At Large and At Small (5 page)

Thank you for your frequent letters: you are the only correspondent, and I might add, the only friend I have in the world. 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.

Alone, that is, except for his family—invalid mother, senile father, elderly aunt, anxious sister—whose constant proximity, in their
cramped lodgings on Little Queen Street, must have seemed more suffocation than comfort. Mary, who for several years had had periods of prostrating depression, supplemented her brother’s clerking salary with long hours of needlework and also bore the brunt of her mother’s care, waiting on her during the day and sharing her restless bed at night.

On September 27, Lamb wrote Coleridge:

My dearest
friend—

White or some of my friends or the public papers by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines. 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 mad house, from whence I fear
she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses,—I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment I believe very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.… Write,—as religious a letter as possible—but no mention of what is gone and done with.—With me “the former things are passed away,” and I have something more to do than to feel.
God Almighty have us all in His keeping.—

C. Lamb

Five days before he wrote those words, Lamb had arrived home from work to find his mother pierced to the heart with a carving knife, his father wounded in the head with a fork, and his sister still gripping the bloody murder weapon. Mary had apparently become enraged at her young dressmaking apprentice, picked up the knife, and chased the girl
around the dining room. Her mother begged her to stop, the girl escaped, and Mary stabbed her mother. A jury that was convened the next day swiftly returned a verdict of lunacy.

I doubt that anyone has ever read this letter without noticing the adjectives that Lamb lavished on his “poor dear dearest sister” but withheld from his murdered mother. Matricide has never inspired less sympathy for
the victim and more for the perpetrator. The letters that Lamb poured out to Coleridge over the next month constitute a most peculiar psychological record. About Mary, who was kindly tended by “the good Lady of the Mad house, & her daughter… [who] love her & are taken with her amazingly,” he wrote:

Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister was most and thoroughly devoid of the
least tincture of selfishness. I will enlarge upon her qualities, poor dear, dearest soul, in a future letter, for my own comfort, for I understand her thoroughly; and if I mistake not, in the most trying situation that a human being can be found in, she will be found—(I speak not with sufficient humility, I fear,) but, humanly and foolishly speaking, she will be found, I trust, uniformly great and
amiable.

And:

Within a day or two of the fatal one, we dressed for dinner a tongue, which we had had salted for some weeks in the house. As I sat down, a feeling like remorse struck me: this tongue poor Mary got for me; and can I partake of it now, when she is far away?

There were hundreds of words about missing Mary, and not one about missing his mother. In fact, he mentioned her at any length
only twice: once when he found his way “mechanically” (a horrifically honest adverb) to the side of her coffin, where he begged her forgiveness for forgetting her so soon, and once, after angrily observing that she had never appreciated her daughter, when he reminded himself, “Still she was a good mother, God forbid I should think of her but
most
respectfully,
most
affectionately.” He was trying
hard with those italics, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Lamb’s older brother, John, who was “little disposed (I speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old age & infirmities,” managed to wriggle out of his familial responsibilities and dump them all on twenty-one-year-old Charles. Lamb—who was, after all, an accountant—calculated that his father’s pension and his own salary
together produced about £180 a year, “out of which we can spare £50 or £60 at least for Mary while she stays at Islington [a private asylum].… If my father, an old servant maid, & I cant live & live comfortably on £130 or £120 a year we ought to burn by slow fires, & I almost would, that Mary might not go into an hospital.”
John thought Mary should be locked up in a mental institution, preferably
Bedlam, for life; Charles was determined to take care of her himself. He bided his time for two and a half years until his father, who he knew would never accept Mary’s homecoming, had the courtesy to die. Ten days later, taking advantage of an act that allowed an insane criminal to be “liberated on security being given that he should properly be taken care of as a lunatic,” Lamb brought Mary
home. As Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, Lamb’s friend and first biographer, put it, “he satisfied all the parties who had power to oppose her release, by his solemn engagement that he would take her under his care for life; and he kept his word.”

Wordsworth, who himself lived with his sister, before and during his marriage, for fifty-five years, wrote of the Lambs:

Her love

(What weakness prompts
the voice to tell it here?)

