IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF
CHARLES LAMB
[Illustration: CHARLES LAMB.]
IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF
CHARLES LAMB
BY
BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN
AUTHOR OF “OLD CHELSEA,” ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY HERBERT RAILTON
AND JOHN FULLEYLOVE
WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY BY E. D. NORTH
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1890
COPYRIGHT, 1890, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.
Press of J. J. Little & Co.
Astor Place, New York.
TO
L. H. F.
_During the half-century since the death of Charles Lamb, an immense
mass of matter has been gathered about him and about his writings. In
burrowing among the treasures and the rubbish of this mound, I have been
struck by the total absence of what may be called a topographical
biography of the man, or of any accurate record of his rovings: with the
exception of that necessarily brief one contained in Mr. Laurence
Hutton’s invaluable “Literary Landmarks of London.” Such a shortcoming
is the more marked, inasmuch as Lamb is so closely identified with the
Town. Not one among the men of letters, whose shadows walk the London
streets with us, knew them better, or loved them more, than he did. In
following his footsteps, I have found still untouched many of the houses
that harboured him; and I have taken delight in the task, before the
restless hand of reconstruction shall have plucked them forever away, of
helping to keep alive the look of all that is left of the walls within
which he lived and laboured._
_From this mere memento of brick-and-mortar--all my original intent--I
have been led on to a study of the man himself, from our more modern
and more humane point of view. The time has long gone by for that kindly
compact of reticence which may have been becoming in the years directly
after his death. Nothing need be hidden now about the madness of Mary,
about the terrible taking-off of her mother, about the early insanity of
Charles himself, or his later weaknesses. And, in telling the entire
truth, I have found comfort and cheer in the belief that neither apology
nor homily can ever again be deemed needful to a decorous demeanour
beside these dead._
_So that I have sketched him just as he lives for me--the lines and the
wrinkles of his aspect, the shine and the shadow of his soul: just as he
moved in the crowd, among his friends, by his sister’s side, and alone.
To show exactly what he was, rather than what he did, I have used his
own words wherever this was possible; altering them as to their letter
alone, where it has seemed essential. In this spirit of affectionate
allegiance I have followed him faithfully in all his wanderings, from
his cradle close by the Thames to his grave not far from the Lea._
_B. E. M._
_NEW YORK, October, 1890._
List of Illustrations.
CHARLES LAMB, FRONTISPIECE
PAGE
_The Temple Gardens, from Crown Office Row_, 14
_By John Fulleylove._
_A Corner in the Blue-Coat School_, 18
_By Herbert Railton._
_The East India House_, 26
_By Herbert Railton._
_No. 7 Little Queen Street_, 32
_The House in Pentonville_, 39
_The Feathers Tavern_, 48
_By Herbert Railton._
_No. 20 Russell Street, Covent Garden_, 78
_By Herbert Railton._
_The Cottage in Colebrook Row_, 96
_By Herbert Railton._
_Lamb’s two Houses at Enfield_, 102
_By John Fulleylove._
_No. 34 Southampton Buildings_, 122
_By Herbert Railton._
_Charles Lamb--the Maclise Portrait_, 126
_Fac-simile of a Receipt for a Legacy_, 128
_Signed by Charles Lamb as Guardian for
his Sister Mary._
_The Walden House at Edmonton_, 130
_By John Fulleylove._
_Edmonton Church, from Lamb’s Grave_, 136
_By John Fulleylove._
_The Grave of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb at
Edmonton_, 140
_By John Fulleylove._
[Illustration:
_In the_ Footprints _of_
Charles Lamb.]
“The sun set; but set not his hope:
Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
Deeper and older seemed his eye;
And matched his sufferance sublime
The taciturnity of time.
He spoke, and words more soft than rain
Brought the Age of Gold again:
His action won such reverence sweet,
As hid all measure of the feat.”
--EMERSON.
“Far from me, and from my friends, be such
frigid philosophy as may conduct us, indifferent
and unmoved, over any ground, which has been
dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue.”
--SAMUEL JOHNSON.
I.
[Illustration: “Old Bricks for Sale.”]
Such is the legend that catches one’s eye, plain for all men to see, on
many a hoarding in London streets. Behind those boards, wide or high, on
which the callous contractor shamelessly blazons his dreadful
trade--“Old Houses Bought to be Pulled Down”--he is stupidly pickaxing
to pieces historic bricks and mortar which ought to be preserved
priceless and imperishable. Within only a few years, I have had to look
on, while thus were broken to bits and carted away to chaos John
Dryden’s dwelling-place in Fetter Lane, Benjamin Franklin’s and
Washington Irving’s lodgings in Little Britain, Byron’s birthplace in
Hollis Street, Milton’s “pretty garden-house,” in Petty France,
Westminster. The spacious fireplace by which the poet sat, during his
fast-darkening days--for in this house he lost his first wife and his
eyesight--was knocked down, as only one among other numbered lots, to
stolid builders. And the stone, “Sacred to Milton, the Prince of
Poets”--placed in the wall facing the garden, by William Hazlitt, living
here early in our century, beneath which Jeremy Bentham, occupant of the
adjoining house, was wont to make his guests fall on their knees--this
stone has gone to “patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw.”
