New Year’s Eve. I love New Year’s Eve. It brings back all sorts of memories about the past years and dreams for the future. I even love all of the “Best Of” lists that appear everywhere, detailing the best movies, tv shows, music, fads. It’s fun to review the year and remember everything that happened. This past week has been especially rife with them, because New Year’s Eve 2009 marks not only the end of the year, but also a new decade. When this decade began, in 2000, it was the end of the 20^th century, so we had to review all of the 1900s. I remember nothing of this. I was nine years old, and was really only interested in the Barbie I had received for Christmas to be truly bothered by the mysterious “Y2K” that everyone was talking about. I do recall that that New Year’s Eve was the first year I stayed up until midnight.

When I was nine years old, I was in the fourth grade. I still played with Barbies and I thought that “American Girl” was the end all, be all of magazines. My addiction to magazines clearly started young. I was looking forward to turning ten (two digits!) in March. My favorite book was probably a Nancy Drew mystery. Now, ten years later, I’d like to think that I’m mostly grown up. I can’t remember the last time I played with a Barbie, babysitting or not, and I’m not even sure where my old ones are stored. My taste in magazines has widened slightly, but my favorite book is something I read very close to the time I was nine—Little Women, a discovery when I was twelve. In short, in the past ten years, I have paid attention to 1 Corinthians 13:11 and have “put away childish things”. I am entering the third decade of my life. I turn 20 in March, and I am surprisingly excited. Apparently I haven’t put away my childhood enough to not get excited about birthdays.

I don’t necessarily miss being a child. I like the privileges that come with being an adult. I do miss not having many worries, and sleeping a solid eight hours every night. My first decade and a half was filled with momentous things in world culture. My generation is the generation of Harry Potter and Pixar. The Boston Red Sox won the World Series when I was 14. The Twin Towers fell on my first day of sixth grade. Pluto was de-classified as a major planet. Lots of things happened. And the next decade will be filled with even more things. I can’t wait to experience them and read about them and discover them. I can remember almost everything that happened to me in the past 19 years, but I know nothing that is certain in the future. And that is so exciting.

What I have always liked about the new year is its newness. It’s so shiny and special, with no mistakes in it. However, this is also true of a single day, as Emily Dickinson noted when she wrote “We turn not older with years, but new everyday!” Yet even though every day is new, it’s nice to have a completely new year spread out in front of you. I wake up every New Year’s Day with excitement and joy and hope. Everything shifts with a new year. All during the 00’s, 1970 was thirty years ago. Well, tomorrow, January 1, 2010, 1970 turns 40. The world turns a whole year older and so does everything around us. Thoroughbred foals become yearlings on January 1. Lots can and will happen in the next 365 days. A new Derby winner will be crowned in May, new babies will be born who will one day rule the world. December 31 and January 1 are some of the most exciting days in the year. I can’t wait to see what they herald. I always wait to make my resolutions until my birthday in March, but I’m already thinking of how I want to spend 2010. Maybe I’ll created a slogan, something like “Susannah is zen in 2010”.

My life is much different than it was ten years ago. The world has changed as well. But moving forward is living. The world turns and we turn too. Joni Mitchell sang “we’re captive on the carousel of time”, but this carousel is truly beautiful and special. May many blessings and happinesses find you all in 2010.

Happy New Year!

Love,

S.

P.S.  As I was watching this New Year’s scene from “Sex and the City: The Movie” with both of my parents, 2009 magically became 2010. It was a perfect New Year moment. If it is true that whatever you are doing at the beginning of the year continues until the beginning of the next, then I am sure of a year that is filled with love and family. And also great style.

“New Year’s eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.” –Hamilton Wright Mabie

Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays. Oxford University Press, World’s Classics Series; 1961, UK.  A hard-to-find little book that sits happily in the palm of my hand and which I would very much like to steal from the library.  I am allowed to renew my borrowing period three times before I have to return it.  Then I wait a few days and check it out again, and so even if I don’t own it I have the pleasure of its company almost all the time.  The soft salmon-colored dust jacket with the black and white print on the front cover is exquisite.

I wonder if the robed and bearded scroll-readers of Alexandria wept at the advent of the codex.  “Nothing good can come of this,” they might have said.  “A single, elegantly contiguous manuscript is sliced up into separate leaves and you call that progress?  It’s schizophrenic, that’s what it is.”

I like to think the situation more dire with the present shift from books to so-called e-readers.  It’s certainly weirder.  We can see that the disembodiment of books is part of a broader cultural retreat toward immateriality.  Books, like musical recordings, photographs and so many other things, will cease to be physical objects at all and will exist only as electronic phantoms passed from device to device but never from hand to hand.  The notion that this makes an improvement on the old order is laughable.  It smacks of annihilationism: one more milepost on the Manichaean march toward the final ghostification of all things.

I will not purchase an electronic reading device.  I will insist on the codex.  It’s not only that I’m a sentimentalist, but I think we owe philosophical allegiance to the materiality of things.  I don’t want a platonic beatitude.  I want a real book in my hand, a hot cup of tea, a ‘friend’ I can physically embrace.  They fool themselves who believe that digitalization better preserves texts (or recordings or images) against the depredations of time.  Some day the dark ages will come again and we’ll see that nothing is saved by being made intangible.  Materiality is the only condition of salvation.

Consider this the first in a new series of posts, a sort of scrapbook monument to the codex.  There’s irony in the bloggish venue, I know.  It can’t be helped.  But I want to honor books – specific books, like the one above – as discrete physical objects.  In each case I’ll offer a photograph and description of a particular book.  It need not contain great literature between its covers.  It need only give pleasure to the reader or possessor of it.

If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life – thy shining youth – in an office…

~ Charles Lamb, ‘The Superannuated Man’

Business is the death of the soul.  I recognize that I’m one of those persons inclined to be discontent with my lot so long as necessity has any claims on me whatsoever.  But the pursuit of market share and media hits and the perpetually ascending conversion yield puts me in constant thought of my own mortality.  Perhaps the value of business is precisely that it forces me to grapple with vanity and finitude. But I wonder if it doesn’t sharpen the death-wish too.  Later in the same essay Lamb writes that ‘a man can never have too much time to himself, nor too little to do,’ which seems an apt description of death.  I light up a phone switch in place of a candle and whisper supplications to St Bartleby Scrivener.

So… Zadie Smith is publishing – that is, she has written, so Hamish Hamilton is publishing – a book of essays, and thus has essayed to write an essay about it, which is in yesterday’s Guardian. Most of her essay is about the essays of one David Shields, whose book of essays on the essay (or “stupendous conterblast to all conventional literary pieties”) will be out in February, simultaneously here and in the U(essay).

Zadie, like everyone else who is anyone, has been reading Reality Hunger lo these many weeks in proof. (She was given it by a student, apparently, but to read the HH website is to feel sadly out of the loop if one has not been given a copy. Not only do they reference Smith’s piece, a month ago, but they talk excitedly about all the people who have been reading Shields in proof, as well. I for one fall well outside this beautiful circle, but I’m blogging here anyway.) So we have to go with what she says; not yet is it for us to have an actual position on things. But we can read, and think on however little. It is a subject never very far from my mind, in fact, the stuff she’s writing about here: it’s about what I write, and why.

