In the Footprints of Charles Lamb

by Benjamin Ellis Martin

Pepys, Johnson, revisiting their once favourite foregathering place.

Of the three houses into which this block of buildings has been divided, the corner house remains entirely unaltered. Its neighbour, in Bow Street—now a swarming tavern—has suffered somewhat at the hand of the modern restorer. It retains, on its upper floor, a small barred cell, formerly set apart for some exclusive or elusive prisoner from Bow Street station, just at hand.

The house which chiefly concerns us, No. 20 Russell Street, has been made higher by one story, re-roofed, and re-faced with stucco; but it has not been distinctly disfeatured.

Such as it was, it became the next home of the Lambs, in 1817. At that time they had lived for nine years in their chambers in Inner Temple Lane, and it is strange that they should have been willing to leave their beloved Temple, after having been born into it again, and after having grown up in it again. For Lamb’s household gods planted a terrible fixed foot, as he put it, and were not rooted up without blood. “I thought we could never have been torn up from the Temple,” he wrote; yet they did so tear themselves up, and we are left to conjecture, for their reasons. Mary told Dorothy Wordsworth that the rooms had got dirty and out of repair, and that the cares of living in chambers had grown more irksome each year. More weighty among their motives, no doubt, was the desire to escape the incessant invasion of their privacy by welcome, and yet unwelcome, friends. From this wear and tear they were not freed by their flight, however.

In November, 1817, Lamb wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth: “We are in the individual spot I like best in all this great city. The theatres with all their noises; Covent Garden, dearer to me than any gardens of Alcinous, where we are morally sure of the earliest peas and ’sparagus; Bow Street, where the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four-and-twenty hours before she saw a thief. She sits at the window working; and, casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this way, with a constable to conduct the ceremony. These little incidents agreeably diversify a female life.”

Besides these novel sights, they found strange sounds in their new abode. A brazier’s hammers were rankling all day long within, and by night without—but let Mary tell it, in her letter to Dorothy Wordsworth: “Here we are living at a brazier’s shop, No. 20, in Russell Street, Covent Garden—a place all alive with noise and bustle; Drury Lane Theatre in sight from our front, and Covent Garden from our back windows.... The hubbub of the carriages returning from the play doesn’t annoy me in the least—strange that it doesn’t, for it is quite tremendous. I quite enjoy looking out of the window, and listening to the calling up of the carriages, and the squabbles of the coachmen and link-boys.”

They squabble still of a foggy night—“a real London partic’ler”—and the noise is even greater now than it was then, and Covent Garden is filthier than ever, and the thieves go by escorted by a “bobby,” and attended by a crowd; but the brazier no longer brazes, and his discordant shop is now inoffensive with noiseless fruits.

Here they lived until 1823, these six years filled with increasing prosperity, with comparative comfort, with happy friendships, with his best work, with sudden fame. His income had slowly increased with each added year of service in the East India House, and the earnings of his literary work swelled it slightly. That work had never yet received its recognition. It was collected and published in two handsome volumes in 1818, and the reading world of that day suddenly awakened to see in the obscure clerk, plodding daily to his desk in Leadenhall Street, its most delicate humourist, its most acute critic, its most perfect essayist. A little later, inspired by this success, he set to work in these rooms in Russell Street on his “Elia” papers, begun in the new London Magazine for August, 1820.

So he outgrew his gloom and grew gayer, although he was never for one hour out of the shadow of Mary’s constant imminent danger of a relapse. He drew around him many new acquaintances, especially the theatrical folk of this quarter, and more and more of the “friendly harpies” he was fond of, on whom he spent his time and squandered his strength. He needed all he could save of time and strength for his evening work on his Essays, after his day’s work at his desk. Yet he not only was not allowed to attend to literary labour, but he complained that he could not even write letters at home, because he was never alone; and had to seize odd moments for all such writing at his office and from his work in East India House. Stationery, too, he seized there; and some of his unapproachable letters were written on printed official forms concerning “statements of the weights and amounts of the following lots”! His task-masters there would have gone out of their mercantile minds could they have made accurate estimates of the hard money value to be put by posterity on those “following lots” which he thus unofficially filled in!

Even there he was not unmolested, but was constantly “called off to do the deposits on cotton wool,” he complained when writing to Wordsworth. “But why do I relate this to you, who want faculties to comprehend the great mystery of deposits, of interest, of warehouse rent, and of contingent fund?”