To this house there used to come, to call on Hazlitt, a man of
noticeable and impressive presence:--small of stature, fragile of frame,
clad in clothing of tightly fitting black, which was clerical as to cut
and well-worn as to texture; his “almost immaterial legs,” in Tom Hood’s
phrase, ending in gaiters and straps; his dark hair, not quite black,
curling crisply about a noble head and brow--“a head worthy of
Aristotle,” Leigh Hunt tells us; “full of dumb eloquence,” are Hazlitt’s
words; “such only may be seen in the finer portraits of Titian,” John
Forster puts it; “a long, melancholy face, with keen penetrating eyes,”
we learn from Barry Cornwall; brown eyes, kindly, quick, observant; his
dark complexion and grave expression brightened by the frequent “sweet
smile, with a touch of sadness in it.”
This visitor, of such peculiar and piquant personality--externally “a
rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel,” to use his
own words of the singer Braham--is Charles Lamb, a clerk in the East
India House, living with his sister Mary in chambers in the Inner
Temple. Let us walk with him as he returns to those peaceful precincts,
still of signal interest, despite the ruin wrought by recent
improvements. Here, as in the day of Spenser, “studious lawyers have
their bowers,” and “have thriven;” here, on every hand, we see the
shades of Evelyn, Congreve, Cowper, the younger Colman, Fielding,
Goldsmith, Johnson, Boswell; here, above all, the atmosphere is still
redolent with sweet memories of the “best beloved of English writers,”
as Algernon Swinburne well calls Charles Lamb. Closer and more compact
than elsewhere are his footprints in these Temple grounds; for he was
born within their gates, his youthful world was bounded by their walls,
his happiest years, as boy and as man, were passed in their buildings.
And out beyond these borders we shall track his steps mainly through
adjacent streets, almost always along the City’s streets, of which he
was as fond as Samuel Johnson or Charles Dickens. He loved, all through
life, “enchanting London, whose dirtiest, drab-frequented alley, and her
lowest-bowing tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn....
O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops,
mercers, hardware men, pastry-cooks, St. Paul’s Churchyard, the Strand,
Exeter ’Change, Charing Cross, with the man _upon_ a black horse! These
are thy gods, O London!” He couldn’t care, he said, for the beauties of
nature, as they have been confinedly called; and used to persist, with
his pleasing perversity, that when he climbed Skiddaw he was thinking of
the ham-and-beef shop in St. Martin’s Lane! “Have I not enough without
your mountains?” he wrote to Wordsworth. “I do not envy you. I should
pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends with
anything”--even with scenery! It was a serious step which Lamb took in
later life, out from his beloved streets into the country; a step which
certainly saddened, and doubtless shortened, the last stage of his
earthly journey.
By a happy chance--for they have an unhallowed habit in London town of
destroying just those buildings which I should select to save, leaving
unmolested those that would not be missed, for all they ever have to say
to us--nearly every one of Lamb’s successive homes has been rescued from
ruin, and kept inviolate for our reverent regard. “Cheerful Crown Office
Row (place of my kindly engendure)”--to use his own words--has been only
partly rebuilt; and that end of the block wherein lived his parents
stands almost in the same state as when it was erected in 1737; this
date told to us to-day by the old-fashioned figures cut on its easterly
end. It was then named “The New Building, opposite the Garden-Wall,” and
under that division of the Chamber-Book of the Inner Temple I have
hunted up its numerous occupants. By this archive, and by the Books of
Accounts for the eighteenth century, I have thus been enabled to trace
Samuel Salt from his first residence within the Temple in 1746, in Ram
Alley Building--now gone--through successive removals, until he settled
down in his last chambers, wherein he died in February, 1793. The record
reads--a “parliament” meaning one of the fixed meetings in each term of
the Benchers of the Temple, for the purpose of transacting business, and
of calling students to the bar--“13th May, 1768. At this Parliament: It
is ordered that Samuel Salt, Esquire, a Barrister of this Society, aged
about Fifty, be and is hereby admitted, for his own life, to the benefit
of an Assignment in and to All that Ground Chamber, No. 2, opposite the
Garden Walk in Crown Office Row: He, the said Samuel Salt having paid
for the Purchase thereof into the Treasury of this Society, the sum of
One Hundred and Fifty pounds.”
So that it was in No. 2--the numbers having remained always
unchanged--of Crown Office Row, in one of the rear rooms of the ground
floor, which then looked out on Inner Temple Lane, some of which rooms
have been swept away since, and others have been slightly altered, that
Charles Lamb was born, on the 10th February, 1775.
For Samuel Salt, Esquire--one of “The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,”
whose pensive gentility is portrayed in Elia’s essay of that title--had
in his employ, as “his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend,
his ‘flapper,’ his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer,” one John
Lamb; who formed, with his wife and children, the greater part of the
household. Of him, too, under the well-chosen name of Lovel, we have the
portrait, vivid and rounded, in his son’s paper. “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.... Lovel was the liveliest
little fellow breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick’s, whom he was
said greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms it),
possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry--next to Swift and
Prior--moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the
dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage-boards and such small
cabinet toys, to perfection; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with
equal facility; made punch better than any man of his degree in England;
had the merriest quips and conceits, and was altogether as brimful of
rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother of the
angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr.
Izaak Walton would have chosen to go a-fishing with.” In truth,
“A merry cheerful man. A merrier man,
A man more apt to frame matter for mirth,
Mad jokes and antics for a Christmas-eve,
Making life social, and the laggard time
To move on nimbly, never yet did cheer
The little circle of domestic friends.”
This John Lamb was devoted to the welfare of his master, Samuel Salt;
who, in turn, did nothing without consulting him, or failed in anything
without expecting and fearing his admonishing. “He put himself almost
too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in the world.” To
him and to his children Salt was a life-long benefactor, and never,
until death had made an end to the good man’s good deeds, did there
fall on the family any shadow of change or trouble or penury.
It was in Salt’s chambers that Charles and his sister Mary, in their
youthful years, “tumbled into a spacious closet of good old English
reading, and browsed at will on that fair and wholesome pasturage:” thus
already so early drawn together by kindred tastes and studies, even as
they were already at one in their joint heritage of the father’s latent
mental malady. They had learned their letters, and picked up crumbs of
rudimentary knowledge, at a small school in Fetter Lane, hard by the
Temple; the boys being taught in the mornings, the girls in the
afternoons. It stood on the edge of “a discoloured, dingy garden in the
passage leading into Fetter Lane from Bartlett’s buildings. This was
near to Holborn.” Bartlett’s name is still kept alive in Bartlett’s
Passage, right there; but no stone of his building now stands; and the
only growth of any garden in that turbulent thoroughfare to-day is
pavement and mud and obscene urchins.
The inscription painted over their school-door asserted that it was
kept by “Mr. William Bird, Teacher of Mathematics and Languages.”
“Heaven knows what languages were taught in it, then! I am sure that
neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it, but a little of our
native English”--so Charles wrote nearly fifty years after to William
Hone, the editor of the _Every Day Book_. In its pages had just appeared
a woful narrative of the poverty and desolation of one Starkey, who had
been “a gentle usher” in that school. In the letter written by Lamb as a
pendant to that paper, he gossips characteristically about the memories
of those school-days thus awakened in him and in his sister. He vividly
portrays that down-trodden and downcast usher, who “was not always the
abject thing he came to;” and who actually had bold and figurative words
for the big girls, when they talked together, or teased him during his
recitations. “Oh, how I remember our legs wedged into those
uncomfortable sloping desks, where we sat elbowing each other; and the
injunctions to attain a free hand, unattainable in that position!”
They had, also, an aged school-dame here, who was proud to prattle to
her pupils about her aforetime friend, Oliver Goldsmith; telling them
how the good-natured man, then too poor to present her with a copy of
his “Deserted Village,” had lent it to her to read. He had become famous
now, and so affluent--by the success of “The Good Natur’d Man,”
indeed!--that he had bought chambers on the second floor of No. 2 Brick
Court, Middle Temple. This was but a biscuit toss from Crown Office Row,
and perchance little Mary Lamb sometimes met, within the grounds, the
short, stout, plain, pock-marked Irish doctor. He died in those
chambers, only ten months before the birth of Charles; and was buried
somewhere in the burying-ground of the Temple church. Within it, the
Benchers put up a tablet to his memory. It is now in their vestry,
wherein you shall also find the baptismal records of nearly all the Lamb
children. The inscription on the tablet may have been first spelled out
by Mary to her small and eager brother. Doubtless the two children knew
the exact spot of his grave--known exactly to none of us to-day--even
as they knew every corner and cranny of the Temple grounds and
buildings. They played in its gardens, and looked down on them from
these same upper windows of No. 2 Crown Office Row, which have been
selected by Mr. Fulleylove for his point of view. _Then_ these gardens
were as Shakespeare saw them, when he, by a blameless anachronism,
caused to be enacted in them the famous scene of the Roses; really
rehearsed there, years before, when Warwick assigned the rose to
Plantagenet. Now, the grounds have been extended riverwards by the
construction of the Embankment; and the ancient historic blocks of
buildings about them have been vulgarized into something new and fine.
Mary and Charles were always together during these early days. Of the
seven children born into the family, only three escaped death in
infancy: our two, and their brother John, elder by two years than Mary.
Their mother loved them all, but most of all did she love “dear, little,
selfish, craving John;” who, as was well written by Charles in later
life, was
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE GARDENS, FROM CROWN OFFICE ROW.]
not worthy of one-tenth of that affection which Mary had a right to
claim. But the mother, like the father, was fond of fun, and found her
favourite in her handsome, sportive, noisy boy; showing scant sympathy
with and no insight into the “moythered brains”--her own phrase--of her
sensitive, brooding daughter, who already gave unheeded evidence of the
congenital gloom by which her mind was to become so clouded. Another
member of the small household was the father’s queer old-maiden sister,
Aunt Hetty, who passed her days sitting silently or mumbling
mysteriously as she peered over her spectacles at the two children,
huddled together in their youthful fear of her.
So it came to pass that Mary took charge of the “weakly but very pretty
babe”--as she recalled him, long years after, when he lay dead at
Edmonton, and she, in the next room, was rambling disjointedly on about
all their past. With a childish wisdom, born, surely, not of her years,
but rather of her loneliness and her unrequited caresses and her craving
for companionship, she became at once his big sister, his little
mother, his guardian angel. She cared for him in his helpless babyhood,
she gave strength to his feeble frame, she nurtured his growing brain,
she taught him to talk and to walk. We seem to see the tripping of his
feet, that
“---- half linger,
Half run before,”
trying to keep pace with her steps then; even as they always all through
life tried to do, wheresoever she walked, until they stopped at the edge
of his grave. The story of these two lives of double singleness, from
these childish footprints to that grave, is simply the story of their
love. He, like his own Child-Angel, was to know weakness and reliance
and the shadow of human imbecility; and he was to go with a lame gait;
_but, in his goings, he “exceeded all mortal children in grace and
swiftness_.” And so pity springs up in us, as in angelic bosoms; and
yearnings touch us, too, at the memory of this “immortal lame one.”
The boy’s next school, to which he obtained a presentation through the
influence of Mr. Salt, is known officially as Christ’s Hospital, and is
commonly called the Blue-Coat School. It still stands, a stately
monument of the munificence of “that godly and royal child, King Edward
VI., the flower of the Tudor name--the young flower that was untimely
cropped, as it began to fill our land with its early odours--the
boy-patron of boys--the serious and holy child, who walked with Cranmer
and Ridley.” To-day, as we stay our steps in Newgate Street, and peer
through the iron railings at the dingy red brick and stone facings of
the ancient walls; or, as we pause under the tiny statue of the
boy-king--founder, only ten days before his death, of this noble
hospital for poor fatherless children and foundlings--we may look at the
out-of-school games going on in the great quadrangle: the foolish
flapping skirts of the striplings tucked into their red leathern
waistbands to give fair and free play to their lanky yellow legs, their
uncapped heads taking sun or shower with equal unconcern.
Among them, unseen of them, seem to move the forms of those other boys,
Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt--all students here
about this time. _Our_ boy was then a little past seven, a gentle,
affectionate lad, “terribly shy,” as he said of himself later, and made
all the more sensitive by his slight stammer, which lapsed to a stutter
when his nerves were wrought upon and startled. Yet he was no more left
alone and isolated now than he was in after life; his schoolfellows
indulged him, the masters were fond of him, and he was given special
privileges not known to the others. His little complaints were listened
to; he had tea and a hot roll o’ mornings; his ancient aunt used to
toddle there to bring him good things, when he, schoolboy-like, only
despised her for it, and, as he confessed when older, used to be ashamed
to see her come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps near
where they went into the grammar-school, and open her apron, and bring
out her basin, with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for him.
And he was allowed to go home to the Temple for short visits, from time
to time, so passing his young days between “cloister and cloister.”
As he walks down the Old Bailey, or through Fleet Market--then in the
full foul odour of
[Illustration: A CORNER IN THE BLUE-COAT SCHOOL.]
its wickedness and nastiness--and so up Fleet Street on his way home, we
may be sure that his eager eye alights on all that is worth its while,
and that the young alchemist is already putting into practice that
process by which he transmuted the mud of street and pavement into pure
gold, and so found all that was always precious to him in their stones.
After treading them for many years, as boy and as man, he asks: “Is any
night-walk comparable to a walk from St. Paul’s to Charing Cross for
lighting and paving, for crowds going and coming without respite, the
rattle of coaches, and the cheerfulness of shops?”
Among his schoolfellows, Charles formed special friendships with a few
select spirits; and in Coleridge--“the inspired charity-boy,” who
entered the school at the same time, though three years older--he found
a life-long companion. He looked up to the elder lad--dreamy, dejected,
lonely--with an affection and a reverence which never failed all through
life, though in after years subject to the strain of Coleridge’s
alienation, absence, and silence. “Bless you, old sophist,” he wrote
once to Coleridge, “who, next to human nature taught me all the
corruption I was capable of knowing.”
