SOURCE: Woodbery, Bonnie. “Lamb's ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ in Context.” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, no. 90 (April 1995): 94-100.

[In the following essay, Woodbery places Lamb's “Confessions of a Drunkard” in its appropriate contexts of time and publication to view the essay as “a satiric portrait of a drunkard that parodies both Utilitarian ideals and evangelical tracts of conversion,” revealing Lamb's ambivalent feelings concerning alcohol.]

We know¹ from the records kept by the ancient wine firm of Messrs Berry Brothers and Co. on the weight of their distinguished customers that in 1814, when Charles Lamb was 39, he weighed in at a mere 9 stone 3[frac12] lbs., or approximately 129[frac12] lbs. ‘in boots’.² Other descriptions of Lamb's size include Thomas Hood's observation that Lamb had almost ‘immaterial legs’ and Carlyle's less than flattering depiction of Lamb as the ‘leanest of mankind’, in ‘tiny blackbreeches buttoned to the knee cap and no further, surmounting spindle legs also in black’.³ His size then could well have contributed to an intoxication that more than one of his acquaintances recalled. De Quincey relates that ‘the most noticeable feature of [Lamb's] intoxication was the suddenness with which it ascended to its meridian’.⁴ It was De Quincey's belief that six glasses of wine during dinner plus one or two after sufficed to complete Lamb's ‘inebriation to the crisis of sleep’.⁵

Lamb's private observations on drinking range from rejoicing in his midnight revels to lamenting his frequent trials of abstinence. In 1802, we find Lamb enticing Thomas Manning to visit London on the promise of beverages to be served: ‘Rum, Brandy, Gin, Aquavitæ, Usquebagh, or Whiskey a nights—& for the after-dinner-Trick I have 8 Bottles of genuine Port which mathematically divided gives 1 1/7 for every day you stay, provided you stay a week.’⁶ On a more sober note, Lamb writes to the Wordsworth's in 1810: ‘She [Mary] has told you how she has taken to water, like a hungry otter. I too limp after her in lame imitation, but it goes against me a little at first. I have been aquavorous now for full four days and it seems a moon. Must I then leave you, Gin, Rum, Brandy, Aqua Vitæ—pleasant jolly fellows—. Damn temperance & them that first invented it, some Ante-Noahite.’⁷

Lamb's ambivalent feelings about his drinking become apparent in his essay ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ where he presents a dark picture of a drunkard whose constitutional tendency towards drinking ruins him intellectually and physically. The drunkard's life before and after his first drink is rendered in language that is overwrought and painfully real. Lamb's commentators have felt a need to defend him against the suggestion that the ‘Confessions’ present a true picture of its author. After Crabb Robinson read the essay, he concluded that ‘it will hardly be thought [to be] so near a correct representation of fact as it really is. It is sometimes painfully eloquent’.⁸ Lucas defends Lamb, saying that Robinson lacked the imagination to know Lamb really well, but Lucas goes on to explain why he too finds the essay to be a truthful representation.⁹ Others like Thomas Hutchinson believe the ‘Confessions’ render a satiric portrait of a drinker. What Lamb intended is further complicated by the different contexts in which the essay appeared. Besides becoming part of the second edition of The Last Essays of Elia in 1835, the essay was published in four popular contexts, including the philanthropical journal The Philanthropist in 1813, Basil Montagu's temperance compilation Some Enquiries into the Effects of Spiritous Liquors in 1814 (and in the subsequent 1818 and 1839 editions of this compilation), the urbane London Magazine in 1822, and in William Tweedie's teetotaller tract Beacon Lights in 1854.¹⁰ Each context mediates the meaning so that each version is different merely because its context is different.

The ‘Confessions’ were written sometime between 1811 and 1813 when economic discourse was dominated by Bentham's principles of self-interest. Bentham's moral code emphasized four virtues: prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice.¹¹ In this code, temperance was defined as the power of resisting pleasure toward the future happiness of the agent. So the acceptance of the ‘Confessions’ by the editors of The Philanthropist, James Mill and William Allen, must have been prompted by the belief that the ‘Confessions’ were a factual account of the downward progress of a drunkard, and therefore could be used as an example of an ‘evil that remained to be removed from society’. As Mill explains in a typical article articulating the beliefs of Jeremy Bentham, his mentor, ‘the purpose of The Philanthropist is to give publicity to … facts’.

