was followed by "Harlequin's Invasion," a pantomime dating from 1759, the work of Garrick. It shows Harlequin invading the territory of Shakespeare; Harlequin is defeated and Shakespeare restored.
Page 113, line 20. The Lady of the Manor. Here Lamb's memory, I fancy, betrayed him. This play (a comic opera by William Kenrick) was not performed at Drury Lane or Covent Garden in the period mentioned. Lamb's pen probably meant to write "The Lord of the Manor," General Burgoyne's opera, with music by William Jackson, of Exeter, which was produced in 1780. It was frequently followed in the bill by "Robinson Crusoe," but never by "Lun's Ghost," whereas Wycherley's "Way of the World" was followed by "Lun's Ghost" at Drury Lane on January 9, 1782. We may therefore assume that Lamb's second visit to the theatre was to see "The Lord of the Manor," followed by "Robinson Crusoe," some time in 1781, and his third to see "The Way of the World," followed by "Lun's Ghost" on January 9, 1782. "Lun's Ghost" was produced on January 3, 1782. Lun was the name under which John Rich (1682?-1761), the pantomimist and theatrical manager, had played in pantomime.
Page 113, last line. Round Church … of the Templars. This allusion to the Temple Church and its Gothic heads was used before by Lamb in his story "First Going to Church" in Mrs. Leicester's School (see Vol. III.). In that volume Mary Lamb had told the story of what we may take to be her first play (see "Visit to the Cousins"), the piece being Congreve's "Mourning Bride."
Page 114, line 1. The season 1781-2. Lamb was six on February 10, 1781. He says, in his "Play-house Memoranda," of the same occasion, "Oh when shall I forget first seeing a play, at the age of five or six?"
Page 114, line 3. At school. Lamb was at Christ's Hospital from 1782 to 1789.
Page 114, end. Mrs. Siddons in "Isabella." Mrs. Siddons first played this part at Drury Lane on October 10, 1782. The play was "Isabella," a version by Garrick of Southerne's "Fatal Marriage." Mrs. Siddons also appeared frequently as Isabella in "Measure for Measure;" but Lamb clearly says "in" Isabella, meaning the play. Lamb's sonnet, in which he collaborated with Coleridge, on Mrs. Siddons, which was printed in the Morning Chronicle in December, 1794 (see Vol. IV.), was written when he was nineteen. It runs (text of 1797):—
As when a child on some long winter's night Affrighted clinging to its Grandam's knees With eager wond'ring and perturb'd delight Listens strange tales of fearful dark decrees Mutter'd to wretch by necromantic spell; Or of those hags, who at the witching time Of murky midnight ride the air sublime, And mingle foul embrace with fiends of Hell: Cold Horror drinks its blood! Anon the tear More gentle starts, to hear the Beldame tell Of pretty babes, that lov'd each other dear, Murder'd by cruel Uncle's mandate fell: Ev'n such the shiv'ring joys thy tones impart, Ev'n so thou, SIDDONS! meltest my sad heart!
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Page 115. DREAM-CHILDREN.
London Magazine, January, 1822.
John Lamb died on October 26, 1821, leaving all his property to his brother. Charles was greatly upset by his loss. Writing to Wordsworth in March, 1822, he said: "We are pretty well save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness to every thing, which I think I may date from poor John's Loss…. Deaths over-set one, and put one out long after the recent grief." (His friend Captain Burney died in the same month.) Lamb probably began "Dream-Children,"—in some ways, I think, his most perfect prose work—almost immediately upon his brother's death. The essay "My Relations" may be taken in connection with this as completing the picture of John Lamb. His lameness was caused by the fall of a stone in 1796, but I doubt if the leg were really amputated.
The description in this essay of Blakesware, the seat of the Plumers, is supplemented by the essay entitled "Blakesmoor in H——shire." Except that Lamb substitutes Norfolk for the nearer county, the description is accurate; it is even true that there is a legend in the Plumer family concerning the mysterious death of two children and the loss of the baronetcy thereby—Sir Walter Plumer, who died in the seventeenth century, being the last to hold the title. In his poem "The Grandame" (see Vol. IV.), Lamb refers to Mrs. Field's garrulous tongue and her joy in recounting the oft-told tale; and it may be to his early associations with the old story that his great affection for Morton's play, "The Children in the Wood," which he so often commended—particularly with Miss Kelly in the caste—was due. The actual legend of the children in the wood belongs, however, to Norfolk.
William Plumer's newer and more fashionable mansion was at Gilston, which is not in the adjoining county, but also in Hertfordshire, near Harlow, only a few miles distant from Blakesware. Mrs. Field died of cancer in the breast in August, 1792, and was buried in Widford churchyard, hard by Blakesware.
According to Lamb's Key the name Alice W——n was "feigned." If by Alice W——n Lamb, as has been suggested, means Ann Simmons, of Blenheims, near Blakesware, he was romancing when he said that he had courted her for seven long years, although the same statement is made in the essay on "New Year's Eve." We know that in 1796 he abandoned all ideas of marriage. Writing to Coleridge in November of that year, in reference to his love sonnets, he says: "It is a passion of which I retain nothing…. Thank God, the folly has left me for ever. Not even a review of my love verses renews one wayward wish in me." This was 1796. Therefore, as he was born in 1775, he must have begun the wooing of Alice W——n when he was fourteen in order to complete the seven long years of courtship. My own feeling, as I have stated in the notes to the love sonnets in Vol. IV., is that Lamb was never a very serious wooer, and that Alice W——n was more an abstraction around which now and then to group tender imaginings of what might have been than any tangible figure.
A proof that Ann Simmons and Alice W——n are one has been found in the circumstance that Miss Simmons did marry a Mr. Bartrum, or Bartram, mentioned by Lamb in this essay as being the father of Alice's real children. Bartrum was a pawnbroker in Princes Street, Coventry Street. Mr. W.C. Hazlitt says that Hazlitt had seen Lamb wandering up and down before the shop trying to get a glimpse of his old friend.
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Page 118. DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS.
London Magazine, March, 1822.
The germ of this essay will be found in a letter to Barron Field, to whom the essay is addressed, of August 31, 1817. Barron Field was a son of Henry Field, apothecary to Christ's Hospital. His brother, Francis John Field, through whom Lamb probably came to know Barron, was a clerk in the India House.
Barron Field was associated with Lamb on Leigh Hunt's Reflector in 1810-1812. He also was dramatic critic for The Times for a while. In 1816 he was appointed judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, where he remained until 1824. For other information see the note, in Vol. I., to his First-Fruits of Australian Poetry, reviewed by Lamb. In the same number of the London Magazine which included the present essay was Field's account of his outward voyage to New South Wales.
Page 119, line 24. Our mutual friend P. Not identifiable: probably no one in particular. The Bench would be the King's Bench Prison. A little later one of Lamb's friends, William Hone, was confined there for three years.
Page 121, line 8. The late Lord C. This was Thomas Pitt, second Baron Camelford (1775-1804), who after a quarrelsome life, first in the navy and afterwards as a man about town, was killed in a duel at Kensington, just where Melbury Road now is. The spot chosen by him for his grave was on the borders of the Lake of Lampierre, near three trees; but there is a doubt if his body ever rested there, for it lay for years in the crypt of St. Anne's, Soho. Its ultimate fate was the subject of a story by Charles Reade.
Page 123, line 11. Bleach. Illegitimacy, according to some old authors, wears out in the third generation, enabling a natural son's descendant to resume the ancient coat-of-arms. Lamb refers to this sanction.
Page 123, line 20. Hare-court. The Lambs lived at 4 Inner Temple Lane (now rebuilt as Johnson's Buildings) from 1809 to 1817. Writing to Coleridge in June, 1809, Lamb says:—"The rooms are delicious, and the best look backwards into Hare Court, where there is a pump always going. Hare Court trees come in at the window, so that it's like living in a garden."
Barron Field was entered on the books of the Inner Temple in 1809 and was called to the Bar in 1814.
Page 123, last paragraph. Sally W——r. Lamb's Key gives "Sally Winter;" but as to who she was we have no knowledge.
Page 123, end. J.W. James White. See next essay.
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Page 124. THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS.
London Magazine, May, 1822, where it has a sub-title, "A May-Day Effusion."
