SOURCE: Aaron, Jane. “Charles and Mary Lamb: The Critical Heritage.” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s., no. 59 (July 1987): 73-85.

[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture, Aaron summarizes the vicissitudes of Lamb's literary reputation since his death.]

In 1975, this society, the Charles Lamb Society, marked the bicentenary of Lamb's birth with an address by George L. Barnett on ‘The History of Charles Lamb's Reputation’.¹ Barnett's essay concentrated mainly on the critical reception of Lamb's writings when they first appeared, and dealt but briefly with the subsequent ramifications in Lamb's literary prestige. There are contradictions and anomalies in the history of Lamb's reputation which have not yet been fully explored, and which can cast an interesting light not only upon Lamb himself but also upon the processes and trends of literary criticism generally, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The aim of this present paper is to expand upon Barnett's account, and to continue it into the 1980s. The history of Mary Lamb's reputation, unrecorded by Barnett, also deserves attention, both for its own intrinsic interest and for the further light it casts on the reception of her brother's life and writings.

A striking characteristic of our critical heritage on the Lambs is the consistency of its violent internal contradictions. From the first, Lamb evoked extreme reactions: his critics either hated his work or loved it, and wrote more as if they were personal friends or enemies of their subject than his impartial judges. During his lifetime, the period covered most intensively by Barnett's account, criticism of Lamb's writings became energized to an unusual extent by strong emotive responses to his impact as a person. The connection of Lamb's work with his personal life, a connection later to become an ubiquitous characteristic of Lamb studies, first became publicly evident, perhaps, in Robert Southey's defence of his friend against William Jerdan's particularly vituperative review of Lamb's Album Verses, published in 1830.² In ostensibly defending the work from Jerdan's attack, Southey, in fact, praises and unholds the man. His poem ‘To Charles Lamb: On the Reviewal of His Album Verse in the Literary Gazette’, published in the Times in August 1830, speaks of Lamb with affectionate protectiveness, as if he were the beloved child of his friends rather than their adult contemporary. Southey asserts that:

To us, who have admired and loved thee long,
It is a proud as well as pleasant thing
To hear thy good report.

As well as being a reaction to Jerdan's assault, his friend's protectiveness was also, no doubt, the consequence of earlier personalised attacks upon Lamb's reputation. Wiliam Gifford, editor of the Anti-Jacobin when Lamb was first notoriously lampooned in its columns for his supposedly radical political affilliations,³ went on to become editor of the Quarterly Review in 1809. In 1811 the Quarterly described Lamb as insane, and in 1822, it reported him to be an incurable alcoholic,⁴ accusations which were both later to be seconded by Thomas Carlyle's condemnation of Lamb's ‘diluted insanity’ in his journals and Reminiscences.⁵ The majority of those commentators who made Lamb's acquaintance came away with very different impressions of the man, however. When Walter Savage Landor encountered Lamb in 1832, for example, a year after Carlyle's last meeting with him, he was charmed and captivated to the highest degree by the whole household. In subsequent correspondence and verses he celebrated his brief meeting with Elia in most affectionate terms:

Once and once only have I seen thy face,
Elia, once only has thy tripping tongue
Run o'er my heart, yet never has been left
Impression on it stronger or more sweet.(6)

In life as well as in his works Lamb appears to have had the knack of getting under the skin of his acquaintance so that he became to them either a blessed idea to be cherished and protected, or a thing of darkness, arousing hatred and contempt more than pity. Amongst his critics, a defamatory report calls forth a protesting defence, and vice versa.

The immediate result of Lamb's death in December 1834 was a proliferation of personal testimonies to the worth of his character: Wordsworth's elegy, for example, affirmed unequivocally ‘O, he was good, if e'er a good Man lived!.’ Consequently, Lamb's writings came to be appreciated more and more for the light they threw upon an exemplary individual, whose personality was now rapidly being established as one of mythic proportions. The Essays of Elia provided rich feeding-ground for assumptions of autobiographical content. H. N. Coleridge, writing in the Quarterly Review in 1835, for example, insists that the ‘Elias were not merely written by Lamb,—they were and are Lamb,—just the gentle fantastic subtle creature himself printed off.’⁷ As soon as Lamb's letters began to be published they, in their turn, provided further matter for admirers of his character, and seem quickly to have achieved more popularity than the actual works. The Cornell University Press edition now in the process of publication is the fifteenth on the list of new editions of the letters, while the works have been edited ten times. The immediacy and freshness of Lamb's affectionate tone of voice in the correspondence won for him a substantial following of friends and admirers. The numerous biographies and memoirs of Lamb published throughout the century which followed his death are also evidence of public eagerness to acquire every detail of his life.

One other eminent Victorian apart from Carlyle, however, found cause to quarrel with Lamb. Thomas Macaulay, when ostensibly reviewing Leigh Hunt's edition of The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar for the Edinburgh Review in 1841, wrote sternly against the ‘sophistical’ and immoral argument of the Elia essay ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century.’⁸ In the essay, Lamb presented the Restoration comedies as a ‘world of themselves’, an ‘Utopia of gallantry’, which a nineteenth' century audience destroyed by applying to its characters conventional moral tests and judgements. Macaulay protested that the morality of The Country Wife and its like is not that of ‘an unreal world, but of a world which is a great deal too real’; ‘the immorality is of a sort which can never be out of date, and which all the force of religion, law, and public opinion can but imperfectly restrain’. The levity and irresponsibility of Lamb's argument appears to Macaulay to indicate a serious flaw in a nature otherwise admirable. In 1848, a British Quarterly review, attributed to George Lewes, defended Elia from Macaulay's reprimand. For Lewes, ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’ illustrates the capacity of Elia's ‘guileless’ mind to draw out the sting of evil and immorality from indecent material. No attempt is made in this review to take Lamb's argument seriously; his redeeming personal innocence alone is presented as sufficient vindication of his point of view. And, as if in order to give further force to his description of Lamb's virtue, Lewes goes on to provide the first published account of the domestic tragedy which shattered the Lamb household in 1796, when Mary Lamb in a fit of insanity killed her mother. Charles took upon himself all responsibility for the remaining members of the family, and committed himself particularly to care for his sister while she lived, thus procuring her release from permanent incarceration. Lewes sees in this ‘suffering, unselfish’ embrace of ‘the stern austerity of duty’ a dearly won self-discipline which gives to Lamb's mind the profundity to strengthen and enlarge those of his readers.⁹ Later in 1848, Thomas Noon Talfourd revealed in full the details of Lamb's self-sacrifice in his Final Memorials of Charles Lamb. In the face of this unequivocal proof of goodness, the anti-Lamb school of thought was effectively silenced for the rest of the Victoria era, while Lamb's admirers continued to provide a market for a series of biographies encouraging the processes of a popular enthusiasm which now amounted to a secular canonization of ‘Saint Charles’.

But not all Victorian commentary on Lamb lacked critical interest in his writings. Walter Pater's essay ‘Charles Lamb’, first published in the Fortnightly Review (October 1878) and reprinted in his Appreciations remains one of the best assessments of Lamb's writings, and introduces for the first time many ideas which were later to form the basis of twentieth-century interpretations. Pater is not afraid to indicate the apparent contradictions in Lamb's work, while at the same time stressing that he was ‘one who lived more consistently than most writers among subtle literary theories.’¹⁰ One contradiction lies in the ‘modern subjectivity’ of Elia and his egotistic ‘self-portraiture’ as opposed to Lamb's particularly selfless ‘loyal, self-forgetful work for others’ as a critic. Further, Pater found that in the making of prose Lamb realized ‘the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats in the making of verse’, and yet he points out that the essays ‘reached an enduring moral effect also, in a sort of boundless sympathy’. But, for all his intricate and subtle appreciation of Lamb's writings, Pater remained one with his age in his stress on the importance of never forgetting the life. Following what he considers to be one of Lamb's chief characteristics, his ‘habitual apprehension of men's life as a whole—its organic wholeness’, Pater insists that Lamb's readers must always keep his domestic tragedy in mind:

In estimating the humour of Elia, we must no more forget the strong undercurrent of this great misfortune and pity, than one could forget it in his actual story.¹¹

Few Victorian readers of Lamb could have been capable of forgetting the details of his personal history; the importance of the life was impressed upon them from all sides. Augustine Birrell, for example, in the first series of his Obiter Dicta, refused to accept as an admirer of Lamb any reader not thoroughly acquainted with the life:

I run no great risk in asserting that, of all English authors, Charles Lamb is the one loved most warmly and emotionally by his admirers, amongst whom I reckon only those who are as familiar with the four volumes of his ‘life and letters’ as with ‘Elia’.¹²

Birrell goes on to compare Lamb with Dr. Johnson, but he does so on the grounds of their mutual humanity and ‘obedience to duty’ in matters which relate to their lives alone rather than their works. The importance of the life was also stressed by Lamb's most vociferous and enthusiastic Victorian idolator, Swinburne; superlatives flow from Swinburne's pen whenever he concerns himself with Lamb. He attempts very little straightforward criticism of his ‘best beloved’, however, presenting instead a justification for not doing so which would invalidate further critical studies of Lamb altogether:

No good criticism of Lamb strictly speaking, can be written; because nobody can do justice to his work who does not love it too well to feel himself capable of giving judgement on it.¹³

Loving Lamb becomes a moral touchstone for Swinburne: he asserts that ‘All men worthy to know him would seem always to have loved him in proportion to their worthiness’.

Given the highly emotional, and, from the objective critic's point of view, provocative nature of such praise, it is surprising that a critical backlash against Lamb did not commence sooner; perhaps one reason why nothing of the kind occurred was due to the fact that the Victorians were still reading Lamb's own writings intensively, as well as reading eulogiums on him. Agnes Repplier, for example, in her Points of View, argues against what she sees as a characteristic trend of her age, the introduction of moral lessons into the writing or the appreciation of art, and accuses Swinburne of being one of its worst practitioners. But she refers to Lamb for support for her own argument: he had recognized that ‘the natural point of view, as apart from the purely ethical point of view, supplies the proper basis for all imaginative writing’.¹⁴ She quotes effectively from some of Lamb's more obscure works to prove her point. Another ardent Lamb lover, Arthur Symons, found in his favourite author similar enfranchising qualities. In his Figures of Several Centuries, he praises Lamb as a ‘mental gipsy’ who saw ‘in every orderly section of social life magic possibilities of vagrancy’. At the same time he too assures his readers of the amelioration to be gained from a study of Lamb: ‘To read Lamb makes a man more human’ and ‘incites to every natural piety’.¹⁵ Altogether, then, it may be said that during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the myth of Lamb appears to have functioned to such potent effect because it incorporated in the one figure two apparently disparate ideals of human life, both of which the age found particularly compelling: firstly, the highly honourable allegiance to duty and domestic responsibility of the upright Victorian paterfamilias; secondly, the blithe, childlike freedom of a Never-Never Land or Wonderland, with its mischievous dodging of the values of a conventional grown-up world.

At any rate, during the first three decades of this century, Lamb's status as ‘best beloved’ writer went unquestioned in England. His chosen literary form, the essay, achieved particular popularity in these years, too: not only were many volumes of essays produced, but the history and techniques of the form were recorded and analyzed, In these records, Lamb figures as the greatest practitioner of the ‘ideal’ essay, that is, the familiar essay. His own work is rarely analyzed, however; according to his Edwardian admirers, he ‘belongs to a small group of authors for whom we cherish a kindly feeling that precludes any cool critical estimate’.¹⁶ In his History of English Criticism, George Saintsbury, it is true, does hint at some limitations of Lamb's as a critic, but he does so in the mildest and most affectionate of terms, and takes care to establish his own moral worthiness by the preliminary assurance that ‘if any be an “Against”, I more’.¹⁷ But Lamb was defended as a critic, too. E. M. W. Tillyard, in introducing his 1923 edition of Lamb's criticism, presents him as ‘among the very greatest critics’ for any reader who looks to criticism for ‘a more intimate understanding of the original than would have been possible without its help’.¹⁸ In 1931, Edmund Blunden goes further and asserts that if the proposition he puts forward, that criticism ‘is at its finest a secondary poetry’ be accepted, then Lamb is ‘the chief of critics’.¹⁹ Blunden's contributions dominated the first years of the thirties in Lamb studies: his critical biography Charles Lamb and his Contemporaries (1933) was followed in 1934, the year of the centenary of Lamb's death, by the volume Charles Lamb: His Life Recorded by his Contemporaries, which Blunden compiled. The centenary year also saw the publication of two further studies on Lamb, both semi-critical and semi-biographical, J. Lewis May's Charles Lamb: A Study and A.C. Ward's The Frolic and the Gentle. These four works provided material for the unashamedly fictional biographies which followed them, books such as E. Thornton Cooke's Justly Dear: Charles and Mary Lamb and Neil Bell's So Perish the Roses. Altogether admiration for Lamb reached its height in the thirties, after a century of affectionate tribute to his merits and appeal.

But in the centenary year itself nemesis descended upon the ‘Agnists’, and Lamb's reputation received a blow from which, in Britain if not in the States, it can hardly yet be said fully to have recovered. The enthusiasm of his admirers brought Lamb to the attention of F. R. Leavis's critical journal Scrutiny and, in the furtherance of its self-imposed duties as the watchdog of literary values, Scrutiny damned him. Denys Thompson, one of Leavis's followers, in an article entitled ‘Our Debt to Lamb’, found the ‘extravagant eulogy’ accorded to Lamb ‘preposterous and so unrelated to fact, that one can hardly take it seriously or find a point to engage in controversy’. Instead, he stated his own reactions to Lamb categorically: Lamb's was a ‘regressive mind, shrinking from full consciousness’; ‘Elia has been a Bad Influence’. According to Thompson, Lamb's work does not require its reader to ‘re-orientate’ himself, and provides no salutary ‘shock to self-satisfaction’; consequently, it represents a falling away from the more rigorous eighteenth-century essay which attempted to improve the reader's ‘spiritual manners’ by disturbing his complacency. That the essay of his own day was a ‘profitable channel for vulgarity, “low-brow” propaganda and a studied irresponsibility’ Thompson attributed to his contemporaries' debt to Lamb.²⁰

This Scrutiny article was collected in the volume Determinations, edited by Leavis and published in 1934; in the same year the first edition of Thompson's Reading and Discrimination appeared. The manner in which Lamb is referred to in this practical criticism guide for schools did him in all probability more effective harm than the Scrutiny essay itself. The professed intention of Reading and Discrimination is to train its students to discriminate for themselves between good and bad literature, but, in fact, its commentary on the extracts it supplies, the choice of extracts, and the guidance implicit in the order in which they are placed, make up altogether a didactic and domineering over-view of the texts which it would take an unusually independent-minded student to resist. In the section ‘The Essayist—Then and Now’ an extract from the Elia essay ‘The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers’ is placed between an extract from an Addison Spectator essay and a verbose twentieth-century advertisement. The commentary informs the student or teacher that in the eighteenth century the essay was a medium for serious writers but ‘Lamb reduced it to a vehicle for charming whimsies’. The Elia extract is described as ‘remarkable for its offensive affectedness, a pseudo-literary style unvitalized by living speech’. Its ‘pretentiousness’ and ‘Bad Influence’ have resulted in the ‘undesirable’ style of the advertisement which follows it, according to Thompson, and he goes on to deplore that Lamb's work should be distributed as ‘literature’ in schools at all.²¹ A revised edition of Reading and Discrimination appeared in 1954 in which the section on Lamb remained substantially the same as in the 1934 edition, but when a ‘New edition, completely rewritten’ was published in 1979 it contained no mention of Lamb whatsoever. Thompson's diatribes have had their effect: Lamb is no longer generally taught in schools, and it is exceptional to find his name on university syllabuses.

The Leavisite school of criticism thus succeeded in severely damaging Lamb's reputation within the framework of academic studies of English literature. But the reasons for the attack, and for its success, need to be understood in the light of the general purposes of Leavis and his followers with regard to the development of ‘English’ as a new discipline in higher education during the first half of this century. In order to further its aim of establishing English as a strenuous branch of academic study, the equivalent, for example, of scientific subjects, Scrutiny set itself against what it saw as the hitherto ‘gentlemanly’ mode of English teaching, which encouraged, as they saw it, an effeminate or dilettante sense of the subject. The concept of studying ‘English’ was to be reformed as an arduous activity, more capable than any other discipline of strengthening the manly moral and intellectual fibre of its practitioners.²² A new canon of the ‘Great Tradition’ of English writers was established, in which a writer such as Lamb, whose appeal was considered to apply generally to the emotions, and who had no underlying didactic moral mission to pursue, could have little place.

The main thrust of the Leavisite attack upon Lamb, however, as Geoffrey Tillotson stressed in his 1966 article on ‘The Historical Importance of Certain Essays of Elia’,²³ was directed not so much against the author himself as against the type of English scholar, or man of letters, who celebrated his writings and character in the early thirties. Much of ‘Our Debt to Lamb’ is, indeed, devoted to disparagements of the works of Thompson's immediate contemporaries rather than of Elia. A. C. Benson is quoted, for example, as self-damningly confessing that ‘the point of the essay is not the subject, for any subject will suffice, but the charm of personality. It must concern itself with something “jolly”.’²⁴ But if there was one Edwardian essayist who caused Lamb to be represented in the worst possible light from the point of view of the Leavisite critic bent upon rigour, it was not Benson but Lamb's editor and biographer, E. V. Lucas. The titles alone of Lucas's essay collections are sufficient to reveal him as belonging to the essayists of slippered ease who so repelled Thompson: his works include Domesticities (1900), Loiterer's Harvest (1913), Urbanities (1921), and Pleasure Trove (1935). From their appearance in 1903-5, his edition of the works and his biography have remained the standard texts on Lamb. Although invaluably detailed in the factual information they provide, his writings on Lamb do tend to present their subject as precisely the type of gentlemanly and jolly man of letters to whom the Leavisite school most strongly objected. In his essay ‘The Evolution of Whimsicality’, for example, collected in the volume At the Shrine of Saint Charles published for Lamb's centenary year, Lamb is celebrated as the ‘chief populizer’ of whimsicality, which Lucas defines as ‘unreluctant egoism’, ‘the author's side-long amused canonization of himself’. According to Lucas, Lamb ‘came naturally to his task and fondled and displayed his ego with all the ecstasy of a collector exhibiting bric-a-brac or first editions’.²⁵ It is not difficult to imagine the horrified disgust with which Thompson would have responded to such intended praise. It is primarily the image accorded to Elia by his thirties' admirers that he loathes, and would shatter.

In 1957 Thompson's attacks were repeated and further disseminated in another influential critical vehicle largely constructed by disciples of Leavis, the Pelican Guide to English Literature. G. D. Klingopoulos in his account of ‘The Spirit of the Age in Prose’ for the Romantic volume of the series introduces Lamb only to disparage him, and is apparently motivated by the need to make sure that the flames of Lamb's past fame are thoroughly extinguished. He dismissed the work as artificial and lifeless, and the man as ‘self-consciously ingratiating’ and lacking in integrity.²⁶ But here again it is the image of Lamb presented by his earlier admirers, rather than Lamb himself, which appears to arouse Klingopoulos' disgust most strongly.

Apart from a few honourable exceptions, such as John Cowper Powys's celebration of Lamb in his collection Visions and Revisions (1955), favourable British criticism of Lamb throughout the mid-twentieth century tended to adopt a defensive tone. Some reluctance was shown to tackle his work and reputation as a whole, in a refutation of the Leavisite attack. The equivocal reputation of Elia was still, it would appear, too embarrassingly alive in the minds of many British academics to allow even his admirers to affirm whole-heartedly the need for a complete reincorporation of the Essays into the canon of reputable literature. The few critical texts which appeared up to the close of the seventies, such as Wayne McKenna's Charles Lamb and the Theatre, Joan Coldwell's edition of Charles Lamb on Shakespeare, and Roy Park's volume on Lamb as Critic for the Routledge Critics Series, all concentrate on emphasizing Lamb's contribution to literary criticism alone and do not venture onto the dangerous territory to be negotiated in a full reappraisal of the effects and literary influence of his Elia persona. The new series of the Lamb Bulletin has, however, continued to maintain and further Lamb studies effectively, but, although a British publication, it appears to be more frequently available in academic institutions in the States.

That this should be the case is due, no doubt, to the fact that Lamb's reputation in America has never undergone the same vacillations from praise to detraction as it has in Britain. He was cordially received there from the first, particularly after Talfourd's Final Memorials revealed ‘the painfully-exciting cause’ of his occasional over-indulgence in drink, and he has since been established as a minor, but honourable, member of the Romantic school. Ernest Bernbaum's Guide through the Romantic Movement of 1949, for example, presented Lamb as a whole-hearted Romantic who through ‘his persuasive warning against narrow formalizations of one's conception of life and character’ gave effective expression to one of the movement's most characteristic principles.²⁷ A volume which appeared in 1957, The English Romantic Poets and Essayists: A Review of Research and Criticism, contained a chapter on Lamb which did much to direct subsequent developments in Lamb studies in the States. In concluding his survey of the criticism, Stuart M. Tave suggested that future work should endeavour to ascertain the ‘position of Lamb in his own age, as influencer and influenced’; he also found criticism of Lamb deficient in ‘close analyses of the compositional elements in his essays’.²⁸ A number of American scholars have subsequently endeavoured to realize both his suggestions.

In Charles Lamb: The Evolution of Elia (1964) George Barnett provided a detailed account of the influences—primarily early eighteenth-century according to Barnett—which went to form Lamb's style, and analysed the manner in which many of the Elia essays evolved from Lamb's personal letters.²⁹ A year earlier, in 1963, the American critical periodicals had started to publish the first in a sequence of studies analysing in detail the form and themes of the Essays of Elia as examples of the workings of a characteristically Romantic imagination.³⁰ This series of articles led in recent years to three full-scale studies of the Elia essays, Fred V. Randel's The World of Elia: Charles Lamb's Essayistic Romanticism (1975), Robert D. Frank's Don't Call Me Gentle Charles! (1976) and Gerald Monsman's Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer: Charles Lamb's Art of Autobiography (1984). Like the articles which preceded them, these books achieve their effects primarily through detailed studies of individual Elia essays. Randel emphasizes the manner in which Lamb, at one and the same time, transformed the traditions of the essay form through Romanticizing it, and yet tempered the extremities of Romanticism through merging it with the techniques and attitudes of the familiar essay tradition.³¹Don't Call Me Gentle Charles!, a more useful study than its title would suggest, takes seven Elia essays and demonstrates the way in which they are shaped and informed by characteristically Romantic themes and devices.³² Gerald Monsman similarly emphasizes the ties between Lamb and the major Romantics, seeing in his writings a preoccupation with the losses inherent in the human condition, and with art as a redemptive agent, which serves as a prosaic equivalent of the poetic concerns of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats.³³

But Monsman goes on to make new claims for Lamb's work. He sees Lamb's symbol-creation as prefiguring ‘the problems inherent in the modern literary imagination’ and compares Elia in his introductory chapter to major twentieth-century writers as well as to his contemporaries. Like Yeats, for example, Lamb had realized that the external symbols of art can never transcend earthly life because they owe their existence to the mutable sensations and perceptions of day-to-day experience.³⁴ Monsman explores in detail the manner in which Lamb's use of irony and wordplay serves to highlight the ambivalence of the artist's endeavours. A section on Lamb in Mary Jacobus's recent article ‘The Art of Managing Books: Romantic Prose and the Writing of the Past’ also concentrates on the subtle effects of Lamb's characteristic ironic style, presenting Elia as the ‘chameleon’ writer who through his manifold disguises and personae liberates and authorises a self-exploration free of egotism.³⁵ Such approaches, in their focus upon the suggestive use of ambivalence and paradox in Lamb's style, are applying to his work recent theoretical interpretations of language, and in particular of literary language, as endlessly productive of multiple ways of meaning. According to contemporary French theoreticians, the literary text is, for its readers, essentially paradoxical; it avoids definitive closure, and is inherently plural, a weave of varied meanings rather than a single message.³⁶ Full-scale investigation of Lamb's works in the light of such currently popular approaches may well be the mode by which subsequent assessments of his writings will restore them to academic respectability, finally laying the ghost of Scrutiny's condemnation.

As well as developments in the critical analysis of his writings, a reawakening of interest in Lamb has also, of late, been demonstrated by the publication of new biographical studies. Winifred F. Courtney's Young Charles Lamb: 1775-1802 (1982) was followed a year later by David Cecil's A Portrait of Charles Lamb. The latter volume, it is true, provides little new information on its subject, being essentially an elegant and beautifully illustrated reworking of the earlier Edwardian biographies. But Young Charles Lamb is the first volume in a thoroughly researched study of its subject, and one which has brought much useful new material to light, including some of Lamb's hitherto uncollected early contributions to periodicals.³⁷ Courtney concentrates in particular upon Lamb's social affiliations during the politically turbulent period of his youth, and aims to correct the previously accepted notion of his apolitical stance with regard to the events of his time. Her concern with the question of ‘Political Lamb’, as she entitles one chapter, tends, however, to draw attention away from the one major and indubitably formative event of Lamb's first twenty-seven years, Mary's madness and matricide, and his pledge to care for her. Young Charles Lamb does not dwell on this tragedy: in it Lamb tells of the disaster in his own words, in long quotations from the letters he wrote to Coleridge at the time, and Courtney adds very little by way of comment.

In evincing some wariness of engaging herself on a profound level with the private and domestic realities of Lamb's life, and of his relationship with his sister, Courtney but follows a trend common to much twentieth-century biographical material on Lamb. Lamb's first biographers, who had the advantage of knowing both brother and sister personally, showed little unease in describing their close association, and were unanimous in their praise of Mary, and in appreciation of her contribution to her brother's life. Wordsworth, for example, in his elegy to Charles, celebrates their sibling relationship and describes Mary as ‘the meek, / The self-restraining and the ever-kind’. P. G. Patmore, in his account of the Lambs in My Friends and Acquaintance (1854), testifies to her ‘universal loving-kindness and toleration’,³⁸ and Barry Cornwall's biography of Charles similarly recalls Mary's habitual reconciliatory kindness.³⁹ Talfourd in his Final Memorials records in some detail the ‘remarkable sweetness of her disposition’: this ‘most quiet, sensible and kind of women’ was ‘to a friend in any difficulty … the most comfortable of advisers, the wisest of consolers’. He adds to his own account Hazlitt's testimony to her good sense; Mary, alone of all her sex, becomes the exception that proves the misogynist's rule:

Hazlitt used to say, that he never met with a woman who could reason, and had met with one only thoroughly reasonable—the sole exception being Mary Lamb.⁴⁰

But apart from a few isolated sympathetic presentations of her life, such as Anne Gilchrist's Mary Lamb (1883), Helen Ashton and Katharine Davies's chapter on the Lambs in their volume I Had a Sister (1937), and Ernest C. Ross's more extensive study The Ordeal of Bridget Elia, published in 1940, Mary Lamb has on the whole featured but little to positive effect in later nineteenth and twentieth century accounts of the influences upon her brother's life and work.

Indeed, since his fall from British critical grace in the thirties, there has been a tendency amongst some of Lamb's defenders to blame Mary for her brother's apparent limitations: his relatively slender literary output, for example, is attributed to the burden of maintaining his sister, and the extremes of his whimsicality are held to be the consequence of his close and debilitating involvement with her madness. The critics' difficulty in coming to terms with Mary is projected on to her brother himself: V. F. Morley, for example, in his Lamb Before Elia, maintains it inhuman of Lamb were he not to hate and fear his sister,⁴¹ and R. A. Foakes in a recent seventies' article similarly assumes that Charles must have hated ‘one who through her madness’ was ‘such a clog to him’.⁴² The situation was, perhaps, exacerbated by Katharine Anthony's strongly partisan defence of Mary in her The Lambs: A Study of Pre-Victorian England, published in 1948, in which she appears to assume that in order to present Mary in the best possible light her brother must be discredited. Her extraordinary, and entirely unfounded claim that Charles neglected his sister in the last years of his life because of his unrequited passion for their adopted daughter, Emma Isola, detracted substantially from a study of the pair which in many other regards did provide a healing corrective of Mary's earlier critical neglect.

It would appear that too many of those critics who have concerned themselves with the Lambs' relationship have acted on the principle that one member of their union can only be properly acclaimed at the expense of the other, thus positing a tension between the two entirely contrary to the testimonies concerning their strong mutual dependence and regard manifested consistently throughout their own writings and correspondence, and to which the records of their contemporaries also bear witness. Yet current developments in the field of literary theory have had an ameliorative effect on this aspect of Lamb studies, also. The rise of feminist criticism in the seventies and eighties, and the new interest in women's contribution to literary history, have led to further detailed investigations of Mary Lamb, and of the nature of Charles's bond with her. A hitherto unpublished American Ph.D. dissertation on Mary, by Leslie Joan Friedman, which provides much new information on the difficult progress of Mary's career, leaves its readers with an increased appreciation of the creative achievements, under great duress, of both sister and brother.⁴³ And Gillian Beer's recent article on ‘Lamb's Women’ in The Charles Lamb Bulletin presents Charles's unique alliance with Mary as the source of his unusual ability to enter with imaginative sympathy in his writings into the full range of human experience, both male and female, both childlike and parental.⁴⁴

With the increasing maturity of ‘English’ as a scholastic discipline in the second half of this century has come a broadening of critical horizons, and a greater openness to the influence of previously ignored or discredited literary voices. Rigorous and dominant authorial tones, and the adoption of didactic roles with regard to the reader, now appear suspect and lacking in subtlety, while emphatic suggestivity, irony and a playful ambivalence are recognized as qualities to be celebrated in writing. In this context, Lamb's critical reputation stands fair to regain all its lost lustre, and to gleam ever more brightly into the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. George L. Barnett, ‘The History of Charles Lamb's Reputation’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, ii (1975), 22-33.

2. William Jerdan, London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, 10 July 1830.

3. See ‘The New Morality’, Anti-Jacobin: or Weekly Examiner, 9 July, 1798, p. 286.

4. See Quarterly Review, vi (1811), 485 and xxvii (1822), 120-1.

5. Reminiscences by Thomas Carlyle, ed. C.E. Norton (1932), p. 65.

6. The Poetical Works of William Savage Landor, ed. Stephen Wheeler, (Oxford, 1937), ii, 383.

7. H. N. Coleridge, Quarterly Review, liv (1835), 59.

8. The Complete Works of Lord Macaulay (1898), ix, 342-6.

9. George Lewes, British Quarterly Review, liv (1848), 307.

10. Appreciations, The Works of William Pater (1910), v, 106,

11. Ibid, v, 108.

12. Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta (1884), pp. 102-3.

