V. Charles and Mary Lamb; The Godwins.
A story is told of Charles Lamb which, in view of actual facts, one must necessarily disbelieve. It is to the effect that, dining out one evening, he heard in an adjoining room the noise of many children. With his glass filled, he rose from his chair and drank the toast, “Here’s to the health of good King Herod.” Instinctively, those familiar with Elia will recollect his “Dream Children,” and wonder how any critic could reconcile the two attitudes. Lamb had an abiding love for young people and a keen understanding of their natures.
As writers of juvenile literature, Charles (1775–1834) and Mary (1765–1847) Lamb might never have been known, had it not been for William Godwin (1756–1836) and his second wife. The two began a publishing business, in 1805, under the firm name of M. J. Godwin and Company. The only details that concern us are those which began and ended with the Lambs and their work. Godwin, himself, under the pseudonym of Baldwin, turned out literary productions of various kinds. But though, during one period, there was every sign of a flourishing trade, by 1822 the business was bankrupt.
The Lambs regarded their writings for children as pot-boilers; letters from them abound with such confessions. But it was in their natures to treat their work lovingly; their own personalities entered the text; they drew generously upon themselves; and so their children’s books are filled with their own experiences, and are, in many respects, as autobiographical as the “Essays of Elia.” Mary undertook by far the larger number of the volumes which are usually accredited to her brother; in fact, wherever the two collaborated, Lamb occupied a secondary place.
The following list indicates the division of labour:
The King and Queen of Hearts, 1805. Lamb’s first juvenile work.
Tales from Shakespeare, 1807. Lamb wrote to Manning, May 10, 1806: “I have done ‘Othello’ and ‘Macbeth,’ and mean to do all the tragedies. I think it will be popular among the little people, besides money.”
Adventures of Ulysses, 1808. “Intended,” as Lamb told Manning, “to be an introduction to the reading of Telemachus; it is done out of the ‘Odyssey,’ not from the Greek. I would not mislead you; nor yet from Pope’s ‘Odyssey,’ but from an older translation of one Chapman. The ‘Shakespeare Tales’ suggested doing it.” Lamb’s delight in Chapman was as unalloyed as that of Keats.
Mrs. Leicester’s School, 1809. Issued anonymously, hence commonly ascribed to Lamb. The greater part of the work belongs to Mary; it seems to have been her idea originally. Lamb to Barton, January 23, 1824: “My Sister’s part in the Leicester School (about two-thirds) was purely her own; as it was (to the same quantity) in the Shakespeare Tales which bear my name. I wrote only the Witch Aunt, the First Going to Church, and the final story about a little Indian Girl in a Ship.”
Poetry for Children, 1809. Lamb claimed about one-third of the book as his own. Mr. Lucas believes that Mrs. Godwin issued these verses to compete with the Taylors and Adelaide O’Keeffe.
Prince Dorus or Flattery Put Out of Countenance, 1811. Robinson wrote: “I this year tried to persuade him [Lamb] to make a new version of the old Tale of Reynard the Fox. He said he was sure it would not succeed—sense for humour, said L., is extinct.” “Prince Dorus” was done instead.
Beauty and the Beast, 1811. Authorship doubtful.
There is something keenly pathetic in noting the brother and sister at work in the interests of children, hoping to add to their yearly income—sitting down together and thinking out conceptions for their juvenile poems and stories. Mary Lamb reveals, by those smaller elements in her prose, a keener discernment of what a child’s book should be; she is far more successful than her brother in entering into the spirit of the little lives she writes about, while Lamb himself is happiest in his touches where he is handling the literary subjects.[39] But on the whole, Lamb’s style was not suited to the making of children’s books. We see them, while writing the Shakespeare Tales, seated at one table, “an old literary Darby and Joan,” Mary tells Sarah Stoddart, “I taking snuff and he groaning all the while, and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out he has made something of it....”