She  says she disagrees with much of what Shields says, even when she finds him interesting: “Shields likes to say such things as ‘Story seems to say everything happens for a reason, and I want to say No, it doesn’t'; to which I want to say, ‘Bad story does that, yes, but surely good story exists, too’.” Referring to a quote from no less than JM Coetzee, where he also laments the rise of the “well-made novel,” she says:

This easy dismissal of well-made novels deserves a second look. In the first place, “well-made novel” seems to me to be a kind of Platonic bogeyman, existing everywhere in an ideal realm but in few spots on this earth. Reality Hunger wants us to believe that this taste for “novels that don’t look like novels” is in some way unusual, the mark of a refined literary palate.

According to Smith:

Shields argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call “truthiness” – over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives. For Shields it is exactly what is tentative, unmade and unpolished in the essay form that is important. He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”. He recommends instead that artists break “ever larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work”, via quotation, appropriation, prose poems, the collage novel . . . in short, the revenge of the real, by any means necessary.

So naturally this is where Ms Baroque wades in! Because I have this very love-hate relationship with the novel. There is a kind of politeness in the novel, or at least in most contemporary UK novels that I’ve read (which, okay, isn’t very many in the scheme of things, as every time I do read one I regret it bitterly, thinking Why, WHY did all those reviewers and everybody think it was so flipping great??). It’s a politeness that extends even (or especially) when the auther thinks he or she is being really iconoclastic, blowing away the cobwebs of taboo, etc etc. It’s a paleness, a predictable mannerliness; I’ve battled with it for many years and find it almost impossible to articulate what it is I mean by it… sort of, as I used to put it, the thing where the novels feel they have to tell you what colour the person’s front door is. It’s so tiring. Who cares?

It’s this detail, which every writing workshop will tell you is better than just the facts (not just cereal – what kind of cereal?), which to my mind takes one further and further away from what the story is supposed to be about. The story is clearly not about the front door, or the minutiae of utilitarian life. It’s an intrusion of the kind of clutter and noise we all seem to think passes for “reality” these days. And it’s the kind of reality we all know human kind cannot bear too much of.

One exception to this is The Corrections, a masterful work about which I will brook no dissent, and another – ditto – is The Ice Storm. But in those books that is the whole point: the intrusion of the noisy external world into people’s inner imperatives, with – in both cases – pretty dark results. (And of course both Franzen and Moody are great stylists.)

I think, thinking about it, that there are two things to say about Smith’s essay. One is about her definition-confusion about the word “essay” itself:

For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition.” And if this looks to us like one of Johnson’s lexical eccentricities, we’re chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement (“The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays”) and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: “a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.”

(I love that cosy “of all people”: why??) The thing is, as I’ve tried to say in my title, the word has a simple, clear meaning, “to have a go at.” The archaic “assay” is related, clearly. Sure, it’s old. To use it as a synonym for “try” would be very anachronistic now, but in terms of the written thing, the written article, it is still very much in the way of an attempt upon a subject. I can barely see that the meaning has changed at all, except to develop another sense in relation to this specific usage. It’s not an “unstable history” in the slightest. It’s just that we like things literal and plain now.

Like fiction, like poetry (an alternative to fiction that barely gets a look-in in this discussion, even though the author is married to a well-known poet), essays can take many forms. When I was at school we were taught to write “compositions” which were essays. There was a form. Say what it’s about, then lay out your items for discussion in  paragraphs, with each item containing all its subsidiary points, and finish with some kind of conclusion. In practice it can be memoir, philosophy, free-association, scholarly, newsy, scientific. It can be like the long essays by John McPhee, that went all over the shop, or like Annie Dillard’s spiritual-biological musings on life and nature, or like Lamb’s amazing shaggy dog story, A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, which made me weep with laughter in school at 14. It can be a book review (or “book report” as we called them), or high-falutin’ critical analysis, or polemic.

But listen. The other thing Zadie mentions, as quoted above, is this big thing we are all too much in the face of. Reality. There’s a very interesting sentence embedded in the quote above, which goes:

He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”.

This is it.

The mediated, postmodernist, commodified, photographed, regulated, politically correct, plastic world. Think about it. And I mean plastic in both senses. Firstly it is largely made of plastic these days. Look at your nearest bus, or what your apples came in, or warehouse store. Secondly, everything is endlessly plastic, malleable, conditional, attributed, relative, up for reinvention, redefinition, redesign, restructure, realignment, reassigment. Even personal relationships, even gender!

There is now, more than ever, no such thing as empirical reality. So we are lost in a cacaphony of processes, procedures, targets, objectives, appraisals, reviews, emails, brands, cultural signifiers heaping up and up and up in an endless mountain, jargon, disposable coffee cups, fan crazes, other people’s mobile phone conversations, and a complete fall in standards of behaviour – which means that, among other things, other people are just in our faces more than they used to be.

Oh yeah, baby.

I mean even Jack Kerouac didn’t used to text on his BlackBerry while Neal Cassady was trying to talk to him, and crazy as they were I bet they didn’t eat fried chicken from a (plastic) box on the bus and then leave the box under the seat.

And their girlfriends did not talk in an endless infantile highpitched nasal whine, that went up at the end of every  phrase, like the annoying actresses in Mad Men (and every other current American TV show) do?

Ranting? Maybe. But I think fiction can’t cope any more, because frankly we just don’t want to know. There’s too much of it. It’s all too irritating. Fiction either becomes just as shallow as the so-called reality TV we now watch – as if only what you can see is real – or it tries for the historical effect and as often as not wears its research naively on its sleeve. (I don’t mean Wolf Hall here. And I don’t by any means mean all contemporary fiction, either. There are a handful of novelists I would follow around the supermarket, hoping to hear them say something to an aisle attendant.)

Ranting aside, all this imageness and process and positioning, and the way fiction publishing is being run by marketing teams and brand-builders, mean we are hungry not for “reality” – not as in “reality TV,” which is another kind of mediated pre-packaged unreality – but for the real. Something real in our literature. After all, literature is our letter to ourself, that tells us where we are and how to get along there. Fiction used to do that for us.

The fiction Zadie lists in her article does do it. It engages with the inner life, the real imperatives, as reflected in the external. But it’s all old; she ducks out of her own argument a bit to give us classics instead of taking an unflinching look at the now. After all, it’s the now that David Shields is talking about.

Our external now is so managed these days that fiction can’t cope; we need a place to process it and have a think. Because everything else – even the education system itself – is set up to mitigate against thinking. Our society has grown terrified of thought, of deep reflection, in favour of “skills” and “results,” and our literature is desperately trying to regain a foothold. It comes to something when the narrative imagination, which used to be the way to pattern reality in prose and make it bearable, is no longer enough. Franzen writes brilliant essays, for example.

John Gardner saw all this coming decades ago, with his famous, churlish remark that if the New Yorker published any real fiction at all the Steuben paperweights in the side columns would explode. So did Cheever. So did Marshall McLuhan. (So did TS Eliot.) Well, it was the mid-century lament, and Mad Men (whose women speak so differently from the women of that day) charts it too. Life on Mars was a reaction to it. (In Life on Mars the John Sims character literally gets to go back to 1972 and have a think from outside his own life.)

