Charles Lamb

by Walter Jerrold

CHARLES LAMB

THE STORY OF HIS LIFE

Charles Lamb's biography should be read at length in his essays and his letters—from them we get to know not only the facts of his life but almost insensibly we get a knowledge of the man himself such as cannot be conveyed in any brief summary. He is as a friend, a loved friend, whom it seems almost sacrilegious to summarize in the compact sentences of a biographical dictionary, of whom it would be a wrong to write if the writing were to be used instead of, rather than as an introduction to, a literary self-portrait, more striking it may be believed than any of the canvases in the Uffizi Gallery. When he was six-and-twenty Charles Lamb wrote thus in reply to an invitation from Wordsworth to visit him in Cumberland:

I have passed all my days in London ... the lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes—London itself a pantomime and a masquerade—all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?

In whimsical exaggeration Lamb sometimes wrote of his aversion from country sights and sounds, adopting that method partly perhaps for the purpose of rallying his correspondents, and partly for the purpose of accentuating his own "unrural notions." He was a Londoner of Londoners. In London he was born and educated, and in London—with a few of his later years in what is now but an outer suburb—he passed the fifty-nine years of his life. Beyond some childish holidays in pleasant Hertfordshire, a few brief trips into the country—to Coleridge at Stowey and at Keswick, to Oxford and Cambridge, and one short journey to Paris—he had no personal contact with the outer world. He delighted in his devotion to London, and stands pre-eminent as the Londoner in literature.

Charles Lamb was the son of John Lamb, who had left his native Lincolnshire—probably from the neighbourhood of Stamford—as a child, and who finally found himself attached to one Samuel Salt, a Bencher of the Inner Temple, in the capacity of "his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his 'flapper,' his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer." Salt's chambers were at 2, Crown Office Row, and there John Lamb lived with a family consisting of himself, his wife, an unmarried sister, Sarah Lamb ("Aunt Hetty"), a son John, aged twelve, and a daughter Mary, aged eleven, when on 10th February, 1775, there was born to him another son to whom was given the now familiar name. Seven children had been born from 1762 to 1775, but of them all these three alone survived. The father and his employer are sketched, unforgetably, in Lamb's essay on "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," Salt, under his own name, and Lamb under that of Lovel: "I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal and 'would strike.' In the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his opponents." The whole passage must be read in the essay itself. From his father Charles Lamb inherited at once his literary leanings and his humour, both heightened to an incalculable degree. We have Elia's word for it that John Lamb the elder "was the liveliest little fellow breathing" with a face as gay as Garrick's, and we know further that he published a small volume of simple verse. From the father, too, the family derived a heavier inheritance, which was to cast its shadow over their lives from the day of Charles's early manhood to the day half a century later, when his sister Mary, the last survivor of the family circle, was laid to rest.

Lamb's mother, Elizabeth Field, is—for obvious reasons—the only member of the immediate family circle whom we do not meet in his writings. His maternal grandmother—the grandame who is to be met in his verses and in some of his essays—was for over half a century housekeeper at Blakesware in Hertfordshire, and with her, as a small boy, Charles spent pleasant holidays.

Little Charles Lamb was sent for a time to "a humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to us boys in the morning, and the same slender erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters, etc., in the evening." In a letter to Coleridge (5th July, 1796) we have a hint that Lamb may have had yet earlier teaching in an infant school in the Temple for he writes: "Mr. Chambers lived in the Temple; Mrs. Reynolds, his daughter, was my schoolmistress"; though it may be that the lady referred to was employed in Mr. Bird's school. This school, kept by William Bird "in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings," was the one to which Mary Lamb appears to have owed her regular training; but Samuel Salt had a goodly collection of old books in his chambers, and among these the brother and sister browsed most profitably, to use his own expressive word, acquiring an early liking for good literature and learning to take their best recreation in things of the mind. But if from the "school room looking into a discoloured dingy garden" Mary Lamb was presumed to be able to acquire a sufficiency of knowledge, it was seen that her younger brother needed something more than Mr. Bird could give to fit him for a life in which he would have to take an early place as bread-winner. John Lamb's friendly employer—whom lovers of Lamb can never recall but to honour—secured a nomination for the boy to Christ's Hospital, and thither in his eighth year the little fellow was transferred from the home in the Temple.

Should a zealous compiler seek to arrange an autobiography of Charles Lamb from his writings he would not have a difficult task, and he would find two delightful essays devoted to the famous school—so long the distinguishing feature of Newgate Street—where "blue-coat boys" passed the most importantly formative period of their lives. Handicapped somewhat by a stuttering speech Charles Lamb did not perhaps join in all the boyish sports of his fellows, though there are many testimonies to the regard in which he was held by his school-mates, and the fact is stressed that though the only one of his surname at Christ's Hospital, he was never "Lamb" but always "Charles Lamb," as though there were something of an endearment in the constant use of his Christian name. "The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character of his own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the public schools." In the essay from which this is quoted, Charles Lamb, looking back a quarter of a century after leaving the old foundation, summed up the characteristics of his school as reflected in the character of its boys of whom he and the close friend he made there are the two whose names are the most commonly on the lips of men. It is, indeed, worthy of remark that from amid the countless boys educated at Christ's Hospital since it was founded three centuries and a half ago by "the flower of the Tudor name ... boy patron of boys," the names that stand out most prominently are those of the two who were at the school together—Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was at that old "Hospital," recently, alas, demolished, that these men, so different in genius, so similar in many of their intellectual tastes, began a memorable friendship that was only to be broken by death more than half a century later.