Was as the love of mothers; and when years
,

Lifting the boy to man’s estate, had called

The long protected to assume the part

Of the protector, the first filial tie

Was undissolved; and in or out of sight

Remained imperatively interwoven

With life itself.

Charles and Mary shared a household for thirty-six years, in a state of what Lamb called “double singleness.”
They spent their evenings in front of the fire, Mary darning socks while Charles read Elizabethan poetry aloud. They
wrote
Tales from Shakespeare
together, he taking the tragedies and she the comedies, working, as she described it, “on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer’s Night’s Dream; or, rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan.” A collection
of his sonnets was

They visited France together (“I & sister are just returned from Paris!! We have eaten frogs”). When he was forty-eight and she was fifty-eight, they affirmed their coupledom by adopting a teenage orphan girl, who later married Lamb’s publisher.

Mary was lucid and even-tempered
most of the time, but under stress—a servant’s death, a change of lodging—she often relapsed into insanity, and Lamb would walk her, weeping, to Hoxton Asylum, carrying a straitjacket. “What sad large pieces it cuts out of life,” he wrote during one such absence. During another, his despair overflowed to Coleridge in the blackest letter of his life:

Mary will get better again; but her constantly
being liable to such relapses is dreadful,—nor is it the least of our Evils, that her case & all our story is so well known around us. We are in a manner
marked
.… I am completely shipwreck’d—My head is quite bad. I almost wish that Mary were dead.

It pains me to say it, but I feel quite sure that if Mary had not murdered her mother, her brother would never have become Elia, the persona he assumed
in the great essays he wrote in his late forties. I also feel quite sure that Elia would never have been born if Lamb had not been compelled to work as a clerk.

For thirty-three years, Lamb sat on a high stool, identical to those occupied by thirty other clerks; dipped his goose quill into two inkwells, one containing black ink and the other red (he called the latter Clerk’s Blood); and recorded
the prices of tea, indigo, and piece goods. Not only did he hate his work; as Winifred F. Courtney, one of the most perceptive of his biographers, has pointed out, he was
bad
at it. Courtney examined some of Lamb’s ledgers and found that he frequently made mistakes. He rubbed them out with his little finger, but they nonetheless haunted his dreams, from which, he wrote in one of his Elia essays,
he “would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries.” It is worth remembering that while he was adding up figures in the East India House’s stygian offices at Nos. 12–21 Leadenhall Street (what name could be more appropriate?), his friends—Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Godwin, De Quincey— were rambling in the Lake Country, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, siring illegitimate children,
and planning a utopian community in America (“We shall… criticise poetry when hunting a buffalo,” wrote Southey). And yet, improbable as it seems, Lamb was an essential member of their coterie. It’s as if the inner circle of the Beats had consisted of Kerouac, Ginsberg,
Corso, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, and an accountant at H&R Block.

When I first read Lamb, I imagined his life as an essayist to
have been a pleasant stroll along a level, well-trod path. Now I see it as a technical climb along a knife-edged ridge, with a thousand-foot drop on either side. To the left lay the memory of the “day of horrors” and the constant anxiety over Mary’s sanity, both of which threatened his own sanity as well as his ability to summon up sufficient calm to write. To the right lay the deadening drudgery
of Leadenhall, which threatened to swallow his creativity whole. (Remember that during Melville’s nineteen years as a customs inspector, he wrote absolutely nothing of note.) In the narrow space between anarchy and regimentation lay his essays, which I believe were made possible by—and also protected him from— his life’s opposed poles.

Before the murder, Lamb had published only poems, and they
were uniformly terrible. Immediately afterward, he told Coleridge: “Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that kind.” The intended renunciation did not last long, but the output lessened, and, with a couple of exceptions, the quality did not improve. Because he took poetry far more seriously than prose, after the murder it seemed a self-indulgence, a “vanity”—unlike
journalism, which paid, and thus contributed to Mary’s keep. In the dedication to Coleridge that introduced his
Collected Works
of 1818, he wrote, “The sap (if ever it had any) has become, in a manner, dried up and extinct: and you
will find your old associate… dwindled into prose and
criticism
.”

