[In the following essay, Ruddick summarizes trends in Lamb scholarship since the 1960s.]

Taking on the editorship of the Charles Lamb Bulletin has led me to review the current situation in Lamb studies.¹ The availability of most of the required tools for research in the form of accurate texts, of letters and a much increased biographical knowledge of Lamb's closest literary friends (in particular Coleridge) has stimulated historical investigation of Lamb's work and its connection with that of other members of the group. At the same time study of the Elia persona and Lamb's use of masks has shown his subtleties as a practitioner of ambiguity, paradox, the avoidance of resolution and closure, and other features which have been much emphasized by recent criticism generally. Close readings of the Elia essays which also explore their use of myth and literary allusion are also now appearing. And recent critics have demonstrated the power with which Lamb developed features of imagination which are now thought to be centrally Romantic. At the same time there is room for much new thought and investigation. I will try to suggest where, in my view, some of these areas lie.

Lamb criticism takes the form of trickles rather than a broad stream. The Charles Lamb Bulletin is published four times a year, and one of the editor's tasks is to ensure that of the three articles which it contains each time, one will be about Charles or Mary Lamb (or, of course, both of them). We are offered articles on Wordsworth and Coleridge very steadily. The Lamb pieces are harder to find, and sometimes have to be coaxed or commissioned. But what is notable nowadays is the variety of approach taken by writers on the Lambs. The articles may be few, but their writers are well aware of current trends in biographical and critical procedure.

Lamb scholarship is in a healthy state, and the would-be researcher has most of what is needed to hand, with two troublesome exceptions which I'll mention in a moment. Textually, E. V. Lucas' Works of Lamb has stood the test of time, and in finding one's way around it, and for many other purposes too, Claude A. Prance's Companion to Charles Lamb: A Guide to People and Places 1760-1847, which came out in 1983, is a godsend. Even before the War, anyone who had cared to make a case for Lamb as a serious critic had the essential material for assessing Lamb's view of literature conveniently assembled in E. M. W. Tillyard's Lamb's Criticism (1923), but Roy Park's Lamb as Critic, of 1980, is even better because it has marvellous notes, and includes more material connected with the theatre and the art of acting, as well as Lamb's few but invaluable essays on painting and the visual arts. And Elia and the Last Essays of Elia are now readily available once more in World's Classics, very well edited by Jonathan Bate.² And Jonathan Bate's and Roy Park's Prefaces are essential reading for anyone who is trying to form a modern understanding of Lamb.

E. V. Lucas' edition of Lamb's Letters was faulty, so it is good to have the first three volumes of Edwin W. Marrs' replacement edition, which do everything that modern scholarship should do for Lamb's letters up to 1817. What is worrying, however, is the fact that no further volumes have been added to Marrs' edition since 1978. Worrying too is the fact that Winifred Courtney's Young Charles Lamb 1775-1802 (1983) leaves the story of Lamb's life just at the point where his publishing career is beginning, and private report is that Winifred Courtney, who is now rather elderly, may not complete the assembling of the second volume.³ This is a serious setback, as the researcher is left with Lucas' Life—an agreeable account, but one which softens the outlines, and leaves, in particular, the political interest and activity of Lamb largely unexplored.

However, things could be a lot worse, and as I've said already, some interesting new thinking about the Lambs has been going on—though only very recently in Mary Lamb's case, I think. Jane Aaron, of course, has played a prominent part here, and in moving on to consider the double relationship of Charles and Mary Lamb as people and as writers, she brings a fresh mind to bear in an area which had been conspicuously lacking in modern consideration.

We know more about Charles Lamb than we used to do, nowadays, but not perhaps a lot more. But we do know far more about Coleridge than was once the case: to take a couple of obvious points, Molly Lefebure's Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (1974) lets us see how early he became an addict, and appreciate more fully both the charity and the tact which the Lambs exercised in their friendship with him. And better editions of the letters show how well Lamb held his own in critical and theoretical dialogue with Coleridge during the crucial years of the mid and late 1790s. Naturally enough, the relationship between key texts is now studied. Already, in 1963, Richard Havens' essay ‘The Romantic Art of Charles Lamb’⁴ was comparing Lamb's ‘Old China’ essay and Coleridge's ‘Frost at Midnight’ as exercises in the art of reverie. More lately, critics have explored the inter-relationship of the lesser and the greater talents of the Lamb-Wordsworth-Coleridge group. To give a single instance of this, Lucy Newlyn in 1984 traced William Cowper's attitude to the city through correspondence and verse by his admirers Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth in the 1790s and the turn of the century, finding a major place in this debate for a forgotten poem called ‘London’ by the younger member of the group, Charles Lloyd.⁵ Lloyd's poem, once seen, looks like the missing piece of the jigsaw. I think that in this area of following the development of ideas and related treatments of them in the writings of Lamb's group of friends there is still more to be done, and from the point of view of a Lamb scholar it's worth doing, as Lamb was clearly a considerable originator of attitudes and critical debate. I myself tried this a year or two back with Lamb as the starter-off of a new way of interpreting Hogarth, as a pictorial moralist, a truth-teller, and a poet.⁶ The obvious next step was to consider Hazlitt, who wrote with Lamb's essay in mind and narrowed down Hogarth's art into that of the pictorial novelist, a view which persisted almost to the present day, and which was repeated by Thackeray, who wrote a very good early piece on Hogarth with Lamb's and Hazlitt's essays very clearly at his side. I think there are many, many more such connections to be made, particularly with the Lamb and Hazlitt and Lamb and Leigh Hunt materials.⁷ And the literature of the 1830s is still so under-explored, and even the major writers' relationship with the preceding generations so little considered, that plenty of spadework still needs doing. Kathryn Sutherland's ‘The Coming of Age of the Man of Feeling: Sentiment in Lamb and Dickens’ offers a good example of the rewards of this kind of historical scholarship.⁸ Again, a line of influence, in which Lamb stands in a key position between the late eighteenth-century sentimentalism of Henry Mackenzie and Dickens' early fiction, is established.

One more word about how learning more about Coleridge can alter our understanding of Lamb before I leave this area. In his 1987 book Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit of the Age, Thomas McFarland applies the current theory of spaces or absences in the text to Lamb, finding that the great absence in the Elia essays is, in fact, Coleridge, despite Lamb's clothing himself in the