In the Footprints of Charles Lamb

by Benjamin Ellis Martin

I ask you to notice with what decent reticence, so far from the ways, and so foolish in the eyes, of our modern journalistic shamelessness, all the names are suppressed in this report. It is certain that it would not be looked on with favour in the office of any enterprising journal, nowadays! One error the reporter did make; it was not the landlord, but Charles, who came at the child’s cries; luckily at hand just in time to disarm his sister, and thus prevent further harm.

So he was at hand from that day on, all through his life, holding her and helping her in the frequent successive returns of her wretched malady. His gentle, loving, resolute soul proved its fine and firm fibre under the strain of more than forty years of undeviating devotion to which I know no parallel. He quietly gave up all other ties and cares and pleasures for this supreme duty; he never for one hour remitted his vigil; he never repined or posed, he never even said to himself that he was doing something fine. And such is the potency of this intangible tonic of unselfish self-sacrifice, that his tremulous nerves grew tenser under its action, and his reason relaxed her rule thenceforward never any more. The poor guiltless murderess was sent by the authorities to an asylum at Hoxton. There John Lamb and their friends thought it best to isolate her, safely and quietly, for life, spite of her intervals of sanity; but, from the outset, Charles fought against this, offered his life-long personal guardianship—this boy of twenty-two, with only £100 a year!—and at length succeeded in squeezing consent from the crown officials. He counts up, in a letter to Coleridge, the coin “Daddy and I” can spare for Mary, and computes all the care she will bring: “I know John will make speeches about it, but she shall not go into an hospital.” So he meets her as she comes out, and they walk away through life hand in hand, even as they used to walk through the fields many a time in later years on the approach of one of her repeated relapses; he leading her back to temporary retirement in the asylum, hand in hand together, both silently crying!

The mother’s body is laid in the graveyard of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, the aunt is sent to other relatives, and the father’s wound having speedily healed, Charles removed with him to lodgings at No. 45 Chapel Street, Pentonville, on the corner of Liverpool Road. It was a plain little wooden house, as you may see it portrayed in the cut copied from W. Carew Hazlitt’s “Charles and Mary Lamb.” Now, there stands in its place a blazing brazen “pub,” quite in keeping with the squalid street. Its bar, like that favourite bar of Newman Noggs, “faces both ways,” in a hopeless attempt to cope all around with the unquenchable thirst of that quarter!

THE HOUSE IN PENTONVILLE.

The new home, however, brought but slight brightening to the gloom and horror from which Charles had fled in the old home. It was shadowed by the almost actual presence of the dead mother, and made even more dismal by the living ghost of the aged father, now “in the decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage of human weakness, a remnant most forlorn of what he was.” He was released by death early in 1799, and laid by his wife’s side in the burying-ground of St. Andrew’s, Holborn; the ground since then having been cut through and wiped out by the construction of the Holborn viaduct.

Old Aunt Hetty, “the kindest, goodest creature,” had come back to them, but only to die; and their faithful servant, who had followed their fortunes and their misfortunes, sickened slowly unto death. Mary had been allowed to return home for a while, from the rooms at Hackney, where Charles had placed her on her release from the asylum, and where he passed his Sundays and holidays with her. Now, she again broke down, and was forced to go back into seclusion at Hoxton. Then, for the one time in all his life, Charles gave way under these successive strokes, and made his only moan in a letter to Coleridge, early in 1800: “Mary, in consequence of fatigue and anxiety, is fallen ill again, and I was obliged to remove her yesterday. I am left alone in a house, with nothing but Hetty’s dead body to keep me company. To-morrow I bury her, and then I shall be quite alone, with nothing but a cat to remind me that the house has been full of living beings like myself. My heart is quite sunk, and I don’t know where to look for relief. Mary will get better again, but her constantly being liable to these attacks is dreadful; nor is it the least of our evils that her case and all our story is so well known around us. We are in a manner marked.... I am going to try and get a friend to come and be with me to-morrow—I am completely shipwrecked.”

No, he was not completely wrecked, but terribly tempest-tossed for a time; and so at last—in the high phrase of Coleridge—“called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness.”

But “marked” cruelly was the little family in very truth. Soon they were forced to make one more of their many repeated removes. Other quarters were offered them just then in the house of one John Mathew Gutch, who had been a schoolmate at Christ’s of Lamb’s, and was at that time a law stationer in Southampton Buildings, Holborn. It was a most friendly and even generous offer, for Gutch knew the whole sad story, and the dangers, in all probability, portending. His house has been torn down only lately, along with the one hard by in which lived Hazlitt, twenty years later.

It would be but the dreariest of records of the young clerk’s three years at Pentonville, and of his earlier life in Little Queen Street, if one could point to nothing brighter than his anxiety, poverty, loneliness; his dull days at his desk, his duller evenings at cribbage with his almost imbecile father. “I go home at night over-wearied, quite faint, and then to cards with my father, who will not let me enjoy a meal in peace.” For he says—and to the son this is unanswerable!—“If you won’t play with me, you might as well not come home at all.” He is not allowed to write a letter, he can go nowhere, he has no acquaintance. “No one seeks or cares for my society, and I am left alone.” The only literary man he knew was George Dyer; who was “goodness itself,” indeed, but not a stimulating companion. Sometimes he succeeded in slipping out to the theatre, of which he was as fond as, when a boy, he felt the delights he has delineated in “My First Play.” These came back with added keenness to him now, after a long interval; for the scholars at Christ’s had not been allowed to enter any play-house.