SOURCE: Wedd, Mary R. “That Dangerous Figure—Irony.” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s., 73 (January 1991): 1-12.

[In the following essay, Wedd discusses Lamb's subtle and complex use of irony in his Elian essay “Poor Relations.”]

Irony, the Oxford Dictionary tells us, is a ‘Figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used’, often ‘taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to imply condemnation or contempt’; as when Swift put forward ‘A Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burden to their Parents or the Country …’—by using them as meat. ‘I grant’, says Swift, ‘this food will be somewhat dear but never mind, the rich can afford it’. As readers are reputed to have believed implicitly in Gulliver and written letters to him, is it perhaps possible today for a market-economy-based politician to consider quite seriously Swift's ‘Modest Proposal’ if other measures already taken do not have the required result?

As this example from Swift demonstrates, irony can easily misfire where writer and reader do not share the same set of values and Lamb was well aware of this. If you aim to condemn an action by praising it, you may end by being believed. This is particularly so when the device is used with great variety and subtlety, as it often is by Lamb. ‘With the severe religionist he would pass for a free-thinker; while the other faction set him down for a bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few understood him; and I am not certain that at all times he quite understood himself. He too much affected that dangerous figure—irony’. He may have known himself better than he says but others are still misunderstanding him. Lamb is still making fools of us.

It is a telling trick that he plays on us, for example, when after a long passage of concealment, suddenly he allows his true feelings to come out. But he has been working up to this by skilful manipulation of our responses until he has us ready for the change. Wayne Booth asks, ‘Where then do we stop in our search for ironic pleasures?’ and comments, ‘many of the great personal essayists provide experience in the art of deciding when to stop; that is, they provide subtle mixtures that require us to shift gears constantly and skilfully’. (A Rhetoric of Irony p.185) Consider the essay ‘Poor Relations’.

In the first sentence ‘A Poor Relation’ is not regarded as a person but a ‘thing’, ‘the most irrelevant thing in nature’ and this continues throughout the first paragraph. That splendid phrase conveys that by an accident he happens to be connected to us by blood. Nature has lumbered us with him, but in any central concerns of his better-off relations he has no place. This is succeeded by a list of similarly dehumanizing epithets, whose wit temporarily blinds us to their callousness. Have not we all wondered sometimes at the way persons linked by family seem to have nothing in common? ‘An impertinent correspondency’ is a neat oxymoron (‘figure of speech with pointed conjunction of seeming contradictories’ O.E.D.). ‘Impertinent’ keeps its primary sense of ‘unrelated to the matter in hand’ while ‘correspondency’ implies close congruity. This is reinforced by ‘an odious approximation’ which indicates an undeniable link—which we wish did not exist. We do not want to be distracted from our ‘getting and spending’ by ‘a haunting conscience’, a ghost at our table. The word ‘preposterous’ Lamb uses in its original etymological sense from Latin ‘pre’, before, and ‘post’, after, meaning here as regards time ‘back to front’ or ‘hindforemost’, so that ‘a preposterous shadow’ is one that comes when it should be least in evidence ‘in the noontide of your prosperity’ instead of lengthening in the evening. It is a kind of memento mori, ‘an unwelcome remembrancer’, as well as a financial drain. Of course, I need not say that, with Lamb's love of puns, both ‘impertinent’ and ‘preposterous’ have their usual denigratory meanings as well.

To pay your debts of consanguinity by means of ‘your purse’ is bad enough but there is ‘a more intolerable dun—upon your pride’. The Poor Relation takes the pleasure out of your success in achieving comparative wealth and status, he is ‘a rebuke to your rising’ and rubs in the social depths from which you have come. Then Lamb's list develops into a series of literary and biblical references which at first one takes at face value. Ostensibly they demonstrate what a nuisance the Poor Relation is. However, as soon as you pay attention to the context of these allusions you find that they tend to render the pet pretensions of the nouveau riche ultimately ridiculous. ‘A stain in your blood’ and ‘a blot on your scutcheon’ suggest aristocratic ancestry, which is clearly not the case here. In the Bible, when any one, such as Mordecai mentioned later, rends his garment, it is a sign of great grief, sometimes of repentance, as in Joel (2 v.13), where we are adjured to ‘rend your heart, and not your garments’. At the same time as this echo is faintly heard at the back of our minds, we are also thinking, ‘But how shocking if, like a Poor Relation, we really had holes in our clothes!’ So the ambivalence of feeling is beautifully conveyed by Lamb in ‘a rent in your garment’.