Now, what is most needed I think is a good step back from the clutter and noise and static and trappings, of which there are just so many. And some quiet in which to reflect and think and find ourselves, away from the shopping channel. (Everything is the shopping channel.) A chance to look at it, instead of watching it, and to assimilate.

And that’s why I write poetry. And essays. And a blog.

Even my much-vaunted half a novel was half assemblage, scraps, un-permissioned quotes, pages and pages of them; it was simply not possible to do what I was trying to do as straight linear narrative. People keep telling me to have another go but I don’t know. This article is one of the first things I’ve ever read that comes close to describing why I feel so conflicted about novels. I do kind of miss them; recently I read The Thin Man and The Turn of the Screw…

Thank you Zadie and good night.

Charles Lamb

Born February 10, 1775, London—died December 27, 1834, Edmonton, Middlesex.  Essayist and critic, best known for his series of miscellaneous “Essay of Elia,” but also among the greatest of English letter writers, and a perceptive literary critic.

Lamb’s father, a scrivener, acted as confidential clerk to Samuel Salt, a bencher of London’s Inner Temple.  The boy read avidly among Salt’s books, and at the age of seven went to school at Christ’s Hospital,  where he studied until 1789.  He was a near contemporary there of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he began what was to be a lifelong friendship, and of Leigh Hunt. 

He was a good scholar, and but for a stutter would probably have proceeded to holy orders.  Instead, he left school, just before the age of 15 and in 1792 found employment as a clerk at India House, remaining there until retirement in 1825.  In 1796 Lamb’s sister, Mary, in a fit of madness (which was to prove recurrent) killed their mother.  Lamb reacted with courage and loyalty, taking on himself the burden of looking after Mary, and being rewarded by her affectionate devotion.

Lamb’s first appearances in print were as a poet, with contributions to collections by Coleridge (1796) and by Charles Lloyd (1798).  A Tale of Rosamund Gray, a prose romance appeared in 1798, and in 1802 he published John Woodvil, a poetic tragedy.  None of these publications brought him much fame or fortune.  “The Old Familiar Faces” (1789) remains his best known poem, although “On an Infant Dying as soon as it was born” (1828) is his finest poetic achievement. 

In 1807 lamb and his sister published, at the invitation of William Godwin, Tales from Shakespear, a retelling of the plays for children.  The next year came a similarly conceived version of the Odyssey, called The Adventures of Ulysses, and in 1809 Mrs. Leicester’s School, a collection of stories supposedly told by pupils of a school in Hertfordshire.

Concurrently with these collaborative works,  Lamb published Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespear, a selection of scenes, much edited, from the Elizabeth drama.  The Specimens included some passages of implicit criticism, and Lamb also contributed critical papers  on Shakespeare and on Hogarth to Leigh Hunt’s Reflector.  The only lengthy piece of criticism that he undertook, on Wordsworth’s Excursion, was characteristically “gelded” by William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly Review, in which publication it appeared.  

I wonder what would please her,
Charlotte, Julia or Louisa?
Ann and Mary, they’re too common;
Joan’s too formal for a woman;
Jane’s a prettier name beside;
But we had a Jane that died.
They would say, if ‘twas Rebecca,
That she was a little Quaker,
Edith’s pretty, but that looks
Better in old English books.
Ellen’s left off long ago:
Blanche is out of fashion now.

None that I have mentioned yet
Are so good as Margaret.
Emily is neat and fine.
What do you think of Caroline?
How I’m puzzled and perplexed
What to choose or think of next!
I am in a little fever
Lest the name that I shall give her
Should disgrace her or defame her.
I will leave Papa to name her.

(Charles Lamb, ‘Naming the Baby’, 1809)

from Wit in a Constable: A Comedy (by Henry Glapthorne)

Collegian: Did you, ere we departed from the College,
O’erlook my Library?

Servant:                       Yes, Sir; and I find,
Altho’ you tell me learning is immortal,
The paper and the parchment ’tis contain’d in
Savours of much mortality.
The moths have eaten more
Authentic learning, than would richly furnish
A hundred country pedants; yet the worms
Are not one letter wiser.

N.B. I found this brief exchange in the second volume of Charles Lamb’s Specimens of the English Dramatists. Little is known about Henry Glapthorne (1610-1643?). The play from which Lamb takes this extract likely dates from the late 1630s. “Pedants” here carries no air of disdain such as we are now accustomed to in the word. The collegian’s servant is merely pointing out that this library, which his master left untouched to rot on its shelves while at college, might well have educated one hundred country schoolteachers, who might themselves (one assumes) have educated 1,000 country peasants. Education is as often wasted on the ruling class now as it was then. (Very likely the theme touched on here—precious documents being consumed by, and wasted on, worms—was a very old one in England. And yet to have a servant make use of it to his collegian/master in a play dating from the late 1630s adds to the ancient theme a certain political force, given what was then coming on: the English Civil Wars, the Levellers, the Diggers, etc.)

This review was written by Betsy – a member of the Elanora Library staff.

The Guernsey  Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

It is 1946. In London, Juliet Ashton, writer and wartime columnist for The Spectator, receives a letter from a diffident Guernsey farmer, Dawsey Adams, who has bought a second hand book of Charles Lamb’s Essays which once belonged to her. He is writing as a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and a new admirer of Lamb’s writing. Books are impossible to come by in postwar Guernsey – could Miss Ashton recommend a London bookseller and perhaps a Lamb biography?

Juliet has been commissioned to write an article for the Times Literary Supplement on the value of reading. She responds immediately to Dawsey, happy to share a mutual admiration of Lamb, and curious to hear more details of the oddly named Literary Society.  Also on the lookout for a fresh idea for a book, she wonders if some of the other members would mind writing to her about the books they have read and what the group has meant to them.

So begins a regular correspondence between Juliet, her editor and various members of the society. In this way, wonderful pictures are built up of each of the characters, of life in Britain during the Blitz, and in Guernsey during the German occupation and after. At the same time we are treated to many insights into writers, books and the joys of reading, at times moving, often poignant, sometimes hilarious. Isola Pribby, dedicated gardener, herbalist and admirer of the Brontë sisters, makes the observation that men are far more interesting in books than in real life. Certainly, she says, Emily “had to make Heathcliff up out of thin air”, what with the only examples at the Parsonage: their dad – a selfish thing, who “ just sat in his study and shouted for his shawl” while his daughters died like flies, and Branwell, who was not up to much either, “always drinking and sicking up on the carpet”.  

Juliet eventually visits Guernsey to meet the Society members and do some first hand research. From her first view of the island, approaching by rickety mail boat as the “sun breaks beneath the clouds and sets the cliffs shimmering into silver”, Juliet is captivated, and soon comes to love both the place and its people. Material for a potentially wonderful book is plentiful, and Juliet’s own life, which had seemed a little aimless in postwar London, takes on new and unexpected directions.  

As Juliet says of the initial serendipity that finds Dawsey coming across her copy of Charles Lamb’s Essays, “perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.”  I hope many more of its perfect readers will be found by The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Or if you want to find it first, it’s at your local branch, waiting to bowl you over.

