[In the following essay, Monsman explores the relationship between Lamb's occupation as an accounting clerk for the East India Company and his work as a creative writer.]

In “Recollections of Charles Lamb” (1838), Thomas Dequincey describes his first encounter with Lamb at the East India House, seated at “a very lofty writing-desk, separated by a still higher railing from that part of the floor on which the profane—the laity, like myself—were allowed to approach the clerus, or clerkly rulers of the room. Within the railing, sat, to the best of my remembrance, six quill-driving gentlemen; not gentlemen whose duty or profession it was merely to drive the quill, but who where then driving it—gens de plume, such in esse, as well as in posse—in act as well as habit.”¹ Dequincey's mock-heroic elevation of the humble clerks to priestly or scholarly status by a play on the etymological derivation of clerk (from the late Latin clericus and Greek kleros) helps to define the Elia persona in relation to the life behind it. Although Lamb had joked that his “true works may be found on the shelves of Leadenhall Street, filling some hundred Folios,” he also hinted in the same passage that an alternative identity was contained in a contrastingly small volume (and, waggishly, under another name): “He is also the true Elia whose Essays are extant in a little volume published a year or two since: and rather better known from that name without a meaning, than from anything he has done or can hope to do in his own” (“Charles Lamb's Autobiography”). But are Lamb's two quill-driving roles wholly distinct (one recalls John Stuart Mill's curious dissociation of his personal development for his career within the India House for which he also worked) or are they obscurely involved with each other? Is there a separation not only of office from home, Wemmick-like, but also of business writing from real writing? Or is it possible that Lamb's work at the East India House might be a means to a higher end, his art, and that Elia is the bridge between Lamb's vocation pursued with the clerk's pen and his true calling fulfilled with the author's quill

DeQuincey's anecdote concludes with an incident that succinctly presents the imaginative way Lamb, as a clerk intercepted at his duties, transforms the social awkwardness of his commercial position:

The seat upon which he sat, was a very high one; so absurdly high … the act of descending from his throne … both was, and was felt to be by Lamb, supremely ludicrous. On the other hand, to have sate still and stately, … to have bowed condescendingly from this altitude, … would have had an air of ungentlemanly assumption. … Nobody who knew Lamb can doubt how the problem was solved; he began to dismount instantly; and, as it happened that the very first round of his descent obliged him to turn his back upon me as if for a sudden purpose of flight, he had an excuse for laughing; which he did heartily—saying … that I must not judge from first appearances … and other facetiae, which challenged a general laugh from the clerical brotherhood.

When he had reached the basis of terra firma, … I presented my hand … and I instantly received an invitation to spend the evening with him.

Lamb's jesting frees him from the dilemma his role of humble clerk had thrust upon him; laughter dissolves the potential for embarrassment in being perceived as either ridiculous (clerks must descend from an “absurdly high” seat) or proud (clerks cannot sit “still and stately” without condescending to their visitors). Lamb then takes control of the social conditions, redefining the relationship of visitor to clerk by means of “an invitation to spend the evening.” The “not much known” East India House clerk now is elevated, by virtue of the brilliant young would-be author's pilgrimage to meet him, to the status of the socially potent man of letters (for biographical information, see Winifred Courtney, The Young Charles Lamb [1982], 99-104).

As Lamb experienced it, the East India Company was both a commercial and a colonial power; and it projected, as the works of Dickens and Trollope suggest, the political aura of a government agency (in point of fact, Parliament supervised the political power of the company). Its superfluity of employees left Lamb with time for office conversation and letter-writing during the frequent lulls between peak periods. Thomas Love Peacock described the latter part of his day at the East India House in a witty bit of doggerel:

From twelve to one, asked, “what's to be done?”
From one to two, found nothing to do;
From two to three began to foresee
That from three to four would be a damned bore.(2)