The two lads--along with Middleton, then a Grecian in the school,
afterward Bishop of Calcutta--figure together in the fine group in
silver which passes from ward to ward each year, according to merit in
studies and in conduct. There is a Charles Lamb prize, too, given every
year, as fittingly should be, to the best English essayist among the
Blue-Coat boys, consisting of a silver medal: on one side a laurel
wreath enwrapped about the hospital’s arms; on the reverse, Lamb’s
profile, his hair something too curly, his aspect somewhat smug. It
would be a solace to his kindly spirit could he know that his memory is
thus kept green in the school which he left with sorrow, and to which he
always looked back fondly. When a man, he used to go to see the boys;
and Leigh Hunt--who entered a little later--has left us a pleasant
picture of one of these visits. Charles had been a good student in the
musty classical course of the school; not fonder of his hexameters than
of his hockey, however; and when he left, in November, 1789, aged nearly
fifteen, he had become a deputy Grecian, he was a capital Latin
scholar, he probably had a firm conviction that there was a language
called Greek, and he had read widely and well in the English classics.
Doubtless he was, even then, already familiar with the Elizabethan
dramatists, his life-long “midnight darlings;” above all, he had
nurtured himself upon the plays of Shakespeare, which were “the
strongest and sweetest food of his mind from infancy.”
The somewhat sombre surroundings of his summer holidays, too, helped to
form him into an “old-fashioned child.” The earliest thing he could
remember, he once wrote, was Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is
spelled, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire. He
could just recall his visit there, under the care of “Bridget Elia”--as
he named his sister in his essays. This youthful visit had been made to
a farmer, one Gladman, who had married their grandmother’s sister; and
his farm-house was delightfully situated within a gentle walk from
Wheathampstead. Charles describes his return thither with Mary, more
than forty years after; and how, spite of their trepidation as to the
greeting they might get, they were joyfully received by a radiant
woman-cousin, “who might have sat to a sculptor for the image of
Welcome.”
Mainly, however, were the boy’s holidays passed with his grandmother
Field, the old and trusted housekeeper of the Plumer family at
Blakesware, in Hertfordshire: an ancient mansion, topped by many
turrets, gables, carved chimneys, guarded all about by a solid red-brick
wall and heavy iron gates. He was not allowed to go outside the grounds,
and was content to wander over their trimly-kept terraces and about the
tranquil park, wherein aged trees bent themselves in grotesque shapes.
Beyond, he fancied that a dark lake stretched silently, striking terror
to the lad’s imagination.
“So strange a passion for the place possessed me in those years, that,
though there lay--I shame to say how few roods distant from the
mansion--half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was
the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to
pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay
unexplored for me; and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over
elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had
been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy.” It was the placid tiny Ashe,
which, curving about through this valley, here brawls over one of the
wears that have given the place its name, and his lake proved to be only
one of its little inlets.
Within doors he would wander through the wainscoted halls and the
tapestried bedrooms--“tapestry so much better than painting, not
adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots ... all Ovid on the walls,
in colours vivider than his descriptions. Actæon in mid sprout, with the
unappeasable prudery of Diana; and the still more provoking, and almost
culinary, coolness of Dan Phœbus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of
Marsyas.” He would gaze long in wonder on the busts of the Twelve Cæsars
ranged around the marble hall, and would study the prints of Hogarth’s
Progress of the Rake and of the Harlot hung on the walls. “Why, every
plank and panel of that house for me had magic in it,” he says in the
essay on “Blakesmoor in H----shire;” under which name he disguises the
place. That is a delightful paper, ending with this most musical
passage: “Mine too--whose else?--thy costly fruit-garden, with its
sun-baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards
from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead,
save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespake their
pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters
backwarder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old formality, thy
firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring
wood-pidgeon, with that antique image in the centre, God or Goddess I
wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship
to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental
mystery.”
Lamb went back in 1822 to revisit these boyhood scenes, only to find
that ruin had been done with a swift hand, and that brick-and-mortar
knaves had plucked every panel and spared no plank. The ancient mansion
entirely disappeared during that year, and a new Blakesware House soon
after rose on its site: “worthy in picturesque architecture and fair
proportions of its old namesake,” in the words of Canon Ainger.
The boy used to go to church of a Sunday with his grandmother, to
Widford; nearer to their place than their own parish church at Ware. On
a stone under the noble elms many a transatlantic visitor has read the
simple inscription, “Mary Field, August 5th, 1792.” Beneath it lies the
grandmother.
II.
Until lately, in the year 1889, when the frenzy for Improvement and the
rage for Rent wiped it out, I could have shown you a queer bit of cobble
wall, set in and thus saved from ruin by the new wall of the Metal
Exchange. These few square feet of stone were the sole remaining relic
of the chapel of the old manor-house of Leadenhall--so named from its
roofing of lead, rare in those days--which house had been presented to
the City of London by the munificent Richard Whittington in 1408, to be
used as a granary and market. It escaped the Great Fire, and its chapel
was not torn down until June, 1812. This piece of its wall, having been
preserved then, was built in with, and so formed part of, the old East
India House. That famous structure stretched its stately and severe
façade along Leadenhall Street just beyond Gracechurch Street, and so
around the corner into Lime Street. It was, withal, a gloomy
[Illustration: THE EAST INDIA HOUSE.