‘A death's head at your banquet’ again threatens one's security in prosperity and conjures up memories of Belshazzar's Feast. Agathocles rose to be tyrant of Syracuse, but his father was a potter, so ‘Agathocles' pot’ is a reminder of humble origins. In the book of Esther (3 v.2) ‘all the king's servants, that were in the king's gate, bowed, and reverenced Haman: for the king had so commanded concerning him. But Mordecai bowed not, nor did him reverence’. Nor will your Poor Relation, ‘a Mordecai at your gate’, do to you, for he knows exactly what you are. Lazarus, the poor man ‘at your door’, went to heaven, while the rich man Dives went to hell and between them ‘there is a great gulf fixed’ (Luke 16 v.26). The disobedient prophet in 1 Kings 13 (v.24) was repaid for his failure when ‘a lion met him by the way, and slew him’ and it was Pharaoh's obduracy that brought upon him the plague of frogs, which even came ‘into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed’ (Exodus 8 v.3). All these disasters, to which Lamb compares the Poor Relation, were brought upon the victims by their own wrongdoing. Perhaps, though, our sins are a little more venial than those of Dives, the prophet or Pharaoh. ‘A fly in your ointment’ reminds us that ‘Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honour’. (Ecclesiastes 10 v.1) Only ‘a little folly’ and Lamb lets us off with ‘a mote in your eye’ though it is by now beginning to look more like a beam! (Matthew 7 v.3)

A ‘Poor Relation’ is ‘a triumph to your enemy’ who can crow over you for having such a one in your house and even to your friends you have to apologize for him. He is ‘the hail in harvest’, says Elia, remembering Proverbs (26 v.1). ‘As snow in summer, and as rain in harvest, so honour is not seemly for a fool’. This is not the first time that Lamb's allusions have hinted that it may not be the poor relation who is the fool. Spenser writes that ‘A dram of sweet is worth a pound of sour’ (Faerie Queen I.iii.30) but Lamb implies that ‘the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet’ is capable of embittering the whole. Perhaps the culminating irony in this passage is the phrase, ‘the one thing not needful’. Poor Martha, ‘cumbered about with much serving’ (Luke 10 v.40-42), was told ‘But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her’. Modern scholars see it differently but it was always, until recently, taken to mean that the one thing needful was not only the realization that Martha only needed to serve one dish but also that Mary had found the true necessity in listening to the words of Jesus. His words in that chapter, immediately before his visit to the sisters, are the parable of ‘The Good Samaritan’. So, in calling the Poor Relation ‘the one thing not needful’ Lamb not only records what at times we all feel but subliminally condemns us for it.

For, of course, as we read this first paragraph superficially, we smile and register that Lamb is humourously overdoing it a bit perhaps but really just recording what everyone knows to be true. We cannot deny that we have all at some time pretended not to see or crossed the road to avoid someone who is to us, as Lamb had it in his version of this essay in The London Magazine in 1823, ‘the bore par excellence’. Such natural human weakness he seems to condone. Yet there is a sub-text working away subversively by the choice of words and allusions to undermine what he appears to be saying and to prepare us for his later ‘coming clean’.

As the change in style and the use of the verb-ending ‘eth’ indicate, the second paragraph modulates into a conscious imitation of a seventeenth century Theophrastian ‘Character’,¹ which is still a type rather than an individual and which describes a catalogue of failings. ‘He is known by his knock’. Which of us has not felt his heart sink on hearing the front-door bell, or more often nowadays that hatefully insistent summons of the telephone? We know that to answer it will mean a drain on us, a tedium, but we determine to grin and bear it. For years I had pinned to the wall beside my telephone some poignant words of Somerset Maugham's:

I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, and it's important, the matter is more often important to him than to you.

