Charles Lamb and the Lloyds!

Our book today is a little thing from 1898, Charles Lamb and the Lloyds by E. V. Lucas, and it illustrates how little has ever been needed in order to justify the appearance of a new book. In this case, a cache of letters discovered in 1894, letters between members of the prosperous Lloyd banking family (the imperious father, brother Charles the fourth-rate poet, sister Priscilla who married Christopher Wordsworth, Robert Lloyd the nonentity brother) and such luminaries as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. The Lloyds were intellectually undistinguished - when Coleridge took on young Charles as a student in 1796, he very quickly went from writing the boy's father about a communion of like-minded intellects to writing the boy's father apologizing that he wouldn't really have the time to instruct the boy in anything (and laying out very clearly the terms of his room and board). Coleridge demurred only partly because he was afraid of the enormous outlay of energy it takes to shepherd a young man to intellectual awareness (although that fear alone is usually what stops would-be preceptors in their tracks); the rest of it was the result of his up-close estimation of Charles: underneath the languid 'Romantic' pose of philosophical questing, there wasn't a whole lot going on ("no birdsong in the hedgerow," as one contemporary put it).

Still, Lucas didn't require much to justify writing about Lamb. Not only was Lamb a special favorite subject for him (his biography of the man is still eminently readable), but also: Lucas didn't require much to justify writing about anything. He wrote a book review of every book he read, new or old (his friends were forever commenting on the compulsion, but he claimed it kept him in fluid form), and he sold book and theater criticism to paying journals by the yard. The appearance of a new group of letters, no matter how inconsequential in the larger scholastic picture, was guaranteed to prompt him to write something new about it for the presses.

Luckily, he's a delightful companion on the page, as this little volume proves over and over. He has to be, since the only alternative is to watch almost all the leading lights of the age desperately try and fail to strike more than a passing flash from the flinty commonality of the Lloyd mind. Seventeen of these new letters are between Charles Lamb and Robert Lloyd, when the former was twenty-three and the latter nineteen, in the autumn of 1798. Lamb - that most patient of souls - did everything he could to encourage the boy, even when circumstances with Lamb's tragic sister were bringing him nothing but trouble:

My Dear Robert, I am a good deal occupied with a calamity near home, but not so much as to prevent me thinking about you with the warmest affection - you are among my dearest friends. I know you will feel very deeply when you hear that my poor sister is unwell again; one of her old disorders, but I trust it will hold no longer than her former illnesses have done. Do not imagine, Robert, that I sink under this misfortune, I have been season'd to such events, and I think I could bear anything tolerably well. My own health is left me, and my good spirits, and I have some duties to perform - these duties shall be my object. I wish, Robert, you could find an object. I know the painfulness of vacuity, all its achings and inexplicable longings. I wish to God I could recommend any plan to you. Stock your mind well with religious knowledge; discipline it to wait with patience for duties that may be your lot in life; prepare yourself not to expect too much out of yourself; read and think. That is all commonplace advice, I know. I think, too, that it is easy to give advice which in like circumstances we might not follow ourselves. You must depend upon yourself - there will come a time when you will wonder you were not more content.

Indeed, the main joy of this volume lies not in anything the Lloyds themselves have to say but rather in Lamb's sparse but characteristically wonderful contributions.

Let them talk of lakes and mountains and romantic dales - all that fantastic stuff; give me a ramble by night, in the winter nights of London - the Lamps lit - the pavements of the motley Strand crowded with to and fro passengers - the shops all brilliant, and stuff with obliging customers and obliged tradesmem - give me the old bookstalls of London - a walk in the bright Piazzas of Covent Garden. I defy a man to be dull in such places - perfect Mahometan paradises upon earth!

Lamb was never really one to attack a man's dreams - indeed, his congeniality shines through these pages just as it lives in every chapter of Lucas' biography - so there's a good deal of very tactful restraint in his dealings with young Charles Lloyd ("I don't know if you quite comprehend my low Urban Taste," Lamb tells him at one point, uttering the early Romantic version of "It's not you, it's me"). And not just the younger Lloyd, either! The book's most schadenfreudy chapter - fit to make just about anybody laugh out loud - details some of what happened when Charles' father decided to have published some of his translations of Homer, complete with the rhymes of Pope but lacking the actual talent of Pope. Even Lamb's tact had its limits - and Lucas' too.