[From an old print in the British Museum.]]
pile, with its many-columned Ionic portico. Its pediment contained a
stone sovereign of Great Britain, holding an absurd umbrella-shaped
shield over the sculptured figures of eastern commerce; its front was
dominated by Britannia comfortably seated, at her right Europe, on a
horse, and at her left Asia, on a camel.
Within its massive walls--holding memories of Warren Hastings and of
Cornwallis, of Mill, gathering material for his history of India, and of
Hoole, translating Tasso in leisure hours--were spacious halls and lofty
rooms, statues and pictures, a museum of countless curiosities from the
East. Beneath were vaults stored with a goodly share of the wealth of
Ormus and of Ind, and dungeons wherein were found--on the downfall of
John Company, in 1860, and the destruction of his fortress a little
later--chains and fetters, and a narrow passage leading to a concealed
postern: these last for the benefit of the victims of John’s press-gang,
entrapped, drugged, shipped secretly down the river, and so sent across
water to serve Clive and Coote as food for powder.
Upstairs, at a desk, sat Charles Lamb, keeping accounts in big books
during “thirty-three years of slavery,” as he phrased it: of unfailing
and untiring--albeit not untired--devotion to his duties, as his
employers well knew. It was in April, 1792, just as he became seventeen,
that he was first chained to this hard desk; and it came about in this
way.
John Lamb, the father, had got nearly to his dotage and quite to
uselessness, and was pensioned off by his master about this period. The
elder brother, dear little selfish, craving John, had grown into a
broad, burly, jovial bachelor, wedded to his own ways; living an easy
life apart from them all; “marching in quite an opposite direction,” as
his brother kindly puts it--speaking, as was his wont, not without
tenderness for him. He contributed nothing to the support of the family,
and Mary added but little, beyond her own meagre maintenance by
dress-making on a small scale--a trade she had taught herself. In her
article on needlework, written in 1814, for the _British Lady’s
Magazine_, she says: “In early life I passed eleven years in the
exercise of my needle for a livelihood.” And so it seemed needful that
the boy, not yet fifteen years old on leaving Christ’s, should get to
work to eke out the family’s scanty income.
John Lamb had a comfortable position in the South Sea House. It stood
where now stands the Oriental Bank, at the end of Threadneedle Street,
as you turn up into Bishopsgate Within: “its magnificent portals ever
gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and
pillars.” In his essay entitled “The South Sea House,” Lamb has drawn
the picture of the place within: its “stately porticos, imposing
staircases, offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces; ... the
oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors; ... huge
charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated; dusty maps of
Mexico, dim as dreams; and soundings of the Bay of Panama!” All “long
since dissipated or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of
that famous BUBBLE.”
Here Charles was given a desk, and here he worked, but at what work and
with what wage we do not know. It was not for many months, however, for
he soon received his appointment in the East India House through the
kindness of Samuel Salt--the final kindness that came to the family from
their aged well-doer; for he died during that year, 1792. The young
accountant had but little taste for, and still less knowledge of, the
mercantile mysteries over which he was set to toil. He knew less
geography than a schoolboy of six weeks’ standing, he said in mature
manhood; and a map of old Ortelius was as authentic as Arrowsmith to
him. Of history and chronology he possessed some vague points, such as
he could not help picking up in the course of his miscellaneous reading;
but he never deliberately sat down to study any chronicle of any
country! His friend Manning once, with great painstaking, got him to
think that he understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave him
over in despair at the second. And, toil as toughly as he might over his
accounts, he had to own, after years of adding, that “I think I lose
£100 a year at the India House, owing solely to my want of neatness in
making up my accounts.”
And yet, just the more uncongenial as was his labour, by just so much
more did it tend in all ways to his good. Wordsworth said truly, with
admirable acumen, that Lamb’s submission to this mechanical employment
placed him in fine contrast with other men of genius--his
contemporaries--who, in sacrificing personal independence, made a wreck
of their morality and honour. No such wreck did Charles Lamb make, and
his peculiar pride prevented his sacrificing ever one iota of his
independence. He could be no man’s debtor nor dependant, and was content
to cut his coat to suit his cloth, all his life long. His sole hatred,
curiously enough, was for bankrupts; and he has portrayed with delicious
irony, in his essay, “The Two Races of Men”--the men who borrow and the
men who lend--the contempt of the former for money, “accounting it
(yours and mine especially) no better than dross!”
The new clerk began with an annual salary of £70, to be increased by a
small sum each year. Many huge account-books were filled with his
figures--who knows what has become of them?--and these he used to call
his real works, filling some hundred folios on the shelves in Leadenhall
Street. His printed books, he claimed, were the solace and the
recreations of his out-of-office hours at home.
[Illustration: NO. 7 LITTLE QUEEN STREET.]
That home was no longer in the Temple. The home there, of “snug
firesides, the low-built roof, parlours ten feet by ten, frugal board,
and all the homeliness of home,” had been given up, on the death of Mr.