And although the class distinctions between the directors and employees were significant, a clerkship in the higher echelons of industry and commerce would not have been the debased position of Dickens's Bob Cratchit. Moreover, in some measure Lamb's native intelligence, education, and literary accomplishments would have rendered him sui generis among his fellow workers. His flippant response to one supervisor's observation that he had arrived very late—“But see how early I go!”—suggests an easy familiarity and a confidence that his superiors knew his true worth; on the other hand, the palpable insolence in his response to another supervisor implies exasperation with management practices and restiveness with his desk-bound lot—and possibly the benevolent protection of one or more of the directors: “‘Pray, Mr. Lamb, what are you about?’ ‘Forty next birthday,’ said Lamb. ‘I don't like your answer,’ said his chief. ‘Nor I your question’ was Lamb's reply.”³

Given Lamb's handsome salary (£750 a year at his retirement at the age of fifty) and the opportunity to correspond (with the franking privilege) and joke with colleagues, his bitter complaints to correspondents about his India House bondage seem to some degree the product of a more pervasive conflict between art and financial necessity that plagued his whole generation—the frustration of art by the “person on business from Porlock.” Lamb is, he says, “a prisoner to the desk,” “chained to that galley” and “almost grown to the wood” (September 11, 1822), the drudgery of clerking threatening to “lime twig up my poor soul & body, till I shall forget I ever thought myself a bit of genius! I can't even put a few thoughts on paper for a newspaper. I ‘engross,’ when I should pen a paragraph. Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traffick, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilization & wealth & amity & link of society, & getting rid of prejudices, & knowledge of the face of the globe—& rot the very firs of the forest that look so romantic alive, and die into desks” (April 28, 1815). The echo of Pope's “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”—“Is there … / A clerk foredoomed his father's soul to cross, / Who pens a stanza when he should engross?”—suggests that although Lamb fulfills the patriarchal and commercial expectations of society, he simultaneously sacrifices his moral function as author. To Wordsworth he revealed his fondest daydream: “If I do but get rid of auditing Warehousekeepers Accts. & get no worse-harassing task in the place of it, what a Lord of Liberty I shall be. I shall dance & skip and make mouths at the invisible event, and pick the thorns out of my pillow & throw em at rich mens night caps, & talk blank verse hoity toity, and sing a Clerk I was in London Gay, ban, ban, Cacaliban, like the emancipated monster & go where I like up this street or down that alley” (August 9, 1815; Tempest, II, ii). But can “the emancipated monster,” the clerk who felt himself a marked man (both by virtue of Mary's insanity and his own diffused sense of stigmatized innocence), ever successfully escape the world of the East India House? Certainly in his essay, “The Superannuated Man,” Lamb offers little sense of real gaiety and freedom at his unexpected retirement. And in “Popular Fallacies—XIV,” an 1826 expression of despair that was included among the final paragraphs in the Last Essays of Elia, Lamb has given up the work-a-day world for the unreality of otherworldly visions. Despite the fact that his fellow clerks remain “To the strict labors of the merchant's desk By duty chained,” as Wordsworth characterized Lamb's lot (“Written After the Death of Charles Lamb”), the leisured Elia is far more dead than those “co-brethren of the quill” whom, he says, “I had left below in the state militant” (“Superannuated Man”).⁴ If Elia has escaped a depressing routine, he has not been able to replace it with a correspondingly better life. A whole world of ambivalent feeling is embodied in Elia's boast and lament, “It is 'Change time, and I am strangely among the Elgin marbles.” During market hours, Elia finds himself unfamiliarly at the British Museum—but his phrasing, “among the Elgin marbles,” suggests that what Keats in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” called “the Rude / Westing of Old Time” affects him directly. Elia is numbered in that group of marmoreal antiques. Mortality does not merely weigh heavily on him; he has succumbed to it—a ruin, albeit everlasting. As much as Elia would like to escape the tyranny of temporal circumstances, he cannot find a viable alternative.