We hope we shall succeed in persuading our countrymen of how much importance it is to make known the facts which concern humanity in all its modifications. It is only from the knowledge of facts, that a knowledge can spring either of benefits that remain to be attained, or of evils that remain to be removed.¹²

The articles that characterize the journal include ideas for the management of workhouses, arguments for educational reform, and concerns about the civilization of Indians in North America. While Mill advocated the ideas of Bentham, William Allen, the journal's owner and a devoted Quaker, tried to interest readers in his philanthropic concerns. Any attempt to parody utilitarian discourse is lost in this factual context. In the January 1813 issue, the ‘Confessions’ appear between an article on the alarming growth of the pauper population in 1812 and a remarkable institution of education in Berne. The faithful readers of The Philanthropist must have been surprised to go from an abstract mathematical analysis to the drunkard's graphic explanation of what a confirmed sot goes through to quit drinking for one evening. Its inclusion here would be as surprising as its inclusion in The Economist today.

From the very beginning of the essay, the drunkard never resorts to euphemism. Immediately, he explains to the gentle reader how the first steps in a drunkard's reformation are ‘Dreadful, the first steps not like climbing a mountain, but going through fire’ when ‘the whole system must undergo a change, violent as that which we conceive of the mutation of form in some insects’.¹³ He says it is a process comparable to being flayed alive. However, in the factual context of the journal, these hyperbolic images of a drunkard's suffering are offset by the drunkard's use of economic language. He describes his condition with words like ‘auditors’, ‘paid’, ‘mortgage’, ‘wages’, ‘perpetuity’, ‘gains’, and ‘profits’. The economic language gives the ‘Confessions’ the patina of factual analysis. For example, in one section the drunkard explains the danger of drinking to provide others with convivial conversation.

… to give pleasure, and to be paid with squinting malice; to swallow draughts of life-destroying wine which are to be distilled into airy breath to tickle vain auditors; to mortgage miserable morrows for nights of madness; to waste whole seas of time upon those who pay it back in little inconsiderable drops of grudging applause,—are the wages of buffoonery.¹⁴

Thus, the Benthamite pleasure principle is reversed in the drunkard. For here is a man who does not seek pleasure and avoid pain but instead finds his pleasure in pain. For him, the principle of loss replaces acquisition. The drunkard repeatedly gives of himself, but every gift becomes a loss. And yet the drunkard confesses he simply cannot abstain. He admits that he has reached the point where ‘reason shall only visit him through intoxication’.¹⁵ Bataille points out that when excessive loss cannot be compensated for, death unconsciously becomes an object that cannot be avoided.¹⁶ Thus, toward the end of the essay, the reader not surprisingly learns that one of the gains or profits from the drunkard's midnight cup is, contradictorily, a secret wish that he never awake.

In the early 1800s public morals and dominant social codes dictated that drunkenness was an evil to be eradicated or at least hidden away. The Proclamation of George III in 1787 condemning ‘excessive drinking, blasphemy, profane swearing and cursing, profanation of the Lord's day, and other dissolute, immoral or disorderly practices’ ushered in a new code of behaviour: self control and the repression of a hedonism hitherto characteristic of the eighteenth-century mob.¹⁷ From the burgeoning industrialist's point of view these new laws were necessary to discipline a rural and barely urbanized workforce. In 1801 and 1802, William Wilberforce's and John Bowdler's Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Religion prosecuted 623 Sabbath-breakers as part of their campaign to purify and manage their less fortunate brethren.¹⁸ Lamb felt the brunt of this code of behavior when he found himself in the stocks at Barnet for breaking the peace of the Sabbath in 1809 or as he terms it in a pseudonymous essay for ‘timing my Saturnalia amiss’.¹⁹ The evangelical moralists helped enforce the new regulations. They advocated chastizement and denunciation of the drunkard who they believed had failed to exert his willpower to conquer the evil alcohol. The reformers favored prosecution of drunkards and praised the tactics of the Vice Society which showed a ‘zeal for prosecution, a concern with purely public vices, and an inability to concentrate on any one of them’.²⁰ Their moral disapprobation of drunkenness was also shared by many late eighteenth-century doctors who championed sobriety. Dr Trotter's 1804 Essay on Drunkenness stresses the physical and mental effects of drunkenness, but he was unable to describe the condition in terms that were free from moral overtones.²¹ However, Trotter was one of the first doctors to ascribe drunkenness to a constitutional predisposition as opposed to a weakness of the will. Lamb's drunkard, too, claims a constitutional predisposition. He points out that the difference between his vice and other evils such as stealing or lying is that they have no ‘constitutional tendency’. He testifies:

at the first instance of the reformed will, they [stealing and lying] can be bought off without a murmur. The itching finger is but a figure in speech, and the tongue of the liar can with the same natural delight give forth useful truths, with which it has been accustomed to scatter their pernicious contraries. But when a man has commenced sot. …²²