(Cakes and Ale p.1)

Perhaps on a rare occasion one has cooked a complicated meal and has just triumphantly served it. One sits down to eat it and is promptly hoisted up again like a terrified jack-in-the-box by an explosion of harsh sound. One lifts the receiver and chews one's first, and only, mouthful as one listens—and listens—and listens—and the food congeals on the plate. Or one is just reaching the crux of some obdurate piece of work, or one is at the climax of a play on radio or television, and at the very moment when all will be revealed the fatal interruption comes. Just so does the Poor Relation appear at the most inconvenient time and cause the maximum of disruption.

Oh yes, so far Lamb has us entirely, if somewhat guiltily, with him. Indeed the unwanted guests's behaviour seems utterly repellant. How devastatingly accurate is Elia's observation of those who feel themselves to be inferiour and under an obligation, yet whose needs are imperative and whose longing for unaccustomed comfort will not be denied. Our very recognition of their plight, which makes us accede to them, is a trigger for an obscure irritation:

A rap, between familiarity and respect; that demands, and, at the same time, seems to despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling, and—embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and—draweth it back again.

The Poor Relation chooses to call, not on the days when the hostess has an ‘at home’ day and expects people to drop in, but when she has a formal dinner-party with carefully even numbers of invited guests, or on a birthday which he has remembered but pretends to have hit on by accident. ‘He offereth to go away, seeing you have company—but is induced to stay’. The Poor Relation's knowledge that he is de trop forces him to try awkwardly to refuse hospitality, but he cannot keep it up.

He declareth against fish, the turbot being small—yet suffereth himself to be importuned into a slice against his first resolution.

By doing so he draws attention to the fact that your provision for this course was inadequate:

He sticketh by the port—yet will be prevailed upon to empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him.

‘Remainder’ used as an adjective with food occurs in Shakespeare with the strong association of something cast-off, worthless and undesirable. In (II.vii.39) As You Like It, for example, Jacques speaks of the fool's brain as ‘dray as the remainder biscuit / After a voyage’ and in Troilus and Cressida, where food imagery is frequently used to convey sexual disgust, Troilus argues against returning Helen to the Greeks, saying we do not throw away ‘the remainder viands … / Because we now are full’. (II.ii.69) So the Poor Relation justifies his acceptance of the glass of wine because it is both inferior and unwanted, like himself. He can accept it from ‘a stranger’, one of his fellow-guests, as he would hesitate to do from his kinsman. Guests and servants do not know what to make of him:

Every one speculateth upon his condition; and the most part take him to be—a tide-waiter.

A tide-waiter was a Customs Officer who boarded ships as they came in on the tide and Jonathan Bate notes ‘one who waits to see how things go before acting’ as an extension of the meaning here, Lamb making one of his favourite plays upon words:

He calleth you by your Christian name, to imply that his other is the same with your own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less diffidence. With half the familiarity he might pass for a casual dependent; with more boldness he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He is too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more state than befits a client. He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent—yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanour, that your guests take him for one.

What a marvellously subtle piece of irony this is! Which side are we meant to be on? Not the Poor Relation's, whose attitudes, despite our better feelings, make us shudder. As we discover later on, Lamb has no patience with such excessive awareness of inferiority. But not the class-conscious host's, either, in his jumped-up grandeur.

The Poor Relation will not join in a card-game because he is too poor to play for money. He ‘refuseth on the score of poverty, and—resents being left out’:

When the company break up, he proffereth to go for a coach—and lets the servant go.

With what devastating effect Lamb repeats that construction throughout this paragraph; statement, pause represented by a dash, and reversal. In a similar way he balances his sentences with antitheses: ‘… too familiar … yet … less diffidence’; ‘With half the familiarity … with more boldness …’; ‘too humble … yet … more state’. It is comic in the telling because so recognizable but in real life such behaviour is unbearable. What a horror of a man! And yet … and yet … ? Are you beginning to feel a bit sorry for him? Are you wondering whether you yourself have not upon occasion acted similarly in a like predicament?