Whereas at first glance Elia's problem appears less with the politics of employment than with the metaphysics of existence (reconciling human aspirations with the calamitous character of life-in-time), he cannot escape the vital role that such mundane considerations as the struggle for status plays in shaping life's meanings. Elia's writings of necessity must reproduce the dynamic process of life as lived, actively reconstructing the exigencies of a specific social setting and investing economic, political, and cultural imperfections with potential. Elia's powerlessness in “The Superannuated Man” is ironically anticipated in a pre-Elian Reflector piece, “The Good Clerk.” The “good” clerk transforms himself into a creature of the employer, and the tradesman demeans himself into a servant of the buyer—clerk and tradesman subordinating their identities to that of the economically more powerful, like the colonies to such powers as the India House or the wife to the socially dominant husband. Indeed, one of the essay's most detailed anecdotes, cited by Lamb from Daniel Defoe's Complete English Tradesman, describes a shopkeeper who mildly accepts the insolence of the customer, then in a rage beats his meek wife and kicks his children. The implication is that the clerk simply treats his wife and child—powerless victims—as he himself is treated by the customer. One could cite here the analogous situation of Mr. Jellyby's household in Dickens's Bleak House where colonial and domestic despotism go hand-in-hand; or, even more pertinently, how James Mill educated his son John Stuart, ultimately to follow in his father's footsteps as an Examiner of the East India House, as if he were a peasant from a semi-barbarous dependency. “A vigorous despotism,” writes J. S. Mill in turn, is “a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians provided the end is their improvement.”⁵

Whether or not the irony of similar earlier imperial/patriarchal sentiments entered into his own ruminations in class, race, or gender, Lamb nevertheless subversively establishes in “The Good Clerk” a free private space, asserting his freedom to express feelings without hypocrisy and claiming the power to resist the degradation of human nature in the face of mercantile greed. Those spurious virtues of the “good clerk”—who is clean and neat, an early riser, temperate in eating and drinking, and an avoider of oaths and jests—are all honored in the breach by Lamb himself. But these ostensible defects are the elemental expressions of freedom by which Lamb's personality is released from bondage. In contrast to the ironically “good” clerk who, as the first sentence of the essay claims, “writeth a fair and swift hand,” Lamb celebrated Coleridge in “The Two Races of Men” as an annotator of enriching marginalia “in no very clerkly hand.” Lamb himself was notable for correcting his India House accounts by spitting on his finger and rubbing the error out (though in “A Character of the Late Elia” Lamb facetiously attributes to his persona “ponderous tomes of figures, in [a] … remarkably neat hand”). Elia in “The South-Sea House” may have marveled, of course, at the old ornate account books of by-gone scribes; but he also discredits that neatness when he notes that those dusty ledgers are worm-eaten and remote from living reality.

This deliberately ironical inversion of the accepted clerkly paradigm, adopting and subverting Defoe's model clerk, has much in common with other politically disenfranchised authors—nineteenth-century women or ethnically marginalized writers—who challenge the dominance of ruling class hegemony by writing against the grain, subversively adopting forms without their corresponding value systems. Admittedly, Lamb had a very “imperfect sympathy” both with certain ethnic minorities (“Imperfect Sympathies”) and with “degenerate clerks of the present day” (“South Sea House”); nevertheless, what strikes one with particular force is that Lamb's clerk/servant status (his father as well as his mother came from the servant class) may have produced in him something very much like the antagonistic acculturation (adopting the dominant group's means but resisting its goals) of socio-cultural interaction.⁶ Like a number of writers, Lamb's purpose is to discredit the norms which the dominant culture assumes by ironizing conventional responses for new ends—the really good clerk who “pens a stanza when he should engross” is not a creature who subordinates his identity to that of his employer (Defoe and society only suppose that to be the best role model); the gift of a pension in “The Superannuated Man” is not a cause for celebration after all (Elia, the obtuse narrator, only supposes so). The self, consequently, does not define itself in terms of the India House's goal of economic acquisition but, the better to resist, empowers itself by employing the India House's quill in a wholly new way. Lamb does extend the bourgeois value system literally but figuratively, finding his lordship of liberty in a new use of that which resists or threatens identity. Lamb originally saw himself as Caliban, “employed like a slave, to … do the most laborious offices,” as he says of the monster in his Tales from Shakespeare. And Caliban's hatred of the power in Prospero's magic books that binds him to his master leads him to suppose that by destroying the volumes and killing Prospero he may find freedom. But, of course, the drunken butler Stephano is Caliban's new god, and the monster's anticipated liberation form servitude is spurious. Only by acknowledging himself a “thrice double-ass” and submitting to Prospero's power is order restored. Analogously, Lamb-Caliban's transcendence of circumstance does not reside in getting rid of warehousekeeping folios or even in getting rid of all accounting entirely, but in accepting and rephrasing labor's terms through another sort of writing.

