there's a Lamb

I do think these things come along as and when they have to. I know most people don't care a toss for Charles Lamb, but nonetheless I've been reading him lately, in a quirky 1948 Penguin called Charles Lamb and Elia, edited by JE Morpugo. It's a compilation of essays, poems and letters.

Now, Charles Lamb wrote wonderful letters. He wrote long, rambling (all the rambling he was doing) missives to Wordsworth, of all people, all about how boring he thought mountains and the countryside were. He says, for example: "I ought before this to have reply'd to your very kind invitation into Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere. But I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life." That's funny, and it's a great letter. And the essays Lamb wrote as 'Elia' for the London Magazine can be weepingly funny, as I found to my cost back in 10th grade, trying to read A Dissertation Upon a Roast Pig in class. But Lamb's other qualities, revealed to me in this little book, are tenderness, affection, humility, a complete lack of pretence, a keenly incisive literary mind, and an understanding of how hard life is.

He was in no way pampered. Unlike most writers one hears of from that period, Lamb worked in an office for thirty years, as a clerk for the East India Company. His letters and essays on the subject of his retirement with pension are infectiously ecstatic - a tone one also does not often encounter. In short, once you read Lamb, you have to love him.

Anyway, yesterday morning I had am email from a very kind friend with a pub in it, yes! The Charls Lamb, in Elia Street, N1. Imagine! It looks charming. I wrote back saying we must go there, and then went off to the hospital.

After the hospital experience I trudged from Old Street to the Angel in the rain, feeling pretty miserable, it has to be said, but liking the walk. I was going to Waterstone's to get (blind or not) Swithering, by Robin Robertson, which has just won this year's Forward Prize for best poetry collection. I feel I might write something about it. So, at the top of City Road I turned off to avoid crush of Angel station, and went down Colebrook Row instead. It's such a lovely little road, all cottages and trees, and brick pavements with many levels. I've often been down that road before, but never from this end.

Well! What do you think runs off Colebrook Row but Elia Street. It was drizzling, I was upset, my feet hurt, my eyes hurt, and there was the Charles Lamb. If I'd felt better I'd have gone in for a nice glass of wine, but as it was I did feel better. A bit further down the road I found something I'd also never noticed before: I was standing outside a pretty white house with a blue plaque on it, saying Charles Lamb had lived there. And indeed, Charles and Mary Lamb did live in Colebrook Row from 1823 till 1829.














It really was as if he was saying hello to me. I've been up and down this road fifty times before and never seen this house. And I'd never have been given this moment at all if I hadn't chanced on this foxed, musty old book in a disgustingly ill-tended secondhand bookshop in Southwold.

Here's a quote from a memoir of Lamb written by one Bryan Waller Procter. I'd be happy to think someone might one day write something like this about me:

"it must be confessed that in literature Lamb's taste, like that of all others, was at first imperfect. For taste is a portion of our judgment, and must depend a good deal on our experience, and on our opportunities of comparing the claims of different pretenders. Lamb's affections swayed him at all times. He sympathized deeply with Cowper and his melancholy history, and at first estimated his verse, perhaps, beyond its strict value. He was intimate with Southey, and anticipated that he would rival Milton. Then his taste was at all times peculiar. He seldom worshipped the Idol which the multitude had set up. I was never able to prevail on him to admit that "Paradise Lost" was greater than "Paradise Regained;" I believe, indeed, he liked the last the best. He would not discuss the Poetry of Lord Byron or Shelley, with a view of being convinced of their beauties. Apart from a few points like these, his opinions must be allowed to be sound; almost always; if not as to the style of the author, then as to the quality of his book or passage which he chose to select."

Well; almost.