Along with Lamb's powerful ‘Confessions’, Basil Montagu (1770-1851) included both evangelical and medical evidence on the benefits of abstinence in his 1814 compilation Some Enquiries into the Effects of Spiritous Liquors. Excerpts from the writings of Dr Trotter, Dr Rush—an American doctor and avid teetotaller, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Johnson, Ben Franklin, influential clergymen and other worthies all emphasize the deleterious affects of alcohol on the body and mind. Montagu's compilation is an example of an early temperance document in that it relies chiefly on scientific evidence to confirm the ill effects of alcohol on the body. Later tracts often used emotional testimony to convey their messages.

Montagu divides his text among queries, the first being ‘Does the drinking fermented liquors promote health?’ Rush testifies here to the various sicknesses caused from drinking, including a ‘sickness in the stomach and vomiting in the morning, obstruction of the liver, palsy, and madness’.²³ Dr Trotter adds to this list descriptions of gout, palpatations, impotency, change to temperament that results in a perpetual nervousness, and insanity. He emphatically states that the ‘habit of drunkenness will bring on madness and idiotism’.²⁴

In the medical context of Montagu's treatise, the symptoms the drunkard experiences provide a case study for the scientific opinions advanced under this first Query. The drunkard confirms Dr Trotter's suspicion that his nights of drinking are indeed ‘nights of madness’ and confesses that his departing energies depend more and more heavily on the ‘returning periods of the fatal madness to which they owe their devastation’.²⁵ Similarly, he describes always having ‘uneasy sensations in his head and stomach’ and his constant nervousness gives his life much of the ‘obscure perplexity, of an ill dream’.²⁶

The ‘Confessions’ appear under the Query ‘Does the drinking fermented liquors contribute to moral excellence?’ Dr Rush's remarks precede Lamb's essay. Rush invites his audience to now turn their eyes ‘from the effects of spirits upon health and life to their effects upon property’. Among farmers as a group, Rush notes that ‘spirits produce idleness with its usual consequences, such as houses without windows, barns without roofs, gardens without enclosures … hogs without yokes, sheep without wool … and half-clad dirty children, without principles, morals, or manners’.²⁷ Framed in the context of this moral disapprobation, Lamb's ‘Confessions’ closely resemble evangelical tracts of conversion in which the prodigal who has found salvation retells his experience to help others. While the drunkard does emphasize his downward progress, he clearly differs from the men of these early tracts in that he never repents and recommends abstinence only for others. In any case, these satiric subtleties would not have been noticed in this early and very lengthy temperance document.

The satiric tone of the drunkard's message can best be seen in the context which it next appeared—the London Magazine for August 1822. In the Editor's preface to the monthly, known as the ‘Lion's Head’, under ‘Re-prints of Elia’, Lamb, who was vacationing in France for the month of August, offers his readers an explanation of his reprint. Lamb complains that the reviewers for the Quarterly had quoted extensively from the ‘Confessions’ as they appeared in Montagu's compilation. The quotes appeared in an article on Dr Reid's book Essays on Hypochondriasis and other Nervous Affections. The reviewer says the ‘Confessions’ provide a ‘fearful picture of the consequences of intemperance’, a picture the reviewer claims he happens to know is a true tale.²⁸ Lamb defends himself by explaining that the ‘Confessions’ is a compound extracted ‘out of his long observations of the effects of drinking upon all the world about him’ and although a portion of his own experiences certainly went into the paper, ‘how heightened!! how exaggerated! the whole portrait is’.²⁹

Lamb goes on to explain that the ‘Confessions’ are complementary to his Reflector essay on the inordinate appetite of Edax, the great Eater. He says that it ‘struck him that a better paper of deeper interest, and wider usefulness—might be made out of the imagined experiences of a Great Drinker’.³⁰ And the essay does share certain thematic affinities with ‘Edax’. Both satirize Utilitarian philosophy by ironically employing the Benthamite jargon ‘motive’, ‘main spring’, and ‘springs of action’ while presenting protagonists who do not seek pleasure and avoid pain but instead are constitutionally predisposed to find their pleasure in pain.