The “dwindling” was, in fact, a miraculous expansion. When he wrote those self-effacing words, he
had already published some fine literary and theatrical criticism, but he was to find his true voice in the fifty-two essays—on chimney sweeps, on weddings, on old books, on sickness, on gallantry, on witches, on beggars, on roast pig, on ears—that he wrote between 1820 and 1825, working nights and Sundays, for the
London Magazine
. “True voice” is an odd phrase to use for a series of works written
under a pseudonym (he borrowed “Elia” from an Italian clerk who had worked with his brother) and, though autobiographical, mendacious in some crucial respects. Elia, for instance, wrote, “Brother, or sister, I never had any—to know them. A sister, I think, that should have been Elizabeth, died in both our infancies.” Mary became the more comfortably distant “cousin Bridget,” who was, of course,
neither insane nor a murderess. Lamb’s mother was never mentioned; his father was transmuted into an amiable factotum named Lovel, no relation to Elia. And while the real Lamb cared devotedly for his relatives, Elia called
his
poor relations “a lion in your path,—a frog in your chamber,—a fly in your ointment,—a mote in your eye.” By such therapeutic subterfuges did Lamb’s imagination extricate
him from his family’s stifling bonds.

True voice it was: funny (unlike Lamb the poet), intimate (unlike Lamb the accountant), and relaxed (unlike
Lamb the family pillar). But not inextinguishable. On March 29, 1825, Lamb retired, with a generous pension, from the East India House, an event he chronicled in “The Superannuated Man.” This was Coleridge’s favorite essay; he called it “worthy of Charles
Lamb in his happiest Carolo-lambian Hour.” With heartbreaking bafflement, the superannuated Elia, released from the “thraldom” of his own clerkship, confessed, “I wandered about thinking I was happy, and knowing I was not.… I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel.” Lamb lived nine more years but wrote no more great essays. He and Elia had retired
together, and without the clerk’s humble vantage point, he found himself without a platform. Just as Lamb had required Mary’s madness to nudge him from poetry to prose, so he required his old chains to liberate the unpretentious alter ego who defined the modern familiar essay.

Lamb once compared bad journalists to “the
crooked man
, of whom a facetious Greek Professor relates this comical story,
that he swallowed a
tenpenny nail
, and voided it out a cork-screw!” Lamb did the opposite: he swallowed a series of corkscrews and turned them into tenpenny nails. I have spent many a Carolo-lambian Hour grieving over his life’s unfair twists and turns and wishing that posterity could vindicate Elia’s efforts to straighten them out. “Damn the age!” Lamb once said. “I will write for antiquity.”
Antiquity is not cooperating. My dog-eared 1933 anthology (the dog-eared part is fine; Lamb preferred well-thumbed volumes), called
Everybody’s Lamb
, has become Hardly Anybody’s Lamb. If I could make him Everybody’s again, in my own whiffling century, I would forswear my spectacles, play at put, mend pens, kill fleas, stand on one leg, or shell peas.

read last March that the town council of Stafford, New Jersey, had passed an ordinance stating: “At no time shall a vendor be permitted to use a sound device, mechanical bell, mechanical music, mechanical noise, speakers, [or] amplifiers.” The target was ice cream trucks, whose peripatetic
tootles the council wished to classify with the roar of jets and the blast of car alarms. As a child in suburban Connecticut, I had always considered the purl of the Good Humor truck to be more closely akin to a cricket’s chirp or the sound of summer rain: a seasonal gift, wreathed in sweet associations. I was therefore heartened to read, in May, that Jeffery Cabaniss, the owner of Jef-Freeze
Treats, had successfully challenged the constitutionality of Stafford’s anti-tootle law in federal court. Mr. Cabaniss’s only concession was to change his truck’s melody from “Turkey in the Straw,” which had particularly vexed the residents of Stafford, to the less familiar, and thus presumably less irksome, “Music Box Dancer.”