At the end of this paragraph the Poor Relation's tactless reminders of the family's previous lowliness and the contrast with your present affluence remind you of just what you want to forget. ‘His memory is unseasonable’:

He recollects your grandfather; and will thrust in some mean, and quite unimportant anecdote of—the family. He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as ‘he is blest in seeing it now’. He reviveth past situations, to institute what he calleth—favourable comparisons. With a reflecting sort of congratulation, he will enquire the price of your furniture; and insults you with a special commendation of your window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape, but, after all, there was something more comfortable about the old tea-kettle—which you must remember. He dare say you must find a great convenience in having a carriage of your own, and appealeth to your lady if it is not so.

The echoes of the man's direct speech, though mainly ostensibly in the third person, contribute to the exasperation we feel with him, the nasty insinuating creep! The newly acquired coat-of-arms is emphasized to embarrass you and he ‘did not know till lately, that such-and-such had been the crest of the family’, not surprising since it has only just been made so. Gradually we become aware that the underlying reason for the Poor Relation's being such a thorn in our flesh is that he is a living reproach to his hosts—and we begin to feel uneasy. To round off the virtuosity of the style of this paragraph the last sentence is beautifully constructed of a series of appositional clauses, at first short and elliptical like a list, then flowering out into a compound-complex sentence completing the careful rhythm of the whole. Lamb has certainly learnt from his seventeenth-century predecessors:

His memory is unseasonable; his compliments perverse; his talk a trouble; his stay pertinacious; and when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a corner, as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two nuisances.

How constantly in this paragraph we have been made to ‘shift gears’ and to doubt our own judgment.

The third paragraph, though still seemingly on the side of the unwilling host, increases our discomfort. We can pass off a male Poor Relation as an eccentric, Elia says, ‘But in the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice’. The irony here is verging on the painful, particularly if we remember Lamb's Essay ‘Modern Gallantry’ where he throws aside subterfuge and fiercely expresses his anger on behalf of women, particularly the plain, the old and the needy. Modern chivalry, he concludes, is ‘a conventional fiction’. But he will be prepared ‘to rank it among the salutary fictions of life, when in polite circles I shall see the same attentions paid to age as to youth, to homely features as to handsome, to coarse complexions as to clear—to the woman, as she is a woman, not as she is a beauty, a fortune, or a title’. It is not so in the case of the female Poor Relation. Again her own behaviour is amusingly described in all its irritating humility. ‘She is most provokingly humble and ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority’. Unlike her male counterpart she does not take unwelcome liberties. ‘He may require to be repressed sometimes—aliquando suffaminandus erat—but there is no raising her’. The Latin comment is adapted from that of Augustus Haterius, who spoke so quickly that he needed the brake put on.² The masculine Poor Relation makes too many tactless remarks. His feminine counterpart's faux pas is likely to be of the opposite kind. She is too subservient. It is not at all ‘the thing’ for a lady, however, humble, when at your table to beg ‘to be helped—after the gentlemen’. She is obviously a relation, yet disgraces you by not knowing how to behave. It is not in the least suitable for her to drink port with the men. Madeira would have been more appropriate to her sex and her circumstances. She does not know that one should ignore servants and never, never embarrass them by treating them with respect or consideration, which are only proper for gentlefolk. No wonder the ‘housekeeper patronizes her’ and ‘the children's governess takes upon her to correct her’. Just fancy not knowing the difference between an old-fashioned harpsichord and that new and vastly superior instrument the piano, just coming into fashion, whose presence in your drawing-room demonstrates that you have all the latest luxuries! It is like mistaking a compact disc for a 78 record. So what is she doing in your house? ‘She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin’: notice, your wife's, not yours. One recognizes the syndrome whereby, when the little ones are making a nuisance of themselves, one spouse says to the other, ‘Can't you control your children?’ At the end of ‘Modern Gallantry’ Lamb makes clear what he thinks of the man who is ‘the disparager and despiser’ of his ‘female aunt, or unfortunate—still female—maiden cousin’.

In the next paragraph Lamb again modulates into another key. Dick Amlet, played so incomparably by Jack Palmer according to the essay ‘On Some of the Old Actors’, in Vanburgh's play The Confederacy, was a rogue who aspired to pass himself off as a gentleman and marry an heiress. Unfortunately he had a common, though not in this case poor, relation in the shape of his mother. He was hampered, Lamb says, ‘by the malignant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling him “her son Dick”’. Nevertheless, as she was a successful pawnbroker, she was able in the end to endow him with £10,000 and he achieved his ambition. This reference to the play provides an effective transition and Lamb begins to ‘come clean’ and demonstrate what he really thinks of the harm done by nonsensical snobberies in destroying people's lives. ‘All men …’ he says, ‘are not of Dick's temperament. I knew an Amlet in real life, who, wanting Dick's buoyancy, sank indeed’.

Now, having prepared us for it throughout, Lamb suddenly reverses his viewpoint and we are ready to change sides, as it were, and see the situation through the eyes of the social inferior. Poor W—, as Lamb calls him, was really Robert Favell (1775-1812),³ who left Cambridge because he was ashamed of his father who was a house-painter there, so that, in a sense, this was another example of the embarrassment of having a poor relation, but it was more than this. It was the sense of his own social inferiority, as a charity-boy at Christ's Hospital or a sizar at Cambridge, which had already undermined him. Lamb is gentle with his memory but does suggest that W—'s plight was at least partly due to his own weakness.

Poor W—was of my own standing at Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth of promise. If he had a blemish, it was too much pride; but its quality was inoffensive; it was not of that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to keep inferiors at a distance; it only sought to ward off derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect carried as far as it could go, without infringing upon that respect, which he would have every one else equally maintain for himself. He would have you to think alike with him on this topic.

But Lamb refused to do so. This may not have been the class-consciousness of those who scorn inferiors but it was damaging and unnecessary all the same.

Many a quarrel have I had with him, when we were rather older boys, and our tallness made us more obnoxious to observation in the blue clothes, because I would not thrid the alleys and blind ways of the town with him to elude notice, when we have been out together on a holiday in the streets of this sneering and prying metropolis.

The last words of this passage indicate that Lamb was aware of hateful discrimination but he was determined not to pay it the compliment of being affected by it. This takes courage but is the only way to deal with it without being corrupted oneself. W—was a born scholar and ‘found shelter among books, which insult not’. One is reminded of Lamb's statement that, because of Mary's illness, ‘we are in a manner marked’ and of the ways he found to counter this. The pauper's gown, which to W—was a shirt of Nessus flaying him alive, had been worn with pride, Elia suggests, before him by such great men as Latimer, a sizar at Cambridge, and Hooker, a servitor at Oxford.⁴ Indeed there came a time when even W—began to relax. ‘The healing influence of studious pursuits was upon him, to soothe and to abstract. He was almost a healthy man’—when his father came to live and work actually in the city and to be employed by the university. Lamb explains the social circumstances which made this situation impossible. Despite his awareness of his friend's own weakness, Elia here sympathises with him entirely:

The temperament of W—'s father was diametrically the reverse of his own. Old W—was a little, busy, cringing tradesman, who, with his son upon his arm, would stand bowing and scraping, cap in hand, to anything that wore the semblance of a gown—insensible to the winks and opener remonstrances of the young man, to whose chamber-fellow, or equal in standing, perhaps, he was thus obsequiously and gratuitously ducking.

The narrator, finding his friend seeming ‘thoughtful and more reconciled’, tried to jolly him along and help him to be pleased at the growing success of his father as shown by ‘a representation of the Artist Evangelist, which the old man, whose affairs were beginning to flourish, had caused to be set up in a splendid sort of frame over his really handsome shop’. St. Luke was by tradition a painter, though as Frederick Page says, ‘not a house-painter!’ as well as a doctor. But the effect on W—was not what Elia expected. Lamb adapts lines from Paradise Lost (IV 1011-4), where Satan sees God's golden scales hung up and at ‘Yon celestial sign …’ he ‘lookt up and knew / His mounted scale aloft: nor more, but fled’. After the humour of this mock-heroic touch, Elia abandons entirely his ironic stance and tells how W—left university, joined up and was killed in the Peninsular War. Captain Robert Favell was indeed lost in this way, though at Salamanca in 1812, as Lamb tells us in ‘Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’, where he describes him as ‘ill capable of enduring the slights poor Sizars are sometimes subject to in our seats of learning’.

At length Elia disingenuously wonders ‘how, upon a subject which I began with treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital so eminently painful’ and points out the ‘tragic as well as comic associations’ of his theme, as, of course, he fully intended to do from the beginning. This leads in to his portrait of a real-life flesh-and-blood Poor Relation. Gone are the abstractions which alone can make the cruel generalisations of the early paragraphs possible. One is reminded again of Swift who said, ‘I have ever hated all nations, professions and communities; and all my love is towards individuals’.⁵ So the essay ends with a portrait of an individual which contrasts with the Theophrastian so-called Character of the second paragraph. Mr Billet has both a name and a personality.

For his purposes here Lamb again manipulates the point of view, seeing not through the adult's corrupted eyes but through the eyes of a child. ‘The earliest impressions which I received on this matter, are certainly not attended with anything painful, or very humiliating, in the recalling’. The reason begins at once to become clear. First we are told that Elia's father's table was ‘no very splendid one’, a contrast with the parvenue pomp of the family described earlier. Where there is no pretension there can be no consequent humiliation. Then the description of the guest, as the child observes him, is very different, ‘the mysterious figure of an aged gentleman, clothed in neat black, of a sad yet comely appearance’. The word ‘sad’ retains its sense of ‘sober-coloured’ and Lamb is remembering the Song of Solomon (I.v.5-6) ‘I am black, but comely’ and the request there not to despise the speaker for this dark hue. Nor does he. To the child the old gentleman is a focus for awe and respect. ‘His deportment was of the essence of gravity’. Unlike the Poor Relation earlier in the essay, he does not need a brake on his speech, ‘his words few or none’, and he is treated with special consideration. ‘I was not to make a noise in his presence. I had little inclination to have done so—for my cue was to admire in silence’. What a contrast Elia provides between the humiliation meted out to the Poor Relations in the pretentious home described earlier and the treatment received by Mr Billet. With what a bad grace the previous host sees his ‘visitor's two children … accommodated at a side table’ to make room for the Poor Relation, whose chair was banished with relief to a corner, thus getting ‘rid of two nuisances’, as soon as he was gone. For Mr Billet, on the contrary, ‘A particular elbow chair was appropriated to him, which was in no case to be violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which appeared on no other occasion, distinguished the days of his coming. I used to think him a prodigiously rich man’. This was partly because of the child's confusion of work at the Mint with ownership of it! But the implication is that it was as much because of the old man's privileged position in the house. Because the Mint was on Tower Hill, the little boy imagined Mr Billet as imprisoned there and only let out on Saturdays. This, of course, explained his ‘eternal suit of mourning’ and pervaded him with ‘A sort of melancholy grandeur’. Note, instead of grudged left-overs, a special sweet is provided.

‘He and my father had been schoolfellows a world ago at Lincoln’ and

Often have I wondered at the temerity of my father, who, in spite of an habitual general respect which we all in common manifested towards him, would venture now and then to stand up against him in some argument, touching their youthful days.

On the hostility of the Above Boys and the Below Boys at Lincoln—the only topic ‘upon which the old gentleman was ever brought out’—‘many and hot were the skirmishes’. Though in reality Lamb's father probably left Lincoln at quite an early age, the mythology of this warfare obviously flourished in the family and in 1912 Lucas reported that though ‘the old feud between the Above and Below Boys seems now to have abated … a social gulf between the two divisions of the city remains’. In calling the boys ‘young Grotiuses’ in their code of battle Lamb is delightfully apt, for the work in which Grotius initiated international law was entitled De Iure Belli et Pacis, concerning the law of war and peace.

We notice the contrast between Elia's father, ‘who scorned to insist upon advantages’ and managed, when the argument became too heated, to turn the conversation to Lincoln Cathedral on which both parties could agree, with the one-up-man-ship of the hosts at the beginning of the essay. By means of these repeated opposing echoes tentacles stretch back, reminding the reader of the earlier ironies and unifying the structure of the work of art. Moreover, in the next sentence the tactless aunt provides the only instance in this household of the condescension regularly meted out to the Poor Relation in the earlier one. Even this is not intended with any malice but is a misguided attempt at kindness in one who ‘would sometimes press civility out of season’. In saying ‘Do take another slice, Mr Billet, for you do not get pudding every day’, the aunt fails to minister to something in her guest more important than food, his self-respect, which, unlike poor W—'s was clearly not a case of ‘too much pride’. The boy's reaction to seeing the visitor ruffled is anguish, at the thought ‘Perhaps he will never come here again’; demonstrating that even a Poor Relation may seem to come to your table like an angel unawares. Nor was Mr Billet easily downtrodden. In an argument later in the evening he was able to turn the tables completely, when he uttered ‘with an emphasis which chilled the company, and which chills me now as I write it—“Woman, you are superannuated”’. For, of course, the aunt was herself living as a pensioner in her brother's house and had, perhaps, outlived her usefulness. Elia's friend W—could have benefited from some of Mr Billet's spirit.

It is made plain, too, that John Billet had every right to his self-respect.

He died at the Mint (Anno 1781) where he had long held, what he accounted, a comfortable independence; and with five pounds, fourteen shillings, and a penny, which were found in his escritoire after his decease, left the world, blessing God that he had enough to bury him, and that he had never been obliged to any man for a sixpence. This was—a Poor Relation.

He may not have had servants, a coat of arms or a new piano but he was indebted to nobody. Years ago, I had a friend whose theory of philosophy was the desirability of living on tick. When I demurred at this, she said with the utmost scorn, ‘What sort of justification will that be to say to St Peter at heaven's gate, “I paid me way”?’ Secretly I thought, ‘You might do worse’. Lamb thought so too, and acted on it. So he ends his essay with a portrait of a man who receives and is worthy to receive consideration and respect and who, above all, is entitled to respect himself. ‘This’, says Elia, ‘was a Poor Relation’.

So, to sum up Lamb's achievement in this essay, let us look first at his technical skill and then at his message. First of all, let us pay tribute to the brilliance and versatility of his prose style, which he neatly adapts to his purposes. He is equally at home with the short, sharp statement by which, sometimes using also that significant pause, he can make his pointed comments, and with the carefully constructed long sentence, whose balance and rhythm give it the quality of poetry, as demonstrated by his beloved predecessor, Sir Thomas Browne, or by his successor, Virginia Woolf. As they do, he also uses a combination of the two modes for flow and for emphasis. The beauty of Lamb's prose impresses itself on us as we read it aloud. Then there is the manipulation of the point of view. Reading the six Booker short list novels, as I had to do last year, I was a little disappointed to find that all except one of these novels were written in the first person and the exception might as well have been. Not that I have anything against first-person narrative, which can be, and in some of these cases was, used with great sensitivity and sophistication, especially with the help of irony. But variety is the spice of life. In this essay we are at first firmly placed behind the eyes of the host having to entertain a Poor Relation. Ostensibly we see as he sees, and to an extent we do, but, partly by his self-betrayal, partly by more subliminal means, as we have noticed, we are rendered not quite comfortable with our stance. With the entry of Robert Favell the viewpoint is seemingly reversed so that we are looking at life from the position of the inferior. But, here again, we cannot fully identify with W—and Elia's intervention in refusing to share his humiliation, introducing another angle of view, supports our doubt. Yet there is a shift again when the old father's behaviour is described and we sympathize with poor W—completely. Finally, we have the child's-eye-view, a more healthy one in general, but we are not protected from recognizing his mistakes either. Though they are harmless infant misconceptions, they are enough to show that the child does not see entirely truly either.