In addition to the ‘Lion's Head’, the ‘Confessions’ must be read in the context of the August issue where such comic pieces as ‘Why Candles Burn Blue in the Presence of a Ghost’ detract from any stern reformist message. Plus, the essay is signed ‘Elia’, Lamb's familiar pen name. Readers accustomed to the whimsical personal essays of Elia would immediately view the ‘Confessions’ in light of its author's previous work, like the essay for May ‘The Praise of Chimney Sweepers’ or June's contribution ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’. In that essay, Elia laments the absence of beggars on the streets of London, apparently chased away by zealous members of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity.

Read through these contextual layers, the ‘Confessions’ become a satiric portrait of a drunkard that parodies both Utilitarian ideas and evangelical tracts of conversion. Lamb's drunkard never forfeits the pleasure of the moment for future happiness (one of Bentham's four moral virtues); instead he mortgages his ‘miserable morrows, for nights of madness’.³¹ The utilitarian ‘moral springs of action’ are broken in him, claims the drunkard. Making fun of the mechanical origins of the Benthamite jargon, he confesses that the ‘springs of [his] will [are] gone down like a broken clock’.³² Even so the stern voice of the sober moralist interrupts the drunkard's self-pitying revelations:

Yea, but … if sobriety be that fine thing you would have us to understand, if the comforts of a cool brain are to be preferred to that state of heated excitement which you describe and deplore, what hinders in your own instance that you do not return to those habits from which you would induce others never to swerve?³³

The drunkard avoids answering the question directly and instead launches into recollections of those innocent days of youth when pure water could slake his thirst: ‘how gladly would I return to thee, pure element, the drink of children, and of child-like holy hermit. In my dreams I can sometimes fancy thy cool refreshment purling over my burning tongue’.³⁴ The narrator's apostrophe to water is undermined by his mocking tone and his pun on ‘purling’. His audience would be well acquainted with purl, an inexpensive bitters, and a drink described by Dr Trotter as having the same dangerous narcotic properties of opium.

Finally, the ‘Confessions’ were reprinted in 1854 in William Tweedie's Beacon Lights, a wonderful example of a teetotaller tract. Unlike the early temperance tracts that made use of scientific evidence to support their message, the teetotaller tract couched its moral message in the emotionally wrenching testimonials of confirmed drunkards that often provoked lachrymose readers to tears. William Tweedie, an evangelical Scotsman and established temperance reformer, gave lectures on the value of total abstinence from intoxicating drinks and published several temperance tracts. Tweedie's pirated version of the ‘Confessions’ relieve us of any doubt as to whether they present a true portrait of their author since he chooses to title them ‘Confessions of Charles Lamb’. In Beacon Lights the ‘Confessions’ follow a biographic sketch of William Mainwaring, an upstanding citizen of a small New England town and moderate drinker, who quickly becomes the slave and victim of drink. Mainwaring progressively destroys himself with alcohol as he goes from a little drunk to senselessly drunk, at which point he staggers to and falls on his bed where unluckily his infant son is sleeping. The child dies immediately; Mainwaring shoots himself; and his wife ends up delirious.³⁵ In this context of this horrific cautionary tale, the drunkard's emotional outbursts become even more heightened. Passages where he cries ‘with feebler and feebler outcry to be delivered’ or dashes ‘the sparkling beverage to the earth in all the pride of its mantling temptation’ or clasps ‘his teeth’, to not ‘undo 'em / To suffer Wet Damnation to run thro' 'em’ would surely have brought a tear to many readers' eyes.³⁶

Tweedie's preface to the ‘Confessions’ helps emphasize his teetotaller message. He says ‘The history of literary men, and even of religious men, is replete with instances that serve to point the same sad moral. Of these, one of the most affecting was supplied in the “Confessions of a Drunkard”, published anonymously many years ago, but now known to have been indicted, as a record of his own experience, by the celebrated Charles Lamb’.³⁷ Tweedie adds nothing to the text of the essay except a note that underscores the terrible power of alcohol: ‘In alcohol itself resides the terrible power of creating that appetite which ravens and ruins its miserable subject’.³⁸ This note of course effectively squashes the drunkard's point that his need for alcohol is due to a constitutional defect.

Although Tweedie makes no additions, he does make several cuts when the material fails to support his argument for total abstinence. For example, he cuts the passage in which the narrator asks ‘the sturdy moralist’ to have some compassion for his condition. Not surprisingly, Tweedie also cuts the passage that claims there are people with strong constitutions who can hold their liquor and should therefore drink with impunity. Tweedie twists Lamb's text to make it appear to be a real life example of what intemperance can do to even those (as he says) in the most favourable social circumstances and with the rarest mental faculties.³⁹ The inclusion of Lamb's ‘Confessions’ in Tweedie's tract raised some protest in the press, and was subsequently withdrawn, only to be replaced with an equally offensive portrait of Hartley Coleridge.