(The saga of how the book came to be written, by Mary Ann Shaffer, a 70 year old former librarian, and how it eventually found its way into print, is an added, if bittersweet bonus for readers who love the story behind a story).

Title page, "The White Devil"

Funeral dirge for Marcello, sung by his mother:

Call for the robin redbreast, and the wren,
Since o’er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the fieldmouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robb’d) sustain no harm;
But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men,
For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.”

—John Webster, The White Devil

“I never saw anything like this Dirge, except the ditty which reminds Fredinand of his drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to resolve itself into the elements which it contemplates.” —Charles Lamb, in his note on this dirge in Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets.

Following is the funeral dirge from The Tempest:

George Romney, painting of the shipwreck scene in "The Tempest" (1.i)

Full fathom five thy Father lies,
Of his bones are Coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a Sea-change
Into something rich, & strange:
Sea-Nymphs hourly ring his knell.

N.B.: Readers will doubtless recall that T.S. Eliot borrows from both of these dirges in The Waste Land. He seems to have derived all his knowledge of Elizabethan & Jacobean drama (exclusive of Shakespeare) from Lamb’s Specimens. For a link to a recording of Eliot reading The Waste Land, click here. For a link to Lamb’s Specimens, click on the first mention of the book above.

Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb

“The character of Bellario [in John Fletcher's Philaster] must have been extremely popular in its day. For many years after the date of Philaster’s first exhibition on the stage, scarce a play can be found without one of these women-pages in it, following in the train of some pre-engaged lover, calling on the gods to bless her happy rival (his mistress), whom no doubt she secretly curses in her heart, giving rise to many pretty équivoques by the way on the confusion of sex, and either made happy at last by some surprising turn of fate, or dismissed with the joint pity of the lovers and the audience. Our ancestors seem to have been wonderfully delighted with these transformations of sex. Women’s parts were then acted by young men. What an odd double confusion it must have made, to see [in Philaster] a boy play a woman playing a man! One cannot disentangle the perplexity without some violence to the imagination. Donne has a copy of verses to his mistress, dissuading her from a resolution, which she seems to have taken up from some of these scenical representations, of following him abroad as a page. It is so earnest, so weighty, so rich in poetry, in sense, in wit, and pathos, that it deserves to be read as a solemn close in future to all such sickly fancies as he there deprecates. The story of his romantic and unfortunate marriage with the daughter of Sir George Moore, the lady here supposed to be addressed, may be read in Walton’s Lives.”

—Charles Lamb, in a note to a scene in Beaumont and Fletcher’s play Philaster, from his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets

N.B.: In the scene Lamb has in view, Bellario, who had been masquerading as a boy page, is discovered to be a woman, and confesses the motive for her disguise to have been love for Prince Philaster. In the first comment below, you will find both the poem by John Donne here referred to, and the passage from Walton’s Lives.

Charles Lamb

Text of St. Paul.—”St. Paul saith, let not the sun go down on your wrath, to carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy revengeful nature. Yet let us take the Apostle’s meaning rather than his words, with all possible speed to depose our passion; not understanding him so literally that we may take leave to be angry till sunset: then might our wrath lengthen with the days; and men in Greenland, where the day lasts above a quarter of a year, have plentiful scope for revenge.”*

*This whimsical prevention of a consequence which no one would have thought of deducing—setting up an absurdam on purpose to hunt it down, placing guards as it were at the very outposts of possibility, gravely giving out laws to insanity, and prescribing moral fences to distempered intellects—could never have entered into a head less entertainingly constructed than that of Fuller or Sir Thomas Browne, the very air of whose style the conclusion of this passage most aptly imitates.

—Charles Lamb, “Specimens from the Writings of Fuller, the Church Historian“

N.B.: The remarks about St. Paul are Fuller’s; the commentary on them is Lamb’s. Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) was an English clergyman and historian.

British playwright John Fletcher (1579-1625), portrait by unknown artist, ca. 1620.

“The scene where Ordella offers her life a sacrifice, that the king of France may not be childless, I have always considered as the finest in all Fletcher, and Ordella to be the most perfect notion of the female heroic character, next to Calantha in The Broken Heart. She is a piece of sainted nature. Yet, noble as the whole passage is, it must be confessed that the manner of it, compared with Shakespeare’s finest scenes, is faint and languid. Its motion is circular, not progressive. Each line revolves on itself in a sort of separate orbit. They do not join into one another like a running-hand. Fletcher’s ideas moved slow; his versification, though sweet, is tedious, it stops at every turn; he lays line upon line, making up one after the other, adding image to image so deliberately, that we see their junctures. Shakespeare mingles everything, runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched and clamorous for disclosure. Another striking difference between Fletcher and Shakespeare is the fondness of the former for unnatural and violent situations. He seems to have thought that nothing great could be produced in an ordinary way. The chief incidents in some of his most admired tragedies show this.* Shakespeare had nothing of this contortion in his mind, none of that craving after violent situations, and flights of strained and improbable virtue, which I think always betrays an imperfect moral sensibility. The wit of Fletcher is excellent,†… like his serious scenes, but there is something strained and far-fetched in both. He is too mistrustful of Nature, he always goes a little on one side of her. Shakespeare chose her without a reserve: and had riches, power, understanding, and length of days, with her for a dowry.”

*Wife for a Month, Cupid’s Revenge, Double Marriage, etc.
…†Wit Without Money, and his comedies generally.

—Charles Lamb, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare: With Notes

The growing horrors of Faustus are awfully marked by the hours and half-hours as they expire and bring him nearer and nearer to the exactment of his dire compact. It is indeed an agony and bloody sweat. Marlowe is said to have been tainted with atheistical positions, to have denied God and the Trinity. To such a genius the History of Faustus must have been delectable food: to wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden to go, to approach the dark gulf near enough to look in, to be busied in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit that fell from the Tree of Knowledge. Barabas the Jew, and Faustus the Conjurer, are offsprings of a mind which at least delighted to dally with interdicted subjects. They both talk a language which a believer would have been tender of putting into the mouth of a character though but in fiction. But the holiest minds have sometimes not thought it blameable to counterfeit impiety in the person of another, to bring Vice in upon the stage speaking her own dialect, and, themselves being armed with an unction of self-confident impunity, have not scrupled to handle and touch that familiarly, which would be death to others. Milton in the person of Satan has started speculations hardier than any which the feeble armoury of the atheist ever furnished.

–Charles Lamb, in his note on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, in Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets

Some of my friends have complained, when the preceding papers were read, that we discussed Fate, Power, and Wealth, on too low a platform; gave too much line to the evil spirit of the times; too many cakes to Cerberus; that we ran Cudworth’s risk of making, by excess of candor, the argument of atheism so strong, that he could not answer it. I have no fears of being forced in my own despite to play, as we say, the devil’s attorney. I have no infirmity of faith; no belief that it is of much importance what I or any man may say: I am sure that a certain truth will be said through me, though I should be dumb, or though I should try to say the reverse. Nor do I fear skepticism for any good soul. A just thinker will allow full swing to his skepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot. I have no sympathy with a poor man I knew, who, when suicides abounded, told me he dared not look at his razor.

–Emerson, “Worship,” from The Conduct of Life

Click the pic above to read Charles Lamb 48 Blocks Interview

Source: 48 Blocks

Tonight I went to a bar called Ragtag to read an essay called “A Bachelor’s Complaint,” and as I sat at the bar a woman approached me to ask what I was reading.  I tried to explain what it was, then explained I was studying nonfiction writing, and was trying it out myself.  She interjected:  “But don’t you think nonfiction is so subjective it’s really just fiction?”

“I think all nonfiction writing is subjective,” I said.  “Even marginally.”  And according to her analysis, a newspaper article, which, because it has been written by a person, must be a little bit subjective, is essentially fiction.

But never mind the substance of her argument, or the counterargument I tried to present her until she interrupted me again, rather rudely.   Why is it that I can’t read a book in public without having the legitimacy of the genre I work in questioned by some drunk lady who tells me guardedly, when I ask, that she works in “sales”?

It’s not that I’m not willing to have this conversation with people – in fact, the question of whether the essay is grounded so definitely in “nonfiction” rather than “fiction” interests me, as does the legitimacy of those terms for categorizing forms of writing which are specific and relatively well-defined, such as the novel, short story, essay and memoir, as opposed to a term like “fiction” or “nonfiction,” which both seem rather indefinite to me.  But this woman was not interested in having that conversation.  She wanted to make this intellectually provocative statement and depart, happy in her presumed triumph over both me and Charles Lamb.

My question is, where the hell are these people coming from, who care so much about the legitimacy of nonfiction writing as a phenomenon distinct from fiction writing?  Why do they care if when I go to school to study the memoir and essay, and to write essays and memoirs, I do it under the heading “nonfiction”?  Even if it’s an ultimately problematic title – which, for reasons I don’t feel like going into, I deny that it is – why did that woman want to prod me so?

What can I do for my frustration?  This helps:

I’ve recently been working on a book project – I say ‘recently’, but I started it nearly five years ago, and it’s still going, getting ever bigger and more unmanageable ever since. It’s the type of book I’m totally underqualified for, and that only has a limited appeal, but could end up being the only decent thing I ever end up doing. That’s if it gets done – every week that passes, another little side doorway in the project opens up, and I end up scampering through it to find another set of doors, each of which I have to open and explore. If nothing else, it’s made me full of facts about things I knew nothing before – the history of road-building, the life of the Orientalist Arthur Waley, Hitler’s Irish sister-in-law, burial mounds of the Ancient Britons and the Dead Comic’s Society. It’s turning into a project that no single one person could possibly have an interest in everything I’m going to include.

One of the avenues I scouted around turned out to be little more than a cul-de-sac – the three days of reading actually threw up only one single sentence that I could use, if it doesn’t eventually get dropped. It was the life of Charles Lamb, one of the most maudlin life stories you could imagine. Well, you don’t have to imagine. Here it is – the condensed Charles Lamb. If I was making this into a full biography, I’d subtitle it “Murder, Insanity, Poverty and Enfield.” Of those four, Enfield is by the far the hardest to endure.

Charles Lamb was born in the Inner Temple in 1775, the youngest son of John Lamb, (who worked as an assistant to an elderly widowed bencher named Mr. Salt) and a brother to John and Mary (twelve and ten years his senior respectively.) Educated at the school of Christ’s hospital, he was two years below Samuel Taylor Coleridge “and far inferior to him in all scholastic acquirements.”

The two became friends, regularly meeting at a small Smithfield pub called The Salutation and Cat when Coleridge returned to London from university, and where he “recited his early poems with that deep sweetness of intonation which sunk into the heart of his hearer.” Lamb became an ardent follower, dedicating the first collected volume of his works in 1818 to his earliest friend, telling him that “you kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness.”

Lamb didn’t attend university due to his rather unstellar academic achievements, and in 1792, he started working in the Accountant’s Office of the East India Company where he also started tentatively writing verse.

Dissatisfied, his parents both ill, apart from his only friend, and earning a meager wage, Charles “was subjected for a few weeks to the restraint of the insane” in late 1795, after he was convinced he was Young Norval, the lead character in a popular tragedy of the time by John Home. He wrote to Coleridge (by this time married and living in Bristol) saying: “I go nowhere, and have no acquaintance. Slow of speech, and reserved of manners, no one seeks or cares for my society, and I am left alone.”

His sister Mary was also suffering from bouts of mental illness – it was said to run in the family – and on the 22^nd September 1796, she fatally stabbed their ailing mother. “It appeared, by the evidence adduced,” wrote The Times, “that, while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case-knife lying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice, round the room. On the calls of her infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object and, with loud shrieks, approached her parent. The child, by her cries, quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too late. The dreadful scene presented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal knife, and the old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling round the room.”

Mary would have numerous relapses in her life, the most serious always occurring when someone – an aunt, an elderly maid-servant – was on their deathbed. She would watch them incessantly and become “seized with madness” as soon as they eventually died.

Lamb wrote to Coleridge to tell him of the “terrible calamities that have fallen on our family…My poor, dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be moved to a hospital…mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every last vestige of past vanities of that kind.”

The following year, Lambs father died – “released…from his state of imbecility” – at which time Charles secured the release of Mary from an asylum “by his solemn engagement that he would take her under his care for life’ and he kept his word.” For the sake of his sister, Charles “abandoned all thoughts of love and marriage…and set out on the journey of life at twenty-two years of age, cheerfully, with his beloved companion, endeared to him the more by her strange calamity, and the constant apprehension of a recurrence of the malady which had caused it.” Over the years, Mary would occasionally have to spend time in asylums when her illness became overwhelming – from her letters, the one she usually went to was Whitmore House in Hoxton, run by a Mr. Warburton.

Having had a few verses included in a slim volume that Coleridge had assembled in 1796, Charles slowly began to write once more. His blank verse poems that had been compiled with Coleridge’s work were published on their own in 1798, he was reviewed favorably in The Monthly Review, and his prose tale Rosamund Gray followed. Coleridge, who had introduced him to Wordsworth and Southey, then recommended him to Daniel Post, the editor of the Morning Post as a writer of light articles – something Coleridge hoped would help supplement Lamb’s income from the East India Company so he could sufficiently support himself and his sister.

In 1800, he and his sister moved to Chapel Street, Pentonville, and for the next seven years, he struggled on – writing the occasional newspaper article, working on a theatre piece, continuing at the East India Company, and trying to deal with both his own and his sister’s undulating mental states.  In 1807, though, Charles and Mary wrote the book that would make their name – a collection of the outlines of Shakespeare’s plays written in a prose style that children could follow. They split the plays between them, with Charles saying his sister’s “were the most felicitous.”

This was followed in quick succession by Poetry For Children, The Adventures of Ulysses, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare and a job writing for a new quarterly review, edited by Leigh Hunt, called The Reflector.

Charles and Mary moved into a gloomy garret near to their childhood home in Inner Temple Lane, where Charles decorated a room from top to bottom with prints torn out of his books by Milton, Ovid and Shakespeare, which Mary called “our most favourite sitting room.” The move back was not conducive to her mental state, however, and by 1810, she was described as being in “a feeble and tottering condition.”