This leads us to the use of irony. Swift's ‘Modest Proposal’, with which we began, draws a very cut-and-dried, black-and-white picture. It is unequivocal in its condemnation of the Irish Landlords and I think not even the most hardened market-economist could continue to mistake irony for fact when he comes to this sentence.

I grant this food will be rather dear, and therefore very proper for Landlords: who, as they have already devoured the Parents, seem to have the best title to the Children.

With Lamb, in his essay, the irony is much more subtle. It is a kind of irony within an irony. We are not asked to paint anyone entirely black or white. Even when we most condemn we are sneakingly wondering if we are condemning ourselves. The irony cuts both ways. The Poor Relation's behaviour is abominable. We have all suffered from people who drain us dry and give us nothing. But that is only half the story. What of the ethos that places the acquiring of wealth and status symbols above love and compassion and seeks ‘value for money’ and ‘successful business management’ to the exclusion of care for the poor, sick and old?

Yet, Lamb says, there is a caveat needed here too. Recently someone I know had a job making delivery of a Porsche car and, in doing so, had to drive it some distance. She and her family live very modestly, she is a Quaker and one would have said among the least prone to materialism. But she reported that, as they drove, they were aware of admiring looks, the car went like a bird, overtaking everything in sight, and she soon caught herself joyously thinking, ‘We are special. We are important. We are better than everyone else!’ She told me this as an object lesson and that is what Lamb is doing. A taint of that particular kind of lust is in all of us, however, much we think we avoid it. So when we consider Lamb's equivocal use of irony we can no longer separate the medium from the message. By the very nature of his use of the device he is making his point.

So what is his message? Do you think, perhaps, something like this? We are all human, we all feel irritation with others who batten on us, we are all insecure and believe ourselves inferior, we are all tempted to compensate for it in different and sometimes opposite ways. We are all subject to the temptation to equate possessions with happiness. Just look, Lamb says, at the monstrous behaviour all these tendencies lead us into! Life is hard enough without creating artificial divisions through our snobberies and discriminations. Let us respect ourselves and others for the right reasons and not for those which add to the sum of the world's misery. The contrast between the first and the last paragraphs of the essay epitomize Lamb's attitude. The first paragraph sees a man as ‘a thing’ and puts him into an artificial category, that of the Poor Relation. The last paragraph sees him as an individual. Avoid abstract categories like the plague, says Elia. The minute you use them you tend to oversimplify and thus falsify. Classification is no doubt necessary in science. In art, as in human life, it needs to be approached with great caution. That is why you have not heard me mention ‘Romantic Irony’. I have tried to talk about one particular example of the irony of Charles Lamb.

Notes

1. Theophrastus (c. 172-287 B.C.) Greek philosopher, whose Characters consisted of types demonstrating particular faults, including the toady and the over-proud, particular relevant here. English translations of these, as well as contemporary English ‘Characters’ were very popular in the seventeenth century. Best known writers of these are Joseph Hall, who published his in 1608, Sir Thomas Overbury (1614) and John Earle (1628).

2. ‘Haterius noster sufflaminandus est’—‘Our Haterius needs the drag’. Seneca—Controversiae 4 Preface, 7.

3. As Claude A. Prance points out, there is a difference of opinion about Favell's Christian name, but I have followed Mr Prance who says, ‘Both his contemporaries, who should know, Coleridge and Leigh Hunt, call him Robert, and they are followed by the reliable James Dykes Campbell’. Companion to Charles Lamb p113.

4. Hugh Latimer (?1492-1555) became a famous preacher and Bishop of Worcester but was put in the Tower when Mary came to the throne and was one of the Oxford Martyrs burnt on 16 October 1555.

   Richard Hooker (?1554-1600) became fellow of his College, Corpus Christi Oxford, and deputy professor of Hebrew. He is famous for his book Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie which came out in five volumes between 1593 and 1597. His Life was written by Izaak Walton and published in 1665.

5. Letter to Pope of September 1725.