Part of the strength of Lamb's ‘Confessions’ comes from a complexity of meaning that is mediated by the context that it enters. During his life, Lamb never resolved his ambivalent feelings about drinking, but a candid comment he makes to Manning in a letter in 1802 serves as both a reminder of his frequent attempts to quit drinking and of the circumstances that led him to drink.

My habits are changing, I think; i.e. from drunk to sober: whether I shall be happier or no, remains to be proved. I shall certainly be more happy in a morning, but whether I shall not sacrifice the fat & the marrow & the kidneys, i.e. the Night, the glor[iou]s, care-drowning, night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent & flat to bright & brilliant—. O Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any spiritous liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such shame worthy terms? Is life, with such limitations, worth trying.—The truth is that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about my house, who consume me.⁴⁰

Notes

1. A version of this paper was presented at the Wordsworth Summer Conference, 1993, where I had the privilege to meet Bill Ruddick. I dedicate this essay to his memory.

2. E. V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb (2 vols., London, 1905) (hereafter Life), i. 429.

3. Life ii. 606, 790.

4. Thomas De Quincey, The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey ed. David Masson rpt. of 1889-90 ed. (AMS Press, 1968), p. 86.

5. De Quincey, Works, p. 86.

6. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb ed. Edwin W. Marrs Jr. (3 vols., Ithaca, NY, 1975) (hereafter Marrs), i. 223.

7. Marrs iii. 62.

8. Quoted Life i 407.

9. See Lucas' notes to the ‘Confessions’ in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb ed. E. V. Lucas (7 vols., London, 1903-5) (hereafter Works), i. 431-3.

10. My collation of the various versions of the ‘Confessions’ reveals that the Philanthropist version in 1813 (and also the earliest existing version) is substantially different from any version that comes after, from its publication in Montagu's 1814 compilation to its appearance in 1835 in the second edition of The Last Essays of Elia (Moxon). The text is fairly stable from 1814 to 1835. However, the Philanthropist version lacks four substantial passages found in the other versions; in addition, the Philanthropist text has several phrases, words, and punctuation variants.

11. Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London, 1928), p. 474.

12. The Philanthropist 2 (1812) 129.

13. The Philanthropist 3 (1813) 48.

14. ‘and death’ follows in all other versions of the essay. The Philanthropist 3 (1813) 50.

15. The Philanthropist 3 (1813) 53.

16. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess (Minneapolis, 1985), p. 119.

17. Quoted from Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London, 1977), p. 666, in Jane Aaron's A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (Oxford, 1991) (hereafter Aaron), p. 21. Aaron provides an excellent discussion of Lamb's violation of the code of behaviour and his time in the stocks. She uses the incident as illustrative of Lamb's refusal to internalize the new mores and to indicate the equivocal nature of his social position.

18. Aaron 21.

19. Works i. 210. See also Lucas' discussion of this incident in Life ii. 144.

20. Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians (Pittsburgh, 1971) (hereafter Harrison), p. 93.

21. Harrison 21-2.

22. Charles Lamb, ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ in Basil Montagu's Some Enquiries into the Effects of Spiritous Liquors (London, 1814) (hereafter Montagu), p. 201.

23. Montagu 13-14.

24. Montagu 39.

25. ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’, Montagu 212.

26. ‘Confessions’, Montagu 213.

27. Montagu 153

28. Quarterly Review, ‘Reid's Essays on Hypochondriasis and other Nervous Affections’, (April 1822) 120.

29. ‘Lion's Head’, London Magazine 4 (1822) 99 (hereafter ‘Lion's Head’).

30. ‘Lion's Head’ 99.

31. London Magazine 4 (1822) 119.

32. London Magazine 4 (1822) 119.

33. London Magazine 4 (1822) 119.

34. London Magazine 4 (1822) 119-20.

35. William Tweedie, Beacon Lights (London, 1854) pp. 1-9.

36. ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’, Beacon Lights 13.

37. Tweedie's observations directly precede ‘The Confessions’, Beacon Lights 9.

38. Tweedie's footnote is at the bottom of the first page of the ‘Confessions’, Beacon Lights 10.

39. Tweedie's observations follow the ‘Confessions’, Beacon Lights 15.

40. Marrs ii. 70.