This was not Lamb's only literary association with chimney-sweepers. In Vol. I. of this edition will be found the description of a sweep in the country which there is good reason to believe is Lamb's work. Again, in 1824, James Montgomery, the poet, edited a book—The Chimney-Sweepers' Friend and Climbing Boys' Album—with the benevolent purpose of interesting people in the hardships of the climbing boys' life and producing legislation to alleviate it. The first half of the book is practical: reports of committees, and so forth; the second is sentimental; verses by Bernard Barton, William Lisle Bowles, and many others; short stories of kidnapped children forced to the horrid business; and kindred themes. Among the "favourite poets of the day" to whom Montgomery applied were Scott, Wordsworth, Rogers, Moore, Joanna Baillie and Lamb. Lamb replied by copying out (with the alteration of Toddy for Dacre) "The Chimney-Sweeper" from Blake's Songs of Innocence, described by Montgomery as "a very rare and curious little work." In that poem it will be remembered the little sweep cries "weep, weep, weep." Lamb compares the cry more prettily to the "peep, peep" of the sparrow.
Page 125, line 6. Shop … Mr. Thomas Read's Saloop Coffee House was at No. 102 Fleet Street. The following lines were painted on a board in Read's establishment:—
Come, all degrees now passing by, My charming liquor taste and try; To Lockyer come, and drink your fill; Mount Pleasant has no kind of ill. The fumes of wine, punch, drams and beer, It will expell; your spirits cheer; From drowsiness your spirits free. Sweet as a rose your breath will be, Come taste and try, and speak your mind; Such rare ingredients here are joined, Mount Pleasant pleases all mankind.
Page 127, line 12 from foot. The young Montagu. Edward Wortley Montagu (1713-1776), the traveller, ran away from Westminster School more than once, becoming, among other things, a chimney-sweeper.
Page 127, line 9 from foot. Arundel Castle. The Sussex seat of the Dukes of Norfolk. The "late duke" was Charles Howard, eleventh duke, who died in 1815, and who spent enormous sums of money on curiosities. I can find no record of the story of the sweep. Perhaps Lamb invented it, or applied it to Arundel.
Page 128, line 14 from foot. Jem White. James White (1775-1820), who was at Christ's Hospital with Lamb, and who wrote Falstaff's Letters, 1796, in his company (see Vol. I.). "There never was his like," Lamb told another old schoolfellow, Valentine Le Grice, in 1833; "we shall never see such days as those in which he flourished." See the essay "On Some of the Old Actors," for an anecdote of White.
Page 128, line 8 from foot. The fair of St. Bartholomew. Held on September 3 at Smithfield, until 1855. George Daniel, in his recollections of Lamb, records a visit they paid together to the Fair. Lamb took Wordsworth through its noisy mazes in 1802.
Page 129, line 14. Bigod. John Fenwick (see note to "The Two Races of Men").
Leigh Hunt, in The Examiner for May 5, 1822, quoted some of the best sentences of this essay. On May 12 a correspondent (L.E.) wrote a very agreeable letter supporting Lamb's plea for generosity to sweeps and remarking thus upon Lamb himself:—
I read the modicum on "Chimney-Sweepers," which your last paper contained, with pleasure. It appears to be the production of that sort of mind which you justly denominate "gifted;" but which is greatly undervalued by the majority of men, because they have no sympathies in common with it. Many who might partially appreciate such a spirit, do nevertheless object to it, from the snap-dragon nature of its coruscations, which shine themselves, but shew every thing around them to disadvantage. Your deep philosophers also, and all the laborious professors of the art of sinking, may elevate their nasal projections, and demand "cui bono"? For my part I prefer a little enjoyment to a great deal of philosophy. It is these gifted minds that enliven our habitations, and contribute so largely to those every-day delights, which constitute, after all, the chief part of mortal happiness. Such minds are ever active—their light, like the vestal lamp, is ever burning—and in my opinion the man who refines the common intercourse of life, and wreaths the altars of our household gods with flowers, is more deserving of respect and gratitude than all the sages who waste their lives in elaborate speculations, which tend to nothing, and which we cannot comprehend—nor they neither.
On June 2, however, "J.C.H." intervened to correct what he considered the "dangerous spirit" of Lamb's essay, which said so little of the hardships of the sweeps, but rather suggested that they were a happy class. J.C.H. then put the case of the unhappy sweep with some eloquence, urging upon all householders the claims of the mechanical sweeping machine.
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Page 130. A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS IN THE METROPOLIS.
London Magazine, June, 1822.
The origin of this essay was the activity at that time of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, founded in 1818, of which a Mr. W.H. Bodkin was the Hon. Secretary. The Society's motto was "Benefacta male collocata, malefacta existima;" and it attempted much the same work now performed by the Charity Organisation Society. Perhaps the delight expressed in its annual reports in the exposure of impostors was a shade too hearty—at any rate one can see therein cause sufficient for Lamb's counter-blast. Lamb was not the only critic of Mr. Bodkin's zeal. Hood, in the Odes and Addresses, published in 1825, included a remonstrance to Mr. Bodkin.
The Society's activity led to a special commission of the House of Commons in 1821 to inquire into the laws relating to vagrants, concerning which Lamb speaks, the clergyman alluded to being Dr. Henry Butts Owen, of Highgate. The result of the commission was an additional stringency, brought about by Mr. George Chetwynd's bill.
It was this essay, says Hood, which led to his acquaintance with Charles Lamb. After its appearance in the London Magazine, of which Hood was then sub-editor, he wrote Lamb a letter on coarse paper purporting to come from a grateful beggar; Lamb did not admit the discovery of the perpetrator of the joke, but soon afterwards Lamb called on Hood when he was ill, and a friendship followed to which we owe Hood's charming recollections of Lamb—among the best that were written of him by any one.
Page 131, line 14. The Blind Beggar. The reference is to the ballad of "The Beggar's Daughter of Bednall Green." The version in the Percy Reliques relates the adventures of Henry, Earl of Leicester, the son of Simon de Montfort, who was blinded at the battle of Evesham and left for dead, and thereafter begged his way with his pretty Bessee. In the London Magazine Lamb had written "Earl of Flanders," which he altered to "Earl of Cornwall" in Elia. The ballad says Earl of Leicester.
Page 131, line 28. Dear Margaret Newcastle. One of Lamb's recurring themes of praise (see "The Two Races of Men," "Mackery End in Hertfordshire," and "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading"). "Romancical," according to the New English Dictionary, is Lamb's own word. This is the only reference given for it.
Page 133, line 7. Spital sermons. On Monday of Easter week it was the custom for the Christ's Hospital boys to walk in procession to the Royal Exchange, and on Tuesday to the Mansion House; on each occasion returning with the Lord Mayor to hear a special sermon—a spital sermon, as it was called—and an anthem. The sermon is now preached only on Easter Tuesday.
Page 133, line 24. Overseers of St. L——. Lamb's Key states that both the overseers and the mild rector were inventions. In the London Magazine the rector's parish is "P——."
Page 133, line 27. Vincent Bourne. See Lamb's essay on Vincent Bourne, Vol. I. This poem was translated by Lamb himself, and was first published in The Indicator for May 3, 1820. See Vol. IV. for Lamb's other translations from Bourne.
Page 135, line 2. A well-known figure. This beggar I take to be Samuel Horsey. He is stated to have been known as the King of the Beggars, and a very prominent figure in London. His mutilation is ascribed to the falling of a piece of timber in Bow Lane, Cheapside, some nineteen years before; but it may have been, as Lamb says, in the Gordon Riots of 1780.
There is the figure of Horsey on his little carriage, with several other of the more notable beggars of the day plying their calling, in an etching of old houses at the corner of Chancery Lane and Fleet Street, made by J.T. Smith in 1789 for his Ancient Topography of London, 1815. I give it in my large edition.
Page 137, end of essay. Feigned or not. In the London Magazine the essay did not end here. It continued thus:—
"'Pray God your honour relieve me,' said a poor beadswoman to my friend L—— one day; 'I have seen better days.' 'So have I, my good woman,' retorted he, looking up at the welkin which was just then threatening a storm—and the jest (he will have it) was as good to the beggar as a tester.
"It was at all events kinder than consigning her to the stocks, or the parish beadle—
"But L. has a way of viewing things in rather a paradoxical light on some occasions.