As Charles’ fame grew, the Lambs next moved to Russell Street in Covent Garden, and by 1820, through his friendship with the critic William Hazlitt, Charles began supplying essays to The London Magazine under the name Elia – the first essay he wrote, a description of the Old South Sea House where he’d briefly worked as a clerk, was attributed to Elia, the name of a “gay, light-hearted foreigner, who fluttered there at that time.” The name would stick.

*

There is a morbid history to the periodical. The then-editor of The London Magazine, the critic John Scott, would die in a duel with a Mr. Christie, a friend of a writer named Lockhart who had been personally attacked in the pages of the periodical. Scott challenged him to a duel at Chalk Farm at nine o’clock at night. “Two shots were exchanged: Mr. Christie fired wide the first time, intentionally, but on the second fire, his ball entered Mr. Scott’s side, and the wound was fatal.”

More notoriously, one of the magazine’s contributors – and someone who Lamb liked a great deal – was the raffishly dressed, pleasure-bent Thomas Griffiths Wainwright, who contributed under the penname Janus Weathercock. Wainwright would gain much notoriety as ‘Wainwright the Poisoner’ – in 1830, deep in debt, he took out six separate life insurance policies on his wife’s twenty-one-year-old half-sister Miss Helen Frances Phoebe Abercrombie, in which he was named as the executor of her will should she die within the next two years. Unsurprisingly, before the two years were up, Miss Abercrombie did die, suffering a series of convulsions which had started shortly after Wainwright administered a powder to her in a jelly.

The insurance companies were suspicious  – they had been for some time – and all of them refused to pay out. Wainwright left England for France where he spent several years, before being arrested for using a false name, where he was found to be carrying the vegetable poison strychnine. After being jailed for six months, he returned to London in 1837 where he was arrested and charged with fraud – the more serious charge of murder proving impossible to prove conclusively, as a doctor had attributed her death to natural causes at the time and strychnine poisoning was virtually undetectable.

The fraud case argued that the insurance taken out on Miss Abercrombie had not been to benefit her, but to benefit Wainwright “for some purpose of his own.” They argued he must have purposely misled Miss Abercrombie to apply for so much insurance from so many different companies. (Befuddled by Wainwright, Miss Abercrombie had told one insurer that she wanted to secure a sum of £3000 for her sister, saying as long as she outlived the two years, she would then be able to generate that sum by other methods – the firm presumed she meant she was in line to inherit some property at the end of the two years, but this wasn’t the case. Mrs. Wainwright had once spoken on her half-sister’s behalf in the offices of the Globe Insurance Office – “It is for some money matters that are to be arranged, but ladies don’t know much about such things.”)

 Wainwright was found guilty, and sentenced to transportation to Australia for life. He left Britain placed in irons on a convict ship, from where he wrote: “They think me a desperado! Me! The companion of poets, philosophers, artists, and musicians, a desperado! You will smile at this – no – I think you will feel for the man educated and reared as a gentleman, now the mate of vulgar ruffians and country bumpkins.” By 1841, Wainwright was working as an artist in Hobart Town where a Melbourne paper described him: “His conversation and manners were winning in the extreme; he was never intemperate, but nevertheless of grossly sensual habits, and an opium-eater. As to moral character, he was a man of the very lowest stamp….His sole friend and companion was a cat, for which he envinced an extraordinary and sentimental affection. He had always been fond of cats.” Wainwright died suddenly – “struck down in a moment, as with a thunderbolt” in 1852. “He had survived his victims sixteen years.”

*

At the beginning of 1823, Lamb’s essays were published in one volume under the title Elia, and sold rapidly. The same year – in a scheme that seemed to have popped up from nowhere – Lamb moved out to a cottage in Islington, where he “planted, pruned and grafted. The rose was his favourite flower…and with what cheerfulness and gratitude he boasted that , for the first time in his life, he was the absolute lord and master of a whole house! – of an undisturbed and well-conducted home!…He lived abstemiously, retired to rest at a reasonable hour (the midnight chimes had hitherto been more familiar to him than the lark’s), and rose early.” In 1825, at the age of fifty, he finally stopped working for the East India Company, and was awarded a pension of two-thirds of his, by now, “liberal salary.”

With the housekeeping becoming too much for Mary, they moved in as lodgers with a couple in Enfield, and as this was a success for Mary’s health, Charles attempted to move back into London as a lodger. But when Mary became unwell again, he moved back to the solitude of Enfield, later moving to Edmonton. In 1833, the best of his essays were published as The Last Essays of Elia.

His old friend Coleridge died in Highgate in 1834, but Lamb did not attend his funeral, which was confined to family members only. He wrote to Coleridge’s psyhician Dr. Gillman to say “I was glad of being spared from attending; I have no words to express my feelings with you all.” He visited the house in Highgate shortly after Coleridge’s death – “there he asked to see the nurse who had attended upon Coleridge; and being struck and affected by the feeling she manifested towards his friend, insisted on her receiving five guineas from him, – a gratuity which seemed almost incomprehensible to the poor woman but which Lamb could not help giving as an immediate expression of his own gratitude. From her he learned the effort by which Coleridge had suppressed the expression of his sufferings, and the discovery affected him even more than the news of his death. He would startle his friends sometimes by suddenly exclaiming, “Coleridge is dead!” and then pass on to common themes, having obtained the momentary relief of oppressed spirits.”

In December 1834, Lamb stumbled on a stone while taking his early morning walk in Edmonton, and fell, slightly injuring his face.  As his wounds started to heal, his condition suddenly worsened. Five days after his fall, after a day spent completely insensible to the world around him, Charles Lamb died. He was buried in Edmonton churchyard, deep in a plot that he had pointed out to his sister a fortnight before.

Contrary to Charles’ expectations, Mary not only outlived him, but she did so by thirteen years. As time went on, her always fragile mental state worsened – in 1839, an acquaintance described Mary’s mind as “gone, or at least, inert.” The same visitor saw her in 1843, when she had lost even more of her faculties, describing her now as “a mere wreck of herself. Mary died in a care-home she had moved to in St John’s Wood in May 1847.

Her remains were taken to Edmonton, where she was buried above her brother. When the grave was dug, the mourners could see the side of the coffin that contained Charles – “in which all the mortal part of one of the most delightful persons who ever lived was contained, and on which the remains of her he had loved with love “passing the love of woman” were henceforth to rest…”they were lovely in their lives” and…”in death they are not divided!”

I came across one of the works of poet Charles lamb. I was touched by the tone of nostalgia in the poem.
each one of us n somecorner of heart does preserve the joyful moments of the past …
Indeed a lovely work…

I HAVE had playmates I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days–
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies–
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a Love once, fairest among women:
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her–
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man:
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.

Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood,
Earth seem’d a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father’s dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces–

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed–
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

According to British essayist and poet, Charles Lamb, cooking meat with fire was stumbled upon over 70,000 years ago by a Chinese boy named, and I’m not making this up, Bo-bo.  He was a fire bug and accidentally started a pig shed on fire.  All the newborns were roasted alive in the maelstrom.  He noticed a pleasant odor wafting from the smoking ruin that he had never smelled before and poked around.  When he found out that the piglets were the source of this divine scent, and fire bugging always made him hungry, he decided to chow down on one.  It was delicious but missing something, so he invented the first bar-b-que sauce and opened a restaurant that still stands to this day!