Consequently, in “Oxford in the Vacation” Elia reflects Lamb's recognition that his India House work sends him home with “increased appetite” to his books, so that the “outside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays—so that the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author.” Worthless scraps of paper or the shavings-down of the quill, these “parings” of the countinghouse undergo a “gentle-hearted” transvaluation by means of which they are reemployed, rearranged, and harmonized, no longer reflecting a materialistic or marketplace prison but constituting a rewriting of the economic sense of the self that brings a whole world to bear in a creation of one's own: “The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among the cart-rucks of figures and ciphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation” (such as that marvelously ironic picture of mercantile collapse in the “dissertation” on roast pig, perhaps). Transcendence, then, does not mean for Elia what it frequently is taken to mean, a going beyond to another level; rather, one must apply its literal meaning, “to climb across the stumbling block” of some particular order of thought or economic circumstance and to reform it laterally (i.e., still in human and earthly terms rather than at some ultimate level of imagination or spirit above and beyond comprehensible systems). By employing what is imprisoning and inauthentic against itself, by envisioning a new form of social interaction and setting up a new relationship within an antagonistic context, Lamb constructs a Romantic model for change. In particular, the transformation of the master-servant hierarchy in a patriarchal society is not a role reversal (work exchanged for lordly ease) but a role dissolution (work as the source of artistic power and value).

Likewise in Coleridge's “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,” the redefinition of the relation between the social givens and literary creation presents Lamb's commercial servitude as aesthetically transcended, inasmuch as Lamb, the literary brother of Coleridge, gains power over calamitous circumstance by an inward “gentle-heartedness” (i.e., by the creativity or imagination that is the “main haunt and region,” as Wordsworth says, of any romantic “song”). The headnote specifically indicates that the poem is “addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London”; and the word “prison” in the title, which comes to refer as much to Lamb's vocational drudgery at the East India House as to Coleridge is his bower, seems to add an element of punishment for guilt (a subliminal allusion, I take it, to Mary's recent matricide). Lamb, possibly stung by Coleridge's public exposure of his troubles, replied (some years later, however, after his circumstances had stabilized) with more than a touch of irritation: “For God's sake (I never was more serious), don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses” (August 6, 1800. About a week later, Lamb repeated his complaint; he probably had had enough of the gentle-as-a-Lamb punning on his name by his associates at the India House.) And yet the adjective “gentle-hearted” effectively presents Coleridge's sense of the ennobled quality of Lamb's inner self in contrast to the harshness of his life's circumstances. One wonders if Lamb would have been similarly irked by the observation Coleridge—whose only career had been literature—made in the Biographia: that with one exception he had “never known an individual, least of all an individual of genius, healthy or happy without a profession, i.e. some regular employment … which can be carried on … mechanically” (Chapter XI).

In “Lime-tree Bower,” Lamb's domestic calamity and clerkly servitude are implicitly compared with Coleridge's marital deprivations and scalded foot (by his wife, with the bitterly regretted loss of a walk). Yet neither disabling accidents nor their correlative, the rooks' dissonant sound, are ultimately ill-omened if they become occasions for the revelation of “Life.” The bower in the final third of the poem is no longer a “prison” but an equivalent to the harmonious dell, imaginatively opening onto the wider world of the sunset that both Coleridge and Lamb (now, indeed, a Lord of Liberty) simultaneously share. Although disabled, Coleridge is no longer as “bereft of promis'd good” as the self-described Elia among the Elgin marbles at market time. By unexpectedly discovering in life's sorrows and disappointments an opportunity to invoke in art and thought an absent plenitude, Coleridge has been able to glimpse “Love and Beauty.” In a subsequent footnote, he attributed the rook's “creeking” to its “quill-feathers.” Would it be pushing interpretation too far to find in those feathers the dissonance of the clerk's quill harmoniously transformed by the very special gifts of the artist into the authorial quill that bespeaks the “gentle-hearted” vision? In this, we are not very far from DeQuincey's description of the way in which the humble clerk transforms his culturally inferior station into the more socially potent role of the literary mentor and host.