Salt; or, it may be, even earlier, for I am unable to fix the date. The
family had moved into poor lodgings, at No. 7 Little Queen Street,
Holborn, where we find them during the year 1795. The site of this
house, and of its adjoining neighbours on both sides, Nos. 6 and 8, is
now occupied by Holy Trinity Church of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The first
house of the old row still standing is No. 9, and the side entrance of
the Holborn Restaurant is No. 5; so that, you see, the windows of the
Lamb lodgings looked out directly down Gate Street, their house exactly
facing the western embouchure of that short and narrow street.
I pass in front of the little church a score of times in a month, and
each time I look with gladness at its ugly front, content that it has
replaced the walls within which was enacted that terrible tragedy of
September, 1796. The family was straitened direfully in means, and in
miserable case in many ways; the mother ailing helplessly, the father
decaying rapidly in mind and body; the aged aunt, more of a burden than
a help, despite the scanty board she paid; and the sister, suffering
almost ceaselessly from attacks of her congenital gloom, submitting to
the constant toil of her household duties, of her dressmaking, and of
nursing her parents. Early in 1796 Charles wrote to Coleridge: “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
mad-house at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don’t bite any
one. But mad I was!” This was his only attack; there was no more such
agreeable diversity in his life, and he was cured by the most heroic of
remedies.
In the _London Times_ of Monday, September 26, 1796--in which issue the
editors “exult in the isolation and cutting off” of the various armies
of the French Republic in Germany, and doubt the “alleged successes of
the army in Italy reported to the Directory by General Buonaparte;” in
which the Right Honourable John, Earl of Chatham, is named Lord
President of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council; and in which
“Mr. Knowles, nephew and pupil of the late Mr. Sheridan,” advertises
that he has “opened an English, French, and Latin preparatory school for
a limited number of young gentlemen at No. 15 Brompton Crescent”--in
this journal appeared the following:
“On Friday afternoon, the coroner and a jury sat on the body of a lady
in the neighbourhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a wound from
her daughter the preceding day. It appeared, by the evidence adduced,
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, around 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 had received from one of the forks
she had been madly hurling about the room.
“For a few days prior to this, the family had observed some symptoms of
insanity in her, which had so much increased on the Wednesday evening
that her brother, early the next morning, went to Dr. Pitcairn: but that
gentleman was not at home.
“It seems that the young lady had been once before deranged. The jury,
of course, brought in their verdict--_Lunacy_.”
The _True Briton_ said: “It appears that she had been before in the
earlier part of her life deranged, from the harassing fatigues of too
much business. As her carriage toward her mother had always been
affectionate in the extreme, it is believed her increased attachment to
her, as her infirmities called for it by day and by night, caused her
loss of reason at this time. It has been stated in some of the morning
papers that she has an insane brother in confinement; but this is
without foundation.”
I ask you to notice with what decent reticence, so far from the ways,
and so foolish in the eyes, of our modern journalistic shamelessness,
all the names are suppressed in this report. It is certain that it would
not be looked on with favour in the office of any enterprising journal,
nowadays! One error the reporter did make; it was not the landlord, but
Charles, who came at the child’s cries; luckily at hand just in time to
disarm his sister, and thus prevent further harm.
So he was at hand from that day on, all through his life, holding her
and helping her in the frequent successive returns of her wretched
malady. His gentle, loving, resolute soul proved its fine and firm fibre
under the strain of more than forty years of undeviating devotion to
which I know no parallel. He quietly gave up all other ties and cares
and pleasures for this supreme duty; he never for one hour remitted his
vigil; he never repined or posed, he never even said to himself that he
was doing something fine. And such is the potency of this intangible
tonic of unselfish self-sacrifice, that _his_ tremulous nerves grew
tenser under its action, and his reason relaxed her rule thenceforward
never any more. The poor guiltless murderess was sent by the authorities
to an asylum at Hoxton. There John Lamb and their friends thought it
best to isolate her, safely and quietly, for life, spite of her
intervals of sanity; but, from the outset, Charles fought against this,
offered his life-long personal guardianship--this boy of twenty-two,
with only £100 a year!--and at length succeeded in squeezing consent
from the crown officials. He counts up, in a letter to Coleridge, the
coin “Daddy and I” can spare for Mary, and computes all the care she
will bring: “I know John will make speeches about it, _but she shall not
go into an hospital_.” So he meets her as she comes out, and they walk
away through life hand in hand, even as they used to walk through the
fields many a time in later years on the approach of one of her repeated
relapses; he leading her back to temporary retirement in the asylum,
hand in hand together, both silently crying!
The mother’s body is laid in the graveyard of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, the
aunt is sent to other relatives, and the father’s wound having speedily
healed, Charles removed with him to lodgings at No. 45 Chapel Street,
Pentonville, on the corner of Liverpool Road. It was a plain little
wooden house, as you may see it portrayed in the cut copied from W.