Nice weather is headed for the Midwest (if it ever stops raining). The Midwest summer runs from June 21 to September 22.  According to meteorological experts, that’s about 10 days of nice weather.  During this time, outdoor grilling is king. Men from all walks of life practice their expertise as the “chef de charbon”, French for ‘Call the fire department!’.  I’ve went through quite a few grills in my culinary misadventures.  From the portly Weber charcoal kettle, a couple of flame throwing full size gas grills, to the small incendiary portable grills, I have nuked my share of meals.

We’ve been grill-less for the past few years.  Gas grills need a little more attention than their humble charcoal fueled siblings.  The gas grills have burners that are made out of space-age materials that barely survive the first few uses.  The ‘burner holes’ where the flames escape get distorted and rust out.  I’ve seen them enlarge to the point that I could visually inspect the interior of the burner by sticking my head into a hole and getting a closer look.  The grilling area is sometimes coated with porcelain.  This is supposed to aid in the clean-up but the atomically thin coating normally surrenders and disappears after the second cleaning leaving a rusting grate.  Everyone knows how tasty rust makes food, so almost every season these two parts have to be replaced.  I traveled over to our neighborhood home center to purchase the replacements only to find that the parts cost more than the entire grill did when new.  I returned home without the parts and instead bought a giant economy sized George Foreman “Lean, Mean, Fat Reducing, Grilling Machine”.  I’d seen all the infomercials on it and decided that this would fit the bill.  On TV, George showed me how to grill burgers, steaks, chops, though roasting a whole turkey is a bit of a trick.  And the food is healthier because all the fat drains down into a tray! I used it so much that it finally succumbed to exhaustion and died half way through the chicken breasts.  Nothing like the fear of chicken fried salmonella.  So, I got another one…but now the thrill is gone because of the one thing I dislike about ‘George’ as the grill is affectionately known.  It’s a nightmare to clean.  It takes longer to clean the grill than it takes to prepare and eat the food cooked on it.

My wife, who must miss the reduced to ash flavor of grilled on the fire meat, suggested we buy a new grill, a propane powered type.  I was hesitant but gave in and bought a Weber Q.  I’m hoping that they’re as reliable as the old charcoal kettle grill we had years ago.  And if this one dies like all the rest, I’ll hang up my apron and go back to ‘George’ and the sheer agony of cleaning it.

Introduction

“We house together, old batchelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness.”

Tales from Shakespeare, the work that is today most associated with the names of Charles and Mary Lamb, was an immediate success on its publication in 1807. The Critical Review enthused: `. . . we do not scruple to say, that unless perhaps we except Robinson Crusoe, they [the 'Tales] claim the first place, and stand unique, without rival or competitor’.’ Brisk sales of the book ensured a second edition soon appeared and Tales from Shakespeare has never been out of print since. Despite the fact that it was a book for children, it has been described as forming `one of the most conspicuous landmarks in the history of the romantic movement’.

 The Lambs themselves were well placed at the hub of what was to become recognized as the romantic movement and knew — often intimately — anyone who was anyone, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth to William Hazlitt and Mary Shelley. They were in no sense hangers-on, but on the contrary knew many of this circle long before they became household names. The Lambs were not only highly esteemed by many members of this group for their literary abilities, but widely loved for their personal qualities. A degree of the warmth their friends felt towards them was stimulated by admiration and respect for the abiding love they bore each other.

The inseparability of Charles and Mary Lamb was a legend in their own lifetime. ‘As, amongst certain classes of birds, if you have one you are sure of the other,’ wrote Thomas De Quincey, ’so, with respect to the Lambs . . . seeing or hearing the brother, you knew that the sister could not be far off ‘ William Wordsworth imagined the couple as ‘a double tree/ with two collateral stems sprung from one root’, while Edward Moxon referred to ‘their blended existence’. Their cohabi­tation lasted for all of Charles’s fifty-nine years of life, interrup­ted only by Mary’s bouts of illness, when it was considered best for her to be under supervised care elsewhere. Even then, Charles visited his sister nearly every day, sometimes staying in the nursing-home with her. Although historians and critics have tended to portray Mary as the dependent partner in their relationship, from their correspondence it is clear that Charles needed his sister at least as much. During one of Mary’s absences, Charles wrote to a friend:

 “I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all her former ones, will be but temporary. But I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong; so used am I to look up to her in the least & the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe or even understand; and when I hope to have her well again with me it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her: for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older, & wiser, & better than me, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life & death, heaven & hell with me. She lives but for me.”

 Charles had many male correspondents, yet while he fre­quently praised his sister in those letters, he never unburdened himself in this vein. The friend to whom he wrote these words was Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the poet, who was perhaps the one of their circle best able to comprehend that the sibling relationship could be an agonizing, as well as a companionable, kind of marriage. Lamenting his own shortcomings, Charles invoked connubial imagery when he wrote of his sister:

“I know that she has cleaved to me, for better for worse.”

 Similarly, during one of her enforced absences he described himself as “widowed”.

 Neither Charles nor Mary ever married, although both were very interested in children. Mary’s ill health put marriage for her out of the question, while the financial and emotional strain of looking after his sister is the most usual explanation given for Charles’s lifelong bachelorhood. It is possible that both were afraid of passing on the illness which had supposedly dogged the family through previous generations. Yet Charles was at least twice sufficiently in love to think of marrying, and Mary may be believed sincere when she wrote to a girlfriend who was having trouble with her sister-in-law:

 “You will smile when I tell you I think myself the only woman in the world, who could live with a brother’s wife, and make a real friend of her.”

 Instead the couple devoted themselves to each other, and to writing. Although he abandoned serious poetry early in his literary career, Charles’s best-known poem (`The Old Familiar Faces’) continues to appear in standard anthologies today and A. C. Bradley considered him the greatest critic of his century. There was a time when few middle-class homes would have been without a copy of either their collaborative effort, Tales from Shakespeare, or a collection of Charles’s essays, penned under the pseudonym Elia. The Essays of Elia (1823) strongly influenced the essay form, while making a cult figure of their charming yet unreliable narrator.

Behind the amiable persona of Elia was the equally enter­taining Charles; one has to go a long way to find him described by anyone of his acquaintance except in the most affectionate and admiring terms. Hazlitt’s opinion is typical:

Mr Lamb excels in familiar conversation almost as much as in writing, when his modesty does not overpower his self-possession. He is as little of a proser as possible; but he blurts out the finest wit and sense in the world. [Charles's stammer made him a less eloquent speaker than writer.] . . . Mr Lamb is a general favorite with those who know him. His character is equally singular and amiable. He is endeared to his friends not less by his foibles than his virtues; he insures their esteem by the one, and does not wound their self-love by the other. He gains ground in the opinion of others by making no advances in his own.

 As for Mary, Hazlitt said that he had only ever met with one thoroughly reasonable woman, and she was Mary Lamb. Mary was known for ‘the sweetness of her disposition, the clearness of her understanding, and the gentle wisdom of all her acts and words’, and it was because of these qualities that many friends turned to her for advice and sympathy when they were experiencing all kinds of difficulties. Though not a `wit’ like her brother, she was intelligent and insightful. While many of her friends waxed lyrical on the subject of her virtues as a confidante and adviser, Henry Crabb Robinson’s economic praise serves as well as any: ‘With her I can unbosom myself cordially.’