Mrs. Godwin doubtless conceived her system of advertising direct from Newbery; in the story of “Emily Barton,” which forms part of “Mrs. Leicester’s School,” Mary Lamb tells how Emily’s papa ordered the coachman to drive to the Juvenile Library in Skinner street [No. 41], where seven books were bought, “and the lady in the shop persuaded him to take more, but mamma said that was quite enough at present.”
By this, the Lambs indicated a willingness to accord with any business suggestions which might further the interests of the Godwins; nevertheless, they were not so bound that they could not act independently. And, in view of the fact that Lamb disliked Mrs. Godwin, there was a certain graciousness revealed in the concessions they did make from time to time. Elia was to discover that Godwin had his eye alert for any unnecessary element of cruelty which might creep into their books for children. When the publishers were given the manuscript of “Ulysses,” Godwin wrote a letter to Lamb, on March 10, 1808, which, with the answer, is worth quoting, since the attitude is one to be considered by all writers and by all library custodians.
Dear Lamb:
I address you with all humility, because I know you to be tenax propositi. Hear me, I entreat you, with patience.
It is strange with what different feelings an author and a bookseller look at the same manuscript. I know this by experience: I was an author, I am a bookseller. The author thinks what will conduce to his honour; the bookseller, what will cause his commodities to sell.
You, or some other wise man, I have heard to say [it was Johnson]: It is children that read children’s books, when they are read, but it is parents that choose them. The critical thought of the tradesman puts itself therefore into the place of the parent, and what the parent will condemn.
We live in squeamish days. Amid the beauties of your manuscript, of which no man can think more highly than I do, what will the squeamish say to such expressions as these, ‘devoured their limbs, yet warm and trembling, lapping the blood,’ page 10. Or to the giant’s vomit, page 14, or to the minute and shocking description of the extinguishing the giant’s eye in the page following. You, I dare say, have no formed plan of excluding the female sex from among your readers, and I, as a bookseller, must consider that, if you have, you exclude one half of the human species.
Nothing is more easy than to modify these things if you please, and nothing, I think, is more indispensable....
The main argument here stated daily confronts the librarian and the author; it is one so often over-considered, that in its wake it leaves a diluted literature, mild in expression, faint in impression, weak in situation, and lacking in colour. There is a certain literary style that, through zealous regard for refinement, misses the rugged vitality which marks the old-time story, and which constitutes its chief hold upon life. On the other hand, children need very little stimulation, provided it is virile, to set them in active accord; and it is wise for publishers to consider the omissions of those unnecessary details, situations, or actions, without which the story is in no way harmed. But to curtail or to dilute the full meaning, to give a part for the whole, has resulted in producing so many versions of the same tale or legend as to make the young reader doubt which is the correct one; and in most cases leave in him no desire to turn to the original source. On your library shelves, are you to have five or six versions of the same story, issued by as many rival publishing houses, or are you to discard them all and take only that one which is nearest the original in spirit and in general excellence?
Lamb here brushed against the problem of writing for the popular taste. This is how he met it:
March 11, 1808.
Dear Godwin:
The giant’s vomit was perfectly nauseous, and I am glad you pointed it out. I have removed the objection. To the other passages I can find no objection but what you may bring to numberless passages besides, such as of Scylla snatching up the six men, etc.,—that is to say, they are lively images of shocking things. If you want a book which is not occasionally to shock, you should not have thought of a tale which is so full of anthropophagi and wonders. I cannot alter these things without enervating the Book, and I will not alter them if the penalty should be that you and all the London booksellers should refuse it. But speaking as author to author, I must say that I think the terrible in those two passages seems to me so much to preponderate over the nauseous as to make them rather fine than disgusting. [Remember, this is spoken by one who in youth was sensitive and whose feelings are graphically set forth in “Witches, and Other Night Fears.”]... I only say that I will not consent to alter such passages, which I know to be some of the best in the book. As an author, I say to you, an author, Touch not my work. As to a bookseller I say, Take the work, such as it is, or refuse it. You are free to refuse it as when we first talked of it. As to a friend I say, Don’t plague yourself and me with nonsensical objections. I assure you I will not alter one more word.
