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.
A schoolfellow's description of him may help us to visualize the
elusive figure of which we have no early portraits, and the later
portraits of which are understood to be wanting in one regard or
another. His countenance, says this early observer, was mild; his
complexion clear brown, with an expression that might lead you to
think that he was of Jewish descent. His eyes were not each of the
same colour: one was hazel, the other had specks of grey in the iris,
mingled as we see red spots in the bloodstone. His step was
plantigrade, which made his walk slow and peculiar, adding to the
staid appearance of his figure.
[Illustration: CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.]
For seven years--from October 1782 until November 1789--Charles Lamb
remained at Christ's Hospital, and then, close upon fifteen years of
age, returned to his parents in the Temple. His brother John had
obtained an appointment in the South Sea House, probably through the
kindly offices of Samuel Salt, who was a Deputy-Governor, and at some
unascertained date between 1789 and 1792, Charles found employment in
the same office; not, however, for long, for in April of 1792 he was
appointed clerk in the accountant's office of the East India House, at
a commencing salary of £70 per annum. This same year which thus saw
the founding of Charles Lamb's humble fortunes, saw also the beginning
of the break-up of his home, for the immortal old Bencher, Samuel
Salt, died, and the Lamb family was left without its mainstay. John
Lamb the elder was past work, already, we may believe, passing into
senility; and John Lamb the younger, who appears to have been
prospering in the South Sea House, had presumably set up his bachelor
home elsewhere. Salt bequeathed to his clerk and factotum a pension of
£10 a year, and various legacies amounting to about £700. The old
home in the Temple had to be given up, but whither the family first
removed is not known. Four years later they were living in Little
Queen Street--now a portion of Kingsway--off Holborn, in a house on
the west side, the site of which is now covered by a church.
At the end of 1794--though his first known verses are dated five years
earlier--Charles Lamb had, so far as we are aware, the pleasure of
seeing himself for the first time "in print," and curiously enough
here at the earliest beginning of his life as author he was intimately
associated with Coleridge; indeed, his "effusion," a sonnet addressed
to Mrs. Siddons, appeared in "The Morning Chronicle" on 29th December,
with the signature "S. T. C." Coleridge, we learn from Lamb's letters,
altered the sonnet and was welcome to do so, and the poem properly
appears in both of their collected works; the recension is certainly
not an improvement on the original. In the spring of 1796 a small
volume of Coleridge's poems was published, four sonnets by Lamb being
included in it; and in May, 1796, was written the earliest of the rich
collection of Lamb's letters which have come down to us. In this
letter we have the first mention of the shadow which overhung the Lamb
family.
My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks
that finished last year and began this, your very humble
servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am
got somewhat rational now, and don't bite any one. But mad I
was; and many a vagary my imagination played with me,
enough to make a volume, if all were told.... Coleridge, it
may convince you of my regard for you when I tell you my
head ran on you in my madness as much almost as on another
person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate
cause of my temporary frenzy.
It is assumed that the closing reference here is to Lamb's romantic
love for A---- W----; the "Anna" of some of his sonnets written about
this time, the "Alice W----" of the later "Dream Children," and other
of the essays, and that it was to the unhappy course of a deep love
that Charles Lamb owed his brief period of mental aberration. This
year, 1796, which was to close in tragic gloom, was indeed marked
almost throughout by unhappiness, lightened only by the close and
friendly correspondence with Coleridge. From these letters we learn
that besides his own mental trouble, his sister had been very ill, his
brother was laid up and demanded constant attention, having a leg so
bad that for a time the necessity of amputation appeared to be
probable.[1] Through it all Charles Lamb was conscious of being "sore
galled with disappointed hope," and felt something of enforced
loneliness, consequent upon his being, as he described himself, "slow
of speech and reserved of manners"; he went nowhere, as he put it,
had no acquaintance, and but one friend--Coleridge. It is difficult,
in reading much in these letters, to realize that the writer was but
just come of age in the previous February. The first twenty or so of
the letters of Lamb which have come down to us are addressed to
Coleridge (1796-1798). Between the seventh of the series (5th July,
1796) and the eighth (27th September, 1796) there is a gap of time at
the close of which happened the tragedy that coloured the whole of
Charles Lamb's subsequent life and caused him to give himself up to a
life of devotion to which it would not be easy to find a parallel.
[Footnote 1: It is curious that a quarter of a century later, when
writing of his brother in "Dream Children," Lamb speaks of his being
lame-footed, and of having his limb actually taken off.]
The story is best told in the poignant simplicity of Lamb's first
letter to Coleridge after the calamity: