SOURCE: Parker, Mark. “Ideology and Editing: The Political Context of the Elia Essays.” Studies in Romanticism 30, no. 3 (fall 1991): 473-94.

[In the following essay, Parker suggests the political relevance of Lamb's seemingly apolitical Elian essays by considering the circumstances of their original publication in the London Magazine.]

Mario Praz presents a singular picture of Charles Lamb in The Hero in Eclipse—as a man whose essays trace his determined probing of the wounds given him by nascent capitalism, whose ideals are aristocratic but whose place as a clerk is socially ambiguous, and whose “Biedermeier” aesthetic is marked by an “ability to express the quintessence of bourgeois feeling.”¹ This tendentious assessment has not been taken up by later critics, who have preferred immanent or at least more formal approaches to the essays of Elia. But beneath the somewhat programmatic thrust of Praz's remark lies an important yet unregarded aspect of Lamb: the social and political context of his essays.

Book length studies have traced Lamb's development as a craftsman (Barnett), examined his creation of a “neutral ground” as an escape from pressures of work and personal tragedy (Frank), presented a reading of the essays from a phenomenological perspective (Randel), and read us a loosely deconstructive lecture on Lamb's examination of the authorial voice and his exploration of time and eternity (Monsman).² Three early articles (Haven, Reiman, Mulcahy) have considered the essays as prose poems and applied new critical techniques to them.³ Later studies have focused on his use of irony (Flesch) and the psychological burdens inherent in his relation with Coleridge (McFarland).⁴ None of the scholarship on Lamb makes more than passing reference to the monthly publication of the essays; it can be said to take as its text not the essays as they first appeared in the London Magazine, but as they later appeared in the 1823 collection Elia and the 1833 The Last Essays of Elia. This scholarly orientation amounts to a covert editorial decision. Analysis of the Elia and The Last Essays conceals the links between the essays and their most immediate context, the material surrounding them in the London Magazine. Treating the essays in such isolation tends to produce interpretations oriented toward immanent, formal, or autobiographical readings which emphasize the personal and the escapist elements of the essays.

Political contexts are difficult to reconstruct, and in the case of Lamb such an undertaking is daunting. Despite a somewhat polemical, politicized youth, in which he was notorious enough to be paired with the dangerous “Jacobin” Charles Lloyd in an Anti-Jacobin cartoon, Lamb seemed to settle into silence.⁵ His essays, like Austen's novels, are marked by an apparent avoidance of politics. His letters contain jocular or ambiguously ironic comments about his lack of interest in such matters. But the circumstances of the essays, their monthly publication in the London Magazine, provide a measure of their underlying politics. The magazine's editor, John Scott, had clear political opinions, and the use to which he put the Elia essays in the London Magazine allows us to gauge the ways in which these essays ramify into the social and the political—how they embody a symbolic act through which social contradictions are presented and explored. If, as Jerome McGann has argued in “Keats and the Historical Method,” the intentions of the author are “codified in the author's choice of time, place and form of publication,” then attention to Scott's use and placement of the essays in the London Magazine becomes crucial in redressing the formal and autobiographical orientation of the criticism of Lamb.⁶

II

Critical accounts of Scott's editorship praise his apolitical stance. Josephine Bauer is typical of many commentators when she cites approvingly Scott's determination to keep the magazine free of political affiliation and his refusal to let politics and political ideas sway his critical judgment.⁷ Walter Graham, in his pithy account of English literary periodicals, praises the critical tenor of the London Magazine without mention of its politics.⁸ Such accounts attest to the persistence of the critical tradition which Scott himself helped to create, one which commences with Burke and Coleridge, is taken up in the 20's by figures like Scott, receives amplification by Victorians like Arnold, is rediscovered and codified by T. S. Eliot, and becomes ubiquitous in the New Criticism. This tradition obscures the political coding of Scott's critical remarks and editorial practices.

As it was for many in his generation, the French Revolution was the dominant political event for Scott. And like many others, he endorsed the reading of it provided by Burke in Reflections. Scott echoes Burke's attack on what he considered the revolution's ideology: its simplification of individual psychology, preference for abstraction, celebration of system and theory, contempt for tradition, its cosmopolitanism, and sexual license. So too does Scott echo Burke's praise of the concepts of “presumption,” which grants preference to existing institutions, and “prescription,” which seeks to legitimate presumption by arguing that long possession justifies claims of property and title. Scott handles Burke's concept of “wisdom without reflection,” that product of English society and institutions by which individuals act a truth they only dimly perceive, reverentially.⁹

But Burke's interpretation of the Revolution in France did not come to Scott directly. During the post-war crises of 1815-1819 Burke's ideas received powerful restatement and significant modification by Coleridge in The Statesman's Manual, A Lay Sermon, Biographia Literaria, and his “rifacciamento” of The Friend. In them Coleridge attempts to ground Burke's remarks philosophically, to trace them to “principles” and “ideas.” And by them Coleridge attempts to become a second Burke, to interpret the post-war unrest with the same prescience and prophetic power with which Burke surveyed the revolutionary moment of the early 90's. In addition, Coleridge begins the transfer of Burke's political analysis into literary criticism, a move that Scott continues and which would gather force in later versions by Arnold and Eliot.

The historical moment of the London Magazine must have seemed to confirm Coleridge's concerns in A Lay Sermon. As Scott planned the magazine in the Fall of 1819, popular unrest deepened and found focus in the Peterloo Massacre. For Scott, the subsequent ministerial actions were nearly as bad as the unrest itself. Alienated from both sides, like both Burke and Coleridge before him, Scott fell back on his trust in his version of Burke's “wisdom without reflection” and Coleridge's “foundationless well-doing”¹⁰:

An instinctive feeling of the fit and decent, superior to argument and therefore out of the reach of sophistry,—quicker than reason, and therefore not liable to be surprised.¹¹

However ineffectual, this is certainly a recognizable political stance. The events of 1820 only deepened Scott's opposition to popular movements, his anger at ministerial cynicism, and his disgust at the opposition's opportunism. Caroline's return from Italy to claim her place as Queen and her subsequent trial provided, at least in Scott's eyes, ample occasion for everyone to betray their worst instincts. Scott's disappointment at the maneuverings of each political faction is only rivaled by his anxieties over the unrest in England:

We have no interest now to lavish on secondary subjects of debate, for we have become familiar with the language of life and death, and live in the near approach of an inevitable crisis.

(ii: 100)

Coleridge's fears of 1816 had been realized just as surely as Burke's fears in the Reflections.

Coleridge's importance to Scott can be measured by the warmth with which Scott implored his publisher Baldwin to hire Coleridge as a contributor to the London Magazine: “I would again impress upon you the necessity of securing him.”¹² Burke's can be seen in Scott's consistent echo of key Burkean images in his writings. But perhaps a better indication of Scott's commitment to a Burkean-Coleridgean literary culture are his remarks on Godwin in the August 1820 number of the London Magazine. Godwin had long since become a favorite whipping boy for conservative writers. By 1820 Scott must have known that there was little life left in the subject. Thus his inclusion of Godwin in his “Living Authors” series along with Walter Scott, Wordsworth, and Byron is puzzling. But the immediate context of popular unrest justified this reexamination of the thinker whose name was most commonly equated with radical politics. Just as Coleridge wondered in 1816

[w]hether the spirit of jacobinism, which the writings of Burke exorcised from the higher and from the literary classes, may not like the ghost in Hamlet, be heard moving and mining in the underground chambers with an activity the more dangerous because less noisy.

so did Scott in 1820 feel the need to put the spectre of radical politics to rest.¹³ He presents Godwin as a famous convert to be applauded for his ultimate recognition of conservative doctrine.

Scott applies a Burkean measure to Godwin's politics, but he does so without the viscerally nationalistic tone taken up in Reflections. His treatment of Godwin recalls Coleridge's consideration of Rousseau's thought in The Friend more than Burke's attack on the philosophes. The effect of Godwin's work is to “wither the heart,” and Scott expands upon the causes of this:

In his philosophical treatise, as in his novels, he considers man in patches and parcels rather than in the totality of his nature; he argues on one fact, rather than on that combination that constitutes truth;—satisfied with having discovered a weakness, he does not trouble himself to enquire whether it be not inextricably connected with some vital principle or source of welfare, which must perish under its remedy.

(ii: 166)

Here Scott eloquently updates Burke's strictures against “system,” mechanistic psychology, and shortsighted reform with Coleridgean moderation. When he moves to the novels themselves, Scott criticizes their lack of social benefit; they are based on an erroneous system which causes the reader to “rise with the heartache from his works” (163).

This plan includes but little of comfort or consolation; little, we are afraid, of derivable benefit to either the mind or the manners of people in general.

(167)

Scott praises Godwin's later works, which are more likely to “repress presumptuous dissent, and angry opposition, than to provoke them” (166).

In a September 1820 review of Lamia Scott cautions Keats for a similar inattention to “the varieties of human nature” and the “deep, internal, and inextricable connection between the pains and penalties of human nature, and its hopes and enjoyments” (ii: 315). He sees an “extravagant school-boy vituperation” in Keats's treatment of the merchant brothers in “Isabella.” After contrasting it with Boccaccio's characterization, he turns to Elia as an example of an author with a more complex vision:

That most beautiful Paper … on the “ledger men,” of the South Sea House, is an elegant reproof of such short-sighted views of character; such idle hostilities against the realities of life.

(ii: 317)

Elia, a less “systematic” thinker than Keats, is praised for presenting “so clear and fair an impression from facts” (ii: 317). To call such remarks apolitical, as many critics have, would be to mistake the tradition in which Scott operated, one in which a highly articulated Burkean-Coleridgean culture gave a subtle political resonance to critical discourse.

III

Scott furthered his political and social views by either pairing articles or by weaving a kind of running commentary into articles throughout an entire number. The political effectiveness of this might be questioned, especially if one takes as normative the hamfisted methods of most of his competitors. But since Scott wrote many of the articles himself under various pseudonyms, and since many of the contributors knew each other well, this practice was feasible, and sometimes resulted in persuasive, indirect expression of Scott's politics.

Scott's monthly “Historical and Critical Summary of Intelligence” often provides a reference point for the apparent diversity of the magazine. Read with an eye to whatever this section contains, the articles of a given number often take on a different cast; what may seem eccentric in either focus or tone becomes relevant to catching “the spirit of things” as Scott sensed it. The July number is an example. Its table of contents might suggest that the magazine is a pleasant miscellany. But there are subtle resonances between the articles. In the “Historical and Critical Summary of Intelligence” Scott takes up the ministerial response to the Queen's return from Italy. He is concerned that their actions will tarnish the Regent's image, and that this will in turn “interpose a gulph between the past and the future, and break up the glorious associations that are now linked to her name” (ii: 101). This crisis provides a meaning for the apparently trivial review of “The History of Madame Krudener, A Religious Enthusiast,” as well as for this review's survey of the conditions and dispositions of Europe's sovereigns immediately prior to Madame Krudener's vogue in court. The review's intricate analysis of the political climate of 1814—most monarchies harbored liberal, reformist intentions, but could not put them into effect; the blame for this is not simply owing to their inaction, but also to “the unreasonableness of popular demand, and the disgusting intemperance of its self-elected organs”—continues, by analogy, the apocalyptic warnings of the “Summary.” Then, as now, governments could founder by not paying close attention to the wear and tear on the “splendid fictions” of the monarchy. Scott continues in this vein in his monthly “Collector” contribution, which reviews Johnson's account of the coronation of George iii, noting that Johnson's style, which Scott terms “big writing,” leaves the modern reader cold, but speculating that it is in fact “a sly sentiment of irony.” The lesson here, evidently, is that the “splendid fictions” need not be taken seriously by the sophisticated reader of the magazine, however much they require maintenance and adherence among others. Scott follows this article with a review of Mathews' Diary of an Invalid, which occasions yet more praise of the old customs, notably the “durability of prejudice and bias” which guides the populace to proper action. He quotes approvingly Mathews' praise of “female virtue,” which provides for “the happiness of our homes” as well as, ultimately, for the national character upon which England prides itself. In a stunningly Biedermeier reduction of the romantic eternal feminine, Mathews concludes that “all the best virtues of manhood” are produced by “maternal precepts and maternal example” (ii, 64). In an obvious reference to Caroline's difficulties, Scott remarks that “the necessity for giving all publicity to such observations, is but too apparent” (ii: 64).

This ongoing analysis of custom culminates later in the number, when Scott reviews Arthur Taylor's The Glory of Regality: An Historical Treatise of the Anointing and Crowning of the Kings and Queens of England. Here the near reactionary views he expressed earlier are somewhat tempered, and the subject receives a compressed but credible historical treatment. Medieval coronations, and the monarchy in general, were supported and legitimated by real signs, which

had so obvious a counterpart in reality, that it could not but strike on the imaginations of those present, as an imposing symbol of the courage, prowess, zeal, and fidelity of the adherents to the new prince.

(ii: 81)

Time has made such customs obsolete and ridiculous, and the extreme literal-mindedness of the current public renders them dangerous. Scott appeals anxiously for the production of a credible, uplifting ceremony, one appropriate for the current government. This apt formulation of the manufacture of consent, when read in the context of the numerous references to the government's legitimation crisis, makes for a fairly pragmatic conclusion on Scott's part, and to some extent draws together the strands of this discussion throughout the number.

Thus the July London introduces a problem, analyzes it, and enforces a conclusion through the juxtaposition of texts. Even Hazlitt's “Table Talk” installment, so often at odds with Scott's conservative politics, buttresses the editor's opinions on this occasion. Hazlitt's comparison of writing and speaking insists on the pragmatic necessities of speaking; truth, according to Hazlitt, is reserved for writing. An orator communicates with his audience “instinctively and unavoidably” by “his manner,” including “the tones of his voice” and “his commanding attitudes.” Even the magazine's resident leftist lends support to Scott's political program. Hazlitt's ideas, as do those of all the contributors to the London, emerge already incorporated into a system of purposes engineered by Scott.

The initial number of the London also exemplifies this cumulative effect. The number begins with the “Prospectus,” in which the editor gives free range to his patriotism and nationalism. In the next article, “General Reflections, Suggested by Italy,” a description of the Alps is followed by a meditation on national events, the “instruments of a great design” which insure “a slow progressive order of development” (i: 2). An examination of the work of Walter Scott in the first of the “Living Authors” series allows John Scott to trace these concerns further: Baillie Jarvis of Rob Roy is the type of traditional religious feeling, and Scott's characters are generally praised for their delineation of the national character. The next entry, a review of “The Memoirs of Mr. Hardy Vaux,” laments the commonplace tenor of contemporary society: since “the materials of romance are eradicated” (i: 24), one finds the stuff of patriotic feeling only in the past. The succeeding essay, “The Influence of Religious and Patriotic Feeling on Literature,” continues this meditation on change and national character, asserting that great works of literature are dependent upon deep religious and patriotic feeling, and it effectively concludes the discussion with the pithy generalization that “every change in established ideas which removes from a people their great points of rallying and union, is a real evil” (i: 41).

Scott's editorial hand can also be seen in pairings of articles, such as his back to back reviews of Shelley's Cenci and the Memoirs of the Late R. L. Edgeworth in the May 1820 number. The review of Shelley begins with a general criticism of the tendency of his thought. For Scott, Shelley exemplifies the sickly constitution of the age: he sees the world through his prejudices and system, and he “seeks gratification in conjuring up, or presenting the image or idea of something abhorrent to feelings of the general standard” (i: 546). The Cenci combines these tendencies. In it Shelley turns from the usual vices

to cull some morbid or maniac sin of rare and doubtful occurence, and sometimes to found a system of practical purity and peace on violations which it is disgraceful even to contemplate.

(i: 548)

Scott finds Shelley's “Preface,” which seems to him to interpret Cenci's incestuous passion as a manifestation of his implacable hatred of his daughter, incoherent: it is “against common sense, irrational, absurd, nonsensical” (i: 549). Since he cannot accept Cenci's action as anything other than that of a madman, Scott's negative reaction to the play is in perfect accord with his principle that literature should represent human nature: Cenci is not representative, therefore he should not be the subject of drama. Later in the review, however, Scott provides another key to his reaction, one more directly political. Scott seems particularly disturbed that Shelley so clearly connects unthinkable crimes with authority. He seems anxious lest this association might, in the revolutionary social climate of 1820, be taken as the norm. This danger is heightened by the power of the play: despite the unthinkable horror of the subject, it is almost redeemed by the “uncommon force of poetical sentiment, and very considerable purity of poetical style” (i: 550).

After this manifestation of concern for the “splendid fictions” of authority, Scott turns to Edgeworth's Memoirs, a choice calculated to continue the scrutiny of father-daughter relations begun in the review of The Cenci. He begins by doubting the utility and tact of criticism in such instances as this, in which a daughter zealously praises her father; he wonders if such interested appraisals as Maria Edgeworth's can be accurate. In asking if any daughter can judge her father with objectivity, Scott comments subtly on Beatrice. He implies that her eventual actions prejudice her case against her father—a murderer's accusation is unacceptable. Scott praises Maria Edgeworth's talent lavishly, showing great Scott reads this particular diversionary tactic as a sign that Burke's “wisdom without reflection” still survives. Throughout the number, in his own writings and in those of his contributors, Scott articulates an intense desire for escape. It is to this need that Lamb's first essay offers an eloquent answer.

“The South Sea House” begins with a description of the antiquated, deserted edifice—the empty shell of a great commercial enterprise “where dollars and pieces of eight ounce lay, an ‘unsunned heap,’ for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart withal” (ii: 142). Significantly, this lament for the vibrant life of yesterday admits of other, less nostalgic, considerations: the firm was involved in a “Bubble” of speculation, a “tremendous hoax” which present investors look back upon with “incredulous admiration” and “hopeless ambition of rivalry” (ii: 142). Given the past “fret and fever of speculation” and the present turbulence of the commercial houses nearby, its desuetude becomes a symbol of escape: Elia, as he evokes it, finds “charm in thy quiet:—a cessation—a coolness from business” (ii: 143). This relief is paralleled, even intensified, by Elia's recollection of his own activity there as clerk. He thinks of massive account books at which he toiled, but “can look upon these defunct dragons with complacency.” The respite from the pressures of business is both public and personal. From the safe distance of the present, Elia recalls and describes the other clerks, remarking in each case how each managed to escape his lot. Elia sketches the cashier Evans, in whom the small salary of the South Sea House produces a “hypochondry” in which he imagines himself a defaulter. “Melancholy as a gib-cat over his counter all the forenoon,” performing his accounts with “tremulous fingers,” he is slowly transformed during the day, reaching his “meridian of animation” during the hour of tea and visiting. Only then does he expand into the “dear old bachelor” whose visits animate the homes of several families. Evans's financial stress is shared by his deputy, Thomas Tame, and he too manages a compensatory escape. Though impoverished, he and his wife claim descent from nobility “by some labyrinth of relationship,” and this consciousness of breeding becomes a means of finding a slim contentment:

This was the thought—the sentiment—the bright solitary star of your lives,—ye mild and happy pair,—which cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station! this was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering attainments: and it was worth them all together. You insulted none with it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it.

(ii: 144)

These portraits of humiliations transmuted are followed by more absolute methods of escape. John Tipp manifests a complete separation of home and office; Elia presents him as the consummate actor playing the role of accountant.¹⁴ Henry Man finds relief in writing. Plumer transforms his illegitimacy into a pretension toward blue-blood. Elia recalls M——, significantly singing “that song sung by Amiens to the banished Duke, which proclaims the winter wind more lenient than for a man to be ungrateful” (ii: 145-46). Elia's reveries concern less the matter of fact conditions of the lives of his co-workers than the complex mechanisms of sublimation they employ against real humiliations. The essay is a study in alienation overcome by eccentric defenses.¹⁵

The attraction of this kind of whimsical evasion for Scott needs little explanation. The essay takes the reader from the unacceptable present to an idealized past. The sublimations and compensations of the clerks are, for Scott, triumphs. His allusion to this essay in his review of Keats's Lamia in the next number emphatically praises Lamb's “fair and clear impression from facts”—that is, the essay provides an adequate response to problems which are, in Scott's mind, intractable. It does no good to resist or complain about one's lot, be it the wear and tear of a marginal job or a distasteful political situation. At this particular political moment, evasion is the path to happiness.

Scott returns—albeit indirectly—to this point later in the August number. His “Living Authors, No. 3” takes up Godwin's work and thought. While praising Godwin's tenacity and perspicacity in pursuing political and social abuses, Scott nevertheless finds his political criticisms pointless. Clearly, Godwin fails to provide what Elia does so abundantly—relief and comfort. Unlike Elia, he fails to see the whole man or the whole of the situation:

For the harmony of union he seems to have little feeling: to the softening and reacting springs of conduct; the modifying influences; the preserving, and redeeming guards and checks; in short, to all that lessens dead weight, and breaks collision in the moral machinery of the world, he is almost insensible. He delights in simple principles, and undivided forces.

(ii: 163)

For Scott, the slightness and the whimsical grace of Elia's contribution—their superficial irrelevance to social and political conditions—are a reflex of their historical moment, and their complicated play of nostalgia and reminiscence a cogent resolution of social and political contradiction.

As the situation of the Queen worsened, so did Scott's mood in the “Lion's Head”; the October number provides more anxious commentary than convivial growls. Scott reports that the Regent's credibility has sunk very low indeed: even the French—the constant butt of Scott's wit—consider his claims hypocritical. This marks a new danger to civil order:

Whether the English manners and national character will ever recover from the shock they have received, is doubtful; and the blow given to them may be a fatal one to the Monarchy.

(ii: 364)

Scott's response, as one might expect, is to weight the magazine with articles that indirectly promote a respect for tradition, continuity, and the past. Elia's “Oxford in the Vacation,” which directly follows the “Lion's Head,” eloquently furthers these aims. As in his previous essay, Elia displays the recognition of the “realities of life” so central to Scott's politics. Elia returns to the topic of his clerking occupation, terming it a necessary “relaxation” from his literary pursuits. His levity, however, is not easily maintained; the very real constraints of clerking are apparent in Elia's discussion. He acknowledges the truth of the impression given the reader from the previous essay, that Elia is “a notched and cropped scrivener—one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill” (ii: 365). Although Elia's depiction suggests contentment or at least resignation, one cannot fail to see that these are the triumph of will over circumstance. We are surely close here to the “subtext of desperation” (47) seen by McFarland in the essays; the essay offers two interpretations of Elia's working life. The whimsical charm of Elia's contention that “the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the setting up of an author” (ii: 365) predominates in the essay, but the grinding reality reflected in Lamb's letters is also present.

More attractive to Scott would have been Elia's other remedies. This is not an essay about drudgery; it is an essay about the escape from drudgery. Arbitrary, whimsical charm becomes, for Scott, a readable code. Through it, Elia negotiates the dangerous shoals of the working day, and then sets a course for the open waters of holidays and vacation expeditions. Again, Scott's criticisms of Godwin provide a context for his preference of Elia. Among Godwin's shortcomings as a thinker are, in Scott's opinion, that he fails to consider the inextricability of good and evil. Elia's mingling of the two makes his essay less sentimental than deeply philosophical. Seeing man, as Scott insists, “in the totality of his nature” produces a consoling recognition of a “picturesque variety of phenomena” that displaces real and present pain (ii: 166). Essential to his triumph over the vicissitudes of the work day is Elia's subtle mingling of the occupations of clerk and scholar. Red letter days are “bright visitations to both,” and they allow him the opportunity to “play the gentlemen, enact the student” on a visit to Oxford. Scott must have caught the reference to Lamb's keen educational disappointments in such remarks as “To such a one as myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a few idle weeks at, as one or other of the Universities” (ii: 366). But to say, as McFarland does, that the whimsical charm of such moments rises “from the abyss” (26), while true for Charles Lamb, perhaps misses what Scott and his contemporaries saw in it. To a reader like Scott, whose disposition was more accepting of society's checks and limitations on the individual, the essay presents a reconciliation based on a buoyant embrace of complexity and contradiction, the “impression from facts” for which he praises Elia in the Keats review.

The essay's progress toward the penetralia of antiquarian and scholarly feeling—embodied in the discovery of George Dyer absorbed in back-breaking, unappreciated hackwork in “a nook at Oriel”—allows Elia a moment of reflection on the past:

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, are every thing! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity—then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou called'st it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! the mighty future is nothing, being every thing! the past is every thing, being nothing!

(ii: 366)

Such sentiments mesh with Scott's political and social perspectives nicely, registering simultaneously the allure of the past and the unacceptibility of the present. Nor would Elia's recognition of the “mystery” involved in the past's attraction prove problematic for the editor—his pragmatic view of the past can easily assimilate questions about the arbitrary nature of a tradition. Scott was far less interested in the past as it was than in the past as it presented itself for use. Elia's preference for print over manuscripts, which he states in a footnote to the essay, echoes this acceptance of tradition as final: “There is something to me repugnant, at any time, in written hand. The text never seems determinate. Print settles it” (ii: 367). Elia's antiquarianism tends toward use, not the recovery of absolute origin.

Scott continues this strategy of avoiding the present by means of a backward glance at an idealized past in the number's next articles, “Old Stories” and Proctor's imitation of Elia, “The Cider Cellar.” Although he returns throughout the number to the topic of the past, Scott is most forthright (predictably) in his review of Walter Scott's The Abbot. The review, after a quick dismissal of the novel as a comparative failure, moves to a consideration of the novelist's future direction:

We have heard it said for him, that he still had the past, the present, and the future:—of the present, we would advise him to beware: we do not see very well what he could do with the future—it is a comfortless prospect, and our sympathies recoil from it. But the past is human nature itself, removed to its far point of sight, and its suggestions are endless.

(ii: 428)

This social and political outlook ratifies Elia's whimsical antiquarianism as a welcome, even essential escape.

The November number of the London continues in much the same pessimistic vein, as Scott's sense of crisis over Caroline's trial deepens. His “Lion's Head” as well as the “Historical and Critical Summary” both move gloomily over the political situation. At first glance the lead article in the number seems to take, as did the articles of the previous number, another tack. “The Literature of the Nursery” surveys current trends in children's books and finds them uniformly appalling: “Innovation has made fearful progress in the child's library; and to no purpose, we verily think, but a bad one” (ii: 479). Scott laments the passing of the oral tradition of nursery songs, now all printed. When they can be read “one may be … sure that they have lost their empire in their proper sphere” (ii: 482). Similar depredations have been made on children's books: the old fashioned style of illustration has given way to what Scott terms “flashy” modern technique. Modern illustration, however more exact, does not encourage the “sense of mystery conveyed by the undefined” (ii: 482) that the admittedly poor representations of the past did. Its overcolorful prints teach children to prefer illustration to nature, and the results of such education are predictable for a social critic like Scott:

A sickly, bad taste in mature age is the natural result of these overcharged displays to youth: they affect the whole train of thinking and feeling throughout afterlife; for nature can never have her due and delightful effect on any mind that is not allowed to grow up in just allegiance to her power.

(ii: 483)

Such personal shortcomings have national effects as well. Such education in youth accustoms mature minds to run to excess—the public interest in the details of the investigation of the Queen is a case in point.¹⁶

Scott continues this line of argument in a subtle way by allowing Elia to take it up. Rather than bludgeoning his readership with this interpretation, he suggests it by careful placement of essays. Lamb's “Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago” follows Scott's denunciation of modern innovation. What Scott presented theoretically, Elia's recollections embody practically. The essay presents a remarkable admixture of pleasure and pain, of sympathy and sadism. Bad food, punishments, enforced whole-day leaves, bitter cold, arbitrary discipline, thieving cooks, and the fantastic pampering of a concealed animal form the basis of this essay, which claims to be a correction of the misrepresentations in another essay, one by Charles Lamb. The fact that the ideal past is evoked in the form of a correction of a too favorable account suggests much about the dynamic of displacement: “ideal” is what satisfies the desire for the ideal at a particular moment. The greyness of the recollection echoes Scott's strictures on childhood education in the previous article without directly calling attention to them.

Scott emphasizes this loss of the proper educational tradition by paralleling it with other losses. The next article, “Old Stories, No. iii,” returns to the Middle Ages to praise its manners and loyalty indirectly but no less clearly. This story's return to the past, as the returns in Scott's evaluation of nursery stories and in Elia's depiction of the good old ways of childhood education, stresses the bonds of the social order. Scott manages to capitalize on the character he has given this number in a later article, his famous attack on Blackwood's Magazine. That the success of Blackwood's is a product of “sickly, bad taste” is evident in his reference to its articles' “pungency … like that of the trash they sell in the common liquor-shops under the name of brandy—which is seasoned with burning poison to recommend it to the diseased taste of drabs and dustmen” (ii: 511-12).

Scott's most felicitous pairing of essays, however, is his last one. In the February 1821 number, he follows one of his most cogent assessments of the political scene in England, “The Signs of the Times,” with one of Elia's finest essays, “Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist.” Scott, in a characteristically Burkean-Coleridgean key, sees the restoration of tradition as the only hope for the current political crisis:

we must have rank and title again seen forward, and adventurous, and triumphant, in behalf of Justice, and Truth, and Morals, and Independence … We must look again to our natural political guardians. At some recent county meetings, the people have shown a disposition to do so, and we hail the first symptoms of this return to their old confidence, as indications of a cheering nature, streaking the general gloom of our political horizon.

(iii: 161)

His essay functions as a prosy gloss to Elia's play of recollection, emotion and sentiment. Lamb presents a purely formal world of struggle, the card game, in which human instincts for gaming are safely roused and satisfied. The “temporary illusion” of the card table represents a little world of durable, lasting play enmity. Rank, order, and degree are here givens; they are not subject to vertiginous speculation. Here rank holds to its ceremonial functions; no unseemly private details undermine authority and precedence. A strict rationalist, Mrs. Battle questions the arbitrary elements in cards. Preferring that things be settled absolutely, she finds naming trumps by turning a card disagreeable. But Elia meets this contradiction with an ingenious bit of special pleading for the charms of what he terms “variety.” The arbitrary features of the rules and the look of the game are not to be discounted:

All these might be dispensed with; and, with their naked names upon the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very well, pictureless. But the beauty of cards would be extinguished for ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, they must degenerate into mere gambling.—Imagine a dull deal board, or drum head, to spread them on, instead of that nice verdant carpet (next to nature's), fittest arena for those courtly combatants to play their gallant jousts and tourneys in!

(iii: 163)

Mrs. Battle's reaction—“The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my logic” (iii: 163)—testifies to the efficacy of the Elian resolution of contradiction in the kingdom of cards. His argument forms an obvious parallel to Scott's earlier discussions of the value of viable ceremony in maintaining the “splendid fictions” of the monarchy. The essay ends with a glimpse of an even more private world: Mrs. Battle's card parties give way to the more secluded pleasures of “sick whist” between Bridget and Elia. The meditative, recessive turn of the essay, so often seen as autobiographic and idiosyncratic, takes on a wider application as both commentary on as well as relief from the contemporary political scene. Scott's bracketing of the two essays is a subtle reminder of the subterranean workings of politics in the essays: Elia's ironic displacement of political struggle to the little world of cards solves or at least fends off a political problem by symbolic means.

To clarify the interpretive difference provided by this context, we might briefly recall Donald Reiman's new critical treatment of “Mrs. Battle's Opinions.” Reiman finds the essay expressive of a more timeless concern: “the elevation of sports and games as symbols or parallels of human life's serious occupations” (474). While this doesn't exclude political considerations, it admits them in an abstract, ahistorical way—not at all with the particular urgency felt by Scott in 1820 and 1821. Ultimately, Reiman finds value in Elia's creation of “a symbol-world through which he could explore universal human problems in a truly imaginative way” (478). Such an assessment, while perfectly consonant with the textual tradition inaugurated by the 1823 and 1833 collections of the essays, all but erases the original scene of reception, in which “universal” human problems took the form of a frightening (at least to the readers of the London) popular cynicism about monarchal prerogatives and claims to respect. It also disregards the more ominous features of Elia's special pleading for the arbitrary rankings of cards. Elia, while unconvinced himself, convinces Mrs. Battle of the beauty of the status quo in the world of cards; similarly, Scott, while aware of the manifest shortcomings of the royal family, would be happy to restore popular “old confidence” in these “natural political guardians.” Equally intriguing is the appeal to art—here painting—in Elia's persuasion of Mrs. Battle. A glance at John Scott's reviews of the Waverley Novels provides a suggestive parallel: he rarely omits consideration of Walter Scott's art as an instrument for maintaining the “splendid fictions” of the monarchy and of society in general.

V

John Scott's editorship ended with his death in February 1821, but we can deduce much from the interpretations he gave the first Elia essays.¹⁷ Scott's bibliographic coding allows us to reconstruct a context which suggests that, at least for some of the first readers, the personal and autobiographical aspects of the Elia essays explored by later critics have a social and political component, one not so much to be teased out by a critical social reading such as that of Praz, but one readily available as a kind of editorial packaging. From this perspective the Elia essays are a conscious reaction to particular historical pressures; Elia's famous evasion of such issues is a gesture that contemporaries could read. Thus the strategies of personal consolation explored by such critics as Barnett, Frank, Randel, and McFarland can be read as public strategies for resolving the contradictions and pressures of the current political crises.

Three consequences follow from this analysis. First, by turning our eyes from the putative originary moment in which Lamb produced the essays to Scott's productive linking of them to a specific historical situation, we uncover a wealth of information about the reception of not only Lamb's essays but romantic works generally. Janusz Sławiński, in a compact account of the reorientation forced on literary history by various reception theories, has located a tension between the historian's expansive project and the narrow range of documents available:

The literary historian obviously tries in various ways to break through the individualism and one-time, incidental nature of such testimonies to discover the underlying standards of literary reception. Sometimes he succeeds, and with interesting results. The problem, however, is that these underlying standards still do not reach beyond the expert level.¹⁸

Scott's editorial activities offer a more reliable measure of these underlying standards of reception. Scott's market-wise decisions, especially when read against his own “expert” readings in numerous essays and reviews, are invaluable to a reception history that wishes to map responses other than those of eminent readers.

Secondly, we are encouraged to entertain a new conception of what constitutes the text of the Elia essays. Scott's editorial procedures are not simply a frame for Lamb's work; they are an expansion of the work itself, a part of the text as it was first received. In redrawing the boundary between Elia and the London itself, we must adopt a more complex notion of the morphology of the work, as well as a more complex sense of the textuality of such magazines. There are two moments and two texts for the Elia essays: one constituted by the 1823 and 1833 collections and subsequently enshrined by an idealist textual tradition; the other the product of the individual numbers and the very different textuality of the London.¹⁹

This textual situation brings us to the third consequence of such an analysis of the Elia essays: the implications for literary history. The two moments, two texts, and two textualities of the essays produce different readings. The historical specificities apparent in the Scott/Lamb London text tend, in Elia and the Last Essays of Elia, to fade into more timeless concerns—concerns articulated very well in the new critical interpretations of Haven, Reiman, Mulcahy, and Frank. Read in a collection, the essays prove more amenable to parallels with the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In this format the view of the essays as embodying an attenuated, domesticated romanticism becomes more valid. Nor does Pater's ecstatic championship of Lamb (“In the making of prose he realizes the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats in the making of verse”)²⁰ seem particularly far-fetched in a context shorn of the crises and political anxieties of 1820. Hence a literary history must consider this double strain in the reception of the Elia essays: a dominant idealist tradition inaugurated by the collections, and a largely neglected tradition bound up with the equally neglected question of the role of literary magazines in literary history. Critical models based on production and representation (and the consequent focus on the author) need to give way—not so much to readerly theories stressing reception and impact, but to a flexible combination of these two approaches that takes into account the mutual conditioning of each by the other.

We will see Lamb and Elia more clearly if we accept what the publishing history of the essays bluntly suggests: that the essays are intended in two ways—as an intertextually oriented part of a magazine, and as the self-contained prose poems admired by readers of his two collections. Certainly such a complex orientation fits the ambiguity of Lamb's—and Elia's—authorial stance. The irony that the Friend of the Late Elia attributes to Elia's “doubtful speeches” aptly figures the political dimension of the essays:

He would interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in the ears that could understand it.²¹

In Scott's ears, the essays had a political relevance, and his determined use of them in The London Magazine asks that we re-think the critical tradition of the Elia essays. And in doing so, we may develop the ears not only for the inflections given to romantic texts by contemporary editors and readers, but for those given by the ideological and editorial practices of subsequent critics.

Notes

1. Mario Praz, Hero in Eclipse, trans. Angus Davidson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1956) 65.

2. George Barnett, The Evolution of Elia (New York: Haskell House, 1973). Robert Frank, Don't Call Me Gentle Charles (Corvallis: Oregon State UP, 1976). Fred Randel, The World of Elia (Port Washington: Kennikat P, 1975). Gerald Monsman, Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer (Durham: Duke UP, 1984).

3. Richard Haven, “The Romantic Art of Charles Lamb” ELH [Journal of English Literary History] 30 (1963): 137-46. Donald Reiman, “Thematic Unity in Lamb's Familiar Essays” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology] 64 (1965): 470-78. Daniel Mulcahy, “Charles Lamb: The Antithetical Manner and the Two Planes” SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900] 3 (1963): 517-42.

4. William Flesch, “‘Friendly and Judicious’ Reading: Affect and Irony in the Works of Charles Lamb” SiR [Studies in Romanticism] 23 (1984): 163-83. Thomas McFarland, Romantic Cruxes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987) 25-52.

5. See Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970) 74-77, for a short but astute assessment of Lamb's political views. Winifred Courteney's Young Charles Lamb (Hong Kong: Macmillan, 1982) contains a chapter on his politics.

6. Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) 23.

7. Josephine Bauer, The London Magazine, 1820-1829 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1953) 94.

8. Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1930).

9. The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (Boston: Little, Brown, 1894) iii: 274-75.

10. Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972) 127.

11. The London Magazine, 10 vols. (London: Baldwin, Cradock, & Joy, 1820-25) i: 176.

12. John Scott, “To Robt. Baldwin,” 9 Nov. 1819, Holman Clippings, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. One of six typescripts of Scott's correspondence with Baldwin.

13. Biographia Literaria, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) i: 192.

14. This portrait anticipates Dickens's Wemmick. Gordon Spence has studied some of Dickens's debts to Lamb in Charles Dickens as a Familiar Essayist (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977).

15. McFarland makes this point in his chapter on Lamb in Romantic Cruxes.

16. The proximity of this social analysis to that of Wordsworth in the Preface is striking.

17. After Scott's death, the editorial duties were taken up by the new owner of the magazine, Robert Taylor. Although he had several well-qualified men at hand—Hazlitt and Cary to name two—Taylor chose to edit the London himself. By the end of 1821 he had driven off many contributors, and the magazine never recovered (See Bauer, 80-91). With Scott's death, the elaborate coding of articles ended as well.

18. Janusz Sławiński, “Reading and Reader in the Literary Historical Process” New Literary History 19 (1988): 538.

19. Neither Elia nor the Last Essays sold particularly well. Lamb held that Southey's famous review, which claimed that the work “wanted a sounder religious feeling,” injured the sales. This seems feeble. I would argue that as their success in the London owed much to the intertextual situation created by Scott, so did their relative failure in the 1823 and 1833 editions stem from their removal from this context. Later in the century audiences were prepared to read Lamb in the relentlessly autobiographical and personal mode that the 1823 and 1833 texts encourage, and their popularity rose accordingly. (See 299 ff. of volume 2 of Lucas' edition of Works for some remarks on the publishing history of Elia and Last Essays.)

20. Walter Pater, Appreciations (New York: Macmillan, 1910) 112.

21. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 5 vols. (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1903) ii: 152.