Lamb’s critical genius often showed remarkable subtlety in the fine distinctions drawn between shades of effect which are produced by art. He established, through his careful analyses, an almost new critical attitude toward Shakespeare; and, in days when psychology as a study was unknown, when people witnessed the different phases of emotional life and judged them before formulæ were invented by which to test them scientifically, he saw, with rare discrimination, the part that the spiritual value of literature was to play in the development of culture. He here weighs in the balance a fine terror with a nauseous scene; such a difference presupposes a clear insight into the story and a power to arrive at the full meaning at once; it infers an instinctive knowledge of the whole gamut of possible effects. Lamb’s plea to Godwin is the plea of the man who would rather keep a child in the green fields than have him spend his time on wishy-washy matter.
The whole discussion resolves itself into the question: How much of the brute element, in which early literature abounds, is to be given to children? Shall they be made to fear unnecessarily, shall the ugly phases of life be allowed, simply because they come through the ages stamped as classic? All due consideration must be paid to the sensitiveness of childhood; but in what manner? Not by catering to it, not by eliminating the cause from the story without at the same time seeking to strengthen the inherent weakness of the child. Dr. Felix Adler[40] would remove from our folk-lore all the excrescences that denote a false superstition and that create prejudice of any kind; he would have bad stepmothers taken from the fairy tales, because an unjust hatred for a class is encouraged; he would prune away whatever is of no ornamental or ethical value. Assuredly it is best, as Dr. Adler points out, “to eliminate ... whatever is merely a relic of ancient animism.” Mr. Howells believes that it is our pedant pride which perpetuates the beast man in our classics, and it is true that some of our literature has lived in spite of that characteristic, and not because of it. But who is to point this beast man out for us, who is to judge whether this or that corrupts, who to eliminate and who to recreate? The classics would have to be rewritten whenever there was a shift in moral viewpoint.
A mushroom growth of story-writers, those who “tame” our fairy tales, who dilute fancy with sentimentalism, and who retell badly what has been told surpassing well, threatens to choke the flower. It is not the beast man in classic literature we have to fear so much as the small man of letters, enthused by the educational idea, who rewrites to order, and does not put into his text any of the invigorating spirit which marks all truly great literature. We have always to return to the ultimate goal, to the final court of appeal. If there is too much brutal strength in a story intended for children, it had best be read or told to them, rather than place in their hands what is not literature but the mere husk.
Such a letter as Lamb wrote to Godwin leads us to feel that at times misgivings seized him as to his own mutilation of Homer and of his much-beloved Chapman. But such hesitancy is the exception and not the rule to-day.
As poets for children the Lambs strike their most artificial note; the verses are forced and written according to prescribed formulæ. There is a mechanical effort in them to appear youthful, as though before setting to the task—for so the two called it—a memorandum of childish deeds and thoughts and expressions had been drawn up, from which each was to extract inspiration. But inspiration is sorely lacking; to most of the poems you can apply the stigma of “old maids” children; there is little that is naturally playful or spontaneously appealing in sentiment. Such lines as “Crumbs to the Birds” are unaffected and simple, and the paraphrase “On the Lord’s Prayer” aptly interpretative. But on the whole, the verses are stilted; the feeling in them comes not from the authors so much as it indicates how carefully it was thought out by them. We find Lamb making excuses to Coleridge in June, 1809: “Our little poems are ... humble, but they have no name. You must read them, remembering they were task-work; and perhaps you will admire the number of subjects, all of children, picked out by an old bachelor and an old maid. Many parents would not have found so many.”
It is this utmost sincerity and such a naïve confession which make Charles Lamb one of the most lovable figures in English literature.