13. Miscellanies, The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise, xiv (1926), 281

14. Agnes Repplier, Points of View (1893), pp. 117-8.

15. Arthur Symons, Figures of Several Centuries (1916), p. 29.

16. C. T. Winchester, A Group of English Essayists, (N. Y., 1910), p. 76.

17. George Saintsbury, A History of English Criticism: Being the English Chapters of A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe, (Edinburgh, 1911), p. 347.

18. Lamb's Criticism, ed. E. M. W. Tillyard (Cambridge, 1923), p. viii.

19. Edmund Blunden, Votive Tablets: Studies Chiefly Appreciative of English Authors and Books (1931), pp. 281-2.

20. Denys Thompson, ‘Our Debt to Lamb’, Determinations, ed. F. R. Leavis (1934), pp. 199-207.

21. Denys Thompson, Reading and Discrimination (1934), pp. 40-1.

22. See Brian Doyle, ‘The Hidden History of English Studies’ in Re-Reading English, ed. Peter Widdowson (1982), pp. 24-8, for a similar account of the re-shaping of English studies.

23. See Geoffrey Tillotson, ‘The Historical Importance of Certain Essays of Elia’, in Some British Romantics: A Collection of Essays, ed. James V. Logan, John E. Jordan, and Northrop Frye (Columbus, Ohio, 1966), p. 114.

24. A. C. Benson, ‘The Art of the Essayist’, quoted in Thompson, Determinations, p. 211.

25. E. V. Lucas, At the Shrine of Saint Charles: Stray Papers on Lamb brought together for the Centenary of his Death (1934) p. 46.

26. G. D. Klingopulous, ‘The Spirit of the Age in Prose’, The Pelican Guide to English Literature: From Blake to Byron, ed. Boris Ford (1957), pp. 146 and 148.

27. Ernest Bernbaum, Guide through the Romantic Movement, (N. Y., 2nd ed., 1949), p. 122.

28. Stuart M. Tave, The English Romantic Poets and Essayists: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Carolyn Washburn Houtchens and Lawrence Huston Houtchens (N. Y. 1957) pp. 66 and 68.

29. See George L. Barnett, Charles Lamb: The Evolution of Elia (Bloomington, Indiana, 1964).

30. See, for example, Daniel J. Mulcahy, ‘Charles Lamb: The Antithetical Imagination and the Two Planes’, Studies in English Literature, iii (1963) 517-42; Richard Haven, ‘The Romantic Art of Charles Lamb’, English Literary History, xxx (1963), 137-146; Donald H. Reiman, ‘Thematic Unity in Lamb's Familiar Essays’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology lxiv (1965), 470-8; John R. Nabholtz, ‘Drama and Rhetoric in Lamb's Essays of the Imagination’, Studies in English Literature, xii (1972), 683-703.

31. See Fred V. Randel, The World of Elia: Charles Lamb's Essayistic Romanticism (Point Washington, N. Y., 1975).

32. See Robert D. Frank, Don't Call Me Gentle Charles!: An Essay on Lamb's Essays of Elia (Corvallis, Or., 1976).

33. See Gerald Monsman, Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer: Charles Lamb's Art of Autobiography, (Durham, N. C., 1984).

34. Ibid, p. 12.

35. Mary Jacobus, ‘The Art of Managing Books: Romantic Prose and the Writings of the Past’, in Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (1984), pp. 235-6.

36. See, for example, Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Image-Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (1977), pp. 155-164.

37. See Winifred F. Courtney, Young Charles Lamb 1775-1802 (1982), Appendix B, pp. 343-6.

38. P. G. Patmore, My Friends and Acquaintance (1854), iii, 200.

39. B. W. Procter [‘Barry Cornwall’, pseud.], Charles Lamb: A Memoir (1866), p. 128.

40. Thomas Noon Talfourd, Final Memorials of Charles Lamb: consisting chiefly of his letters not before published, with sketches of some of his contemporaries, (1848), ii, 123 and 126.

41. F. V. Morley, Lamb Before Elia (1932), p. 249.

42. R. A. Foakes, ‘The Authentic Voice: Lamb and the Familiar Letter’, Charles Lamb Bulletin ii (1975), 4.

43. See Leslie Joan Friedman, ‘Mary Lamb: Sister, Seamstress, Murderer, Writer’, unpublished Stanford University Ph.D. thesis, 1976.

44. Gillian Beer, ‘Lamb's Women’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, vi (1984), 138-143.