Carew Hazlitt’s “Charles and Mary Lamb.” Now, there stands in its place
a blazing brazen “pub,” quite in keeping with the squalid street. Its
bar, like that favourite bar of Newman Noggs, “faces both ways,” in a
hopeless attempt to cope all around with the unquenchable thirst of
that quarter!
[Illustration: THE HOUSE IN PENTONVILLE.]
The new home, however, brought but slight brightening to the gloom and
horror from which Charles had fled in the old home. It was shadowed by
the almost actual presence of the dead mother, and made even more dismal
by the living ghost of the aged father, now “in the decay of his
faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage of human weakness, a
remnant most forlorn of what he was.” He was released by death early in
1799, and laid by his wife’s side in the burying-ground of St. Andrew’s,
Holborn; the ground since then having been cut through and wiped out by
the construction of the Holborn viaduct.
Old Aunt Hetty, “the kindest, goodest creature,” had come back to them,
but only to die; and their faithful servant, who had followed their
fortunes and their misfortunes, sickened slowly unto death. Mary had
been allowed to return home for a while, from the rooms at Hackney,
where Charles had placed her on her release from the asylum, and where
he passed his Sundays and holidays with her. Now, she again broke down,
and was forced to go back into seclusion at Hoxton. Then, for the one
time in all his life, Charles gave way under these successive strokes,
and made his only moan in a letter to Coleridge, early in 1800: “Mary,
in consequence of fatigue and anxiety, is fallen ill again, and I was
obliged to remove her yesterday. I am left alone in a house, with
nothing but Hetty’s dead body to keep me company. To-morrow I bury her,
and then I shall be quite alone, with nothing but a cat to remind me
that the house has been full of living beings like myself. My heart is
quite sunk, and I don’t know where to look for relief. Mary will get
better again, but her constantly being liable to these attacks is
dreadful; nor is it the least of our evils that her case and all our
story is so well known around us. We are in a manner _marked_.... I am
going to try and get a friend to come and be with me to-morrow--I am
completely shipwrecked.”
No, he was not completely wrecked, but terribly tempest-tossed for a
time; and so at last--in the high phrase of Coleridge--“called by sorrow
and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness.”
But “marked” cruelly was the little family in very truth. Soon they were
forced to make one more of their many repeated removes. Other quarters
were offered them just then in the house of one John Mathew Gutch, who
had been a schoolmate at Christ’s of Lamb’s, and was at that time a law
stationer in Southampton Buildings, Holborn. It was a most friendly and
even generous offer, for Gutch knew the whole sad story, and the
dangers, in all probability, portending. His house has been torn down
only lately, along with the one hard by in which lived Hazlitt, twenty
years later.
It would be but the dreariest of records of the young clerk’s three
years at Pentonville, and of his earlier life in Little Queen Street, if
one could point to nothing brighter than his anxiety, poverty,
loneliness; his dull days at his desk, his duller evenings at cribbage
with his almost imbecile father. “I go home at night over-wearied, quite
faint, and then to cards with my father, who will not let me enjoy a
meal in peace.” For he says--and to the son this is unanswerable!--“If
you won’t play with me, you might as well not come home at all.” He is
not allowed to write a letter, he can go nowhere, he has no
acquaintance. “No one seeks or cares for my society, and I am left
alone.” The only literary man he knew was George Dyer; who was “goodness
itself,” indeed, but not a stimulating companion. Sometimes he succeeded
in slipping out to the theatre, of which he was as fond as, when a boy,
he felt the delights he has delineated in “My First Play.” These came
back with added keenness to him now, after a long interval; for the
scholars at Christ’s had not been allowed to enter any play-house.
And there was solace for all his privations to be found in his beloved
books, and he “browsed” in many a field. “I have no repugnances.
Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can
read anything which I call _a book_. There are things in that shape
which I cannot allow for such.” He had a spiritual kinship with the
Elizabethans, and was worthy, in his own words, of listening to
Shakespeare read aloud one of his scenes hot from his brain. Yet he was
fond of the writers of the last century, and wished that he might be
able to forget Fielding and Swift and the rest for the sake of reading
them anew. For modern literature, save for a few favourite poems and for
the works of his personal friends, he cared but little. For modern
affairs he cared nothing, and knew nearly nothing about them. There is
hardly a hint in his letters of the grim Napoleonic drama which was
enacted during the younger years of the century; he only grieved that
War and Nature and Mr. Pitt should have conspired to increase the cost
of coals and bread and beer! He once heard a butcher in the market-place
of Enfield say something about a change of ministry; and it struck him
that he neither knew nor cared who was in and who was out. Indeed, he
could not make these present times present to himself, and lived in the
past, so that the so-called realities of life seemed its mockeries to
him. “Hang the age! I will write for antiquity,” he told the able editor
who criticised his style as not in keeping with the taste of the age. In
truth, he was a walking anachronism, and beneath his nineteenth-century
waistcoat pulsated a heart of the seventeenth century--that of Sir
Thomas Browne, perchance.