Charles Lamb and the Lloyds will never be reprinted - its entire life now is to be a quick, inconsequential footnote in any soup-to-nuts biography of Charles Lamb and his literary circle. But in trifles we sometimes find fascinating details too small for inclusion in bigger, more ambitious works. Those works - biographies of Lamb, Coleridge, or Wordsworth - might tell us, for instance, that the latter two poets probably detested young Charles Lloyd's bumbling literary pretensions, but they would hardly pause to make a case for the defense (even though Lamb himself certainly always would have). And Lucas? Well, he tells us "Hypersensitive natures are apt to misconstrue ..." So maybe his tact is equal to the task after all.

 

Young Charles Lamb!

Our book today is Young Charles Lamb, 1775-1802 by Winifred Courtney (a lucky break for Lamb, obviously: a biographer named Winifred will invariably be not only trustworthy but discreet).

One writer on Lamb summed him up accurately - at the same time throwing a spotlight on what's so different about this book:

Had it not been for Mary [his sister], age would not have fallen so suddenly and engulfingly upon him. Without her, we might be able to imagine Lamb as a young man rather than always picturing him as a smoky and eccentric oldish fellow, settled in both his habits and his singleness, whose youth had come to an abrupt end with his childhood.

That's the natural view of Lamb, the established East India clerk and revered author of the 'Elia' essays that brought him fame and income in the 1820s, and the aim of Courtney's biographical study is to blow some of the dust off that legendary figure by taking a close look at Lamb's early life, before and immediately after the signal event that blasted it apart.

A 21-year-old Lamb walked in on that event one evening when he came home from his job at the East India Company to find his older sister Mary standing over the dead body of his mother with a carving knife in her hand. The family - Lamb's old and senile father, his mother, his sister Mary and his aunt - had gathered at the table for supper, and something set Mary (who had often shown signs of insanity and even violence in the past) off. By the time Lamb walked innocently into the room, his mother was dead, stabbed through the heart, and his father was wounded, and his aunt was insensate with shock. It was Lamb who gently took the knife out of Mary's hands.

He swore that his sister would never go to one of the state-run mental hospitals that would certainly have been her fate without him. Instead, for the rest of his life he devoted himself to providing her with private care, even for the years when there was no money, when there was no help (when a 'bad time' would come upon her, the two would hurriedly pack her things - and her straight jacket - and go to whichever private care facility Charles could manage; the arrangement horrified his friends even while it also filled them with a kind of involuntary wonder at his steadfastness). The two had been friends before Mary killed their mother; after, they fell into the deepest of sibling bonds, sitting together on countless nights at the same work-table, Charles writing whichever piece was paying that week and Mary doing her best to help him. In all of English literature, it's easily the weirdest, most unaccountable authorial relationship of them all.

Courtney explores the roots of that relationship - she digs around all of Lamb's relationships, including the large correspondence he conducted with his best friend Coleridge ... indeed, one of the best pleasures of her very enjoyable book is the trove of letters to and fro she so liberally quotes; they give a feel for Lamb and everybody else that's a fascinating counterpart to the famous essays.

Since she's dealing with Lamb's unsettled youth, she's had to master a mountain of financial and clerical details, and she presents everything with a clear, weighing mind - she doesn't even succumb to the typical biographer's vice of universally praising her subject. Although Lamb dearly loved poetry and tried his hand at it for most of his life, Courtney is under no illusions as to the merits of the result:

After the period covered by this book Lamb gave up trying to be a serious poet, though (with Mary) he later wrote children's verse for money and would now and then drop into rhyme for comic or political or friendly purposes to the end of his life, even publishing more of it than was strictly wise (it is hard to give up an old love).

Despite this, the book is full of poets: obscure, owlish Wordsworth, beautiful, passionate Coleridge, stately, meticulous Southey ... and moving amongst them, storing up the voracious and eclectic reading that would later come to such glorious flower, was tiny little tobacco-addict Lamb, always listening patiently, always ready with that deceptively winning self-deprecation that would in later years make all his essays such endlessly charming and endearing little masterpieces:

My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks' standing.

Courtney follows the young Lamb through all his various forays into journalism and the formative writing of literary essays; she follows him through the ever-expanding circle of friendships for which he always showed a singular appetite; and most of all she follows him through the ups and downs of his troubled guardianship of Mary's best interests. The result is a familiar portrait (less so the actual portrait on the book's cover, done of Lamb in 1804 by none other than William Hazlitt, before he abandoned painting in favor of writing): Lamb the rock, Lamb the ever-affable friend to all, Lamb the voice of sanity and balance.

But a portrait may be familiar and still be wonderfully done, and Young Charles Lamb is certainly that. It's not only a fascinating book in its own right - it's also a virtually indispensable companion to the 'Elia' essays and the other famous writings of Lamb's much later life. It's here you see the forces that shaped those later writings, and it's a great feat Courtney has done, explicating those forces so exhaustively, and so well.