The desire to go beyond an imperfect reality or a present moment that is jejune, prosaic, or inextricably sorrowful in order to discover some visionary or sublime mode of being always results for Lamb in an abrupt rupturing of illusion, a sudden turning back to the imperfect but reassuring familiarity of daily life—whether that be the bubbling kettle and Bridget nursing Elia's sprained ankle in “Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist,” the coming in of the supper tray in “A Chapter on Ears,” the inland landing in “Witches, and other Night-fears,” the adult's perspective on the players in “My First Play,” the materialization of Bridget beside Elia's bachelor armchair in “Dream-Children,” the Chinese Locke who arises to set all to rights in “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig,” or Elia's perspective on the unreality of the teacup figures in “Old China.” Elia's inverted epiphany of the routine and social is clearly analogous to Wordsworth's reverting in “Tintern Abbey” to what he describes as the “anchor” of his “moral being” lodged in “nature” and “sense.” Similarly, although in the “Intimations Ode” spiritual radiance fades into “the light of common day,” Wordsworth glimpses transcendent truth in “the meanest flower that blows.” This is the same gesture as Coleridge's finding delight in his imprisoning bower. Like the “humble-bee” that “Sings in the bean-flower” (lines 58, 59), common objects such as the claystone, the ship, and the rook are all transfigured against the backdrop of a Turneresque sunset that, like the gentle heart, operate to establish a plenitude in the place of privation (“I am glad / As I myself were there!” lines 45-46), and of imprisonment (“No plot so narrow,” line 61), and of absence (“No waste so vacant,” line 62), and of division (“No sound is dissonant,” line 76). Though Lamb's economic bondage to the routine of the East India House may indeed have been felt as a grievous burden, yet this bondage prompts him to heightened creativity, inasmuch as without it he feels “superannuated,” utterly diminished. For Lamb as author, a clerkship of deadening servitude and routine must frame the escape to freedom, providing for the enfranchised quill a background awareness of the processes that govern life and that contain the potential for visionary insight. Paradoxically, personal identity and freedom for Lamb are precisely a function of that economic enslavement, together with life's other losses and imperfections, employed so as to generate in art or merely in the unarticulated imagination a reflection of the absent original power that is “Life.”

Notes

1. De Quincey, Literary Reminiscences, (1873), I, 69-73.

2. Cited by Carl Dawson in an unpublished paper, “John Stuart Mill and the East India Company,” from T.L. Peacock, Poems and Plays, Works, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones (1931), VII, 236.

3. Robert Lynd, Preface to The Collected Essays of Charles Lamb, (1929) quoted in Ledwith, p. 129; Algernon Black, “Charles Lamb,” Macmillan's Magazine, 39 (1879), 432.

4. See Robert Frank, “The Superannuated Man,” Don't Call Me Gentle Charles! (1976), pp. 105, 109, 112.

5. J.S. Mill, Considerations On Representative Government, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, intro Alexander Brady (1977), p. 567.

6. In terms of the freedom to act or the powerlessness of being acted upon (i.e., in terms of dominance or submission) it is possible to locate Lamb as clerk/author within the discourse of ethnic alienation; Lamb's statements reflect something of that existential isolation described by Richard Wright, the black boy “acting in conformity with what others expected of me even though, by the very nature and form of my life, I did not and could not share their spirit”; or like, earlier, for example, the “discord of double-consciousness” in W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk. Richard Wright, Black Boy, Chapter II, p. 33; Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil (Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago, London: 1979), p. 54. The identity of Elia with the feminine earns him the sympathy of Miriam Henderson, Dorothy Richardson's heroine in Pilgrimage, which is predicated upon a perfectly understandable sense of their mutual impotence (“Deadlock,” Chap. VIII, p. 179).