 The Lambs lived extremely modestly, mostly in rented lodgings, although their hospitality was famous. The London literary scene of the time has been characterized as ‘inbred’, as the same set of acquaintances moved from one drawing-room to the next, although it is more justly characterized as a loose grouping of like minds who, finding each other’s company stimulating, framed the week in order to enjoy it often. Sunday lunch saw the gathering of writers and artists at the studio of Benjamin Haydon; on Tuesdays Thomas Alspaper was ‘at home’ for music and whist; on other occasions the composer Vincent Novello offered music, cheese and beer; but it was the Lambs’ suppers, usually held on a Wednesday or Thursday, which were the high point of the week, comprising feasts less for the palate than for the mind and soul. ‘How oft did we cut into the haunch of letters, while we discussed the haunch of mutton on the table? How we skimmed the dream of criticism! How we got into the heart of controversy! How we picked out the marrow of authors!’ recalled Hazlitt. ‘What I would not give for another Thursday evening,’ wrote the radical writer and publisher Leigh Hunt, while the lawyer Crabb Robinson remembered, ‘In Lamb’s humble apartment I spent many happy hours and saw a greater number of excellent persons than I have ever seen collected together in one room.’

Charles and Mary also counted among their close friends and regular correspondents the Wordsworths and Coleridge (Charles’s closest friend from his schooldays at Christ’s Hospi­tal to the day Coleridge died), as well as William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, Robert Southey and a host of other now less familiar literary figures. However, gatherings at the Lambs’ were not solely a forum for serious talk, and literature was often not the principal topic of conver­sation: also numbered among the Lambs’ friends were actors, artists and musicians, as well as a disparate collection of people who appealed to the Lambs’ idiosyncratic taste, from sea captains to eccentric academics. While their home was often an intellectual hotbed, it was also the scene of a good deal of hilarity and drinking; as Hazlitt put it: ‘wit and good fellowship was the motto inscribed over the door’.”

At the centre of this most glittering circle in the opening years of the nineteenth century were Charles Lamb and the quieter, more reserved, much-loved figure of his sister Mary. Certainly a reason for the particular regard in which the couple were held by some of their many friends was the knowledge that the Lambs woke up every morning to a private nightmare, a phantom which haunted their past, their present and their future. Only a handful of the habitués of the Lambs’ convivial weekly gatherings were aware that the couple were living with the consequences of a calamitous event which had taken place in their family, leaving Charles dependent on alcohol, and Mary suffering periodic attacks of insanity.

Dreams do not readily lend themselves to theory, even though they are often theorised about: they are not a grand edifice on strong foundations. They are the house built on sand: ‘Þa com Þær regen and michel flod’–then came rain and a great flood. Always that line from Matthew vii, 24-27 in the Anglo-Saxon Bible arises when I think of dreams: it is a metaphor and an old rhythm that says what a dream is: a house where the walls wash away, and the floors and the roof.

Dreamthread is a series of miniature essays, dreambubbles on this inexhaustible topic. In future, you may find that I add other dreamthreads onto The Casket, or I may not (dreams are capricious in keeping promises) but here I at least make an idle start. Below are a few little reveries with their warped surfaces and dangerously alluring colours. And bring your lifejacket: there are sirens out on them there dreamseas.

i. Ted Hughes and the Manfox

Teachers aren’t allowed to teach dreams. We actively discourage dreaming in lessons, bullying the students to ‘concentrate’ and ‘get on with the work.’ But this teacher is a dreamer, and for dreamer read ‘anarchist of the imagination’;’ night pilgrim’; ‘disciple of Queen Mab’. My theories about pedagogy are few and simple, but one of my treasured ideas is that the closer a lesson is to seeming like a dream or beast of the mind, then the better that lesson is. To be a beast of the mind, the lesson has to be one where the imaginative boundary between teacher and pupils is blurred, and all share the dreamscape, all become the beast. Most of the lessons that happen this way (I do not teach this kind of lesson, incidentally; they occur without anyone’s conscious will) take poems as their starting point.

Only yesterday, I taught a lesson on Ted Hughes’s ‘The Thought Fox’ to my higher ability year 8 group. Before looking at the poem itself,  we chatted about Hughes’s ‘Manfox’ dream. I told them that, in the dream, Hughes describes how he is struggling with an undergraduate essay he is writing on Samuel Johnson. As he tries to write, in walks a fox on hind legs, looking like a small man. This fox, this Manfox, is on fire, his skin bloody, black and charred. Manfox walks to Hughes’s desk and places his bloody and blackened handprint on the paper of  the unfinished essay, and tells Hughes: ‘Stop this! you are destroying us.’

For my money, this has to be one of the most beautiful dreams I have ever heard described, and so seduced am I by it that a strange thing happens me when I tell its story. Hughes’s dream is such a powerful idea, of the poetic muse rising to the surface of the poet’s mind in order to save his poems and therefore the poet himself, that as I spoke to the students, I felt I was Hughes: Ted Hughes, now ten years dead, but, through the sorcery of his dream, fiery and alive. Thanks to his night-magic, even the most fidgety children in the group listened: they always sense when you are opening a door into a world they do not yet know.

ii. A Game of Cards

I had a great dream about Elizabeth Bishop once. We were playing cards on an old rickety blue-top card table I used as my first proper desk as a child. I gushed about how much I admired her work, and she said ‘Don’t imitate me. Change your hand.’ The conversation was so vivid, and the dark colours so sharp that I’m in the dream now and again now as I write this. Her face blended into the darkness but her voice was ashy, asthmatic and clear. This was years ago, but it felt like such a blessing at the time and still does: my Manfox dream.

iii. Charles Lamb Dreaming

‘Witches and Other Night Fears’ was on the syllabus of my Romantic Literature MA at Manchester, and I vividly remember the tutorial. My teacher Grevel Lindop read aloud Lamb’s description of the dream where Lamb starts off sporting with nereids and ends up being ‘wafted’ down the Thames to Lambeth Palace. Lamb tells us that ‘the poverty of my dreams mortifies me’ and Grevel commented: ‘well, if that’s poverty, I’d be quite happy to be as poor as Charles Lamb.’  Quite, especially when the essay closes with observations like these:

 an old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humorist, used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question would be, —”Young man, what sort of dreams have you?”

The ‘notion’ to which Lamb refers is also lovely: ‘The degree of the soul’s creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking.’ The brain’s reservoir of making, a dream is colour and memory refashioned. Light like liquor.

iv. Dream-colours

Normally we know when a dream is important because of the type of colour it uses. If a dream looks like precious and semi-precious stones (but always including a very shiny jet colour somewhere to add weight and melancholy) then we should know of that dream that it is the mind is at its most wild, lovely and truthful. As for melancholy, I should perhaps have stolen from Byron and said ‘lemancholy’– his word for the sadness involved in love–as there is always an erotic element when those colours are present, even if the dream is not overtly sexual.

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Dreams are never finished. You never hit the ground. You open a door and nothing lies beyond it. Think of the half-built sets in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon: the head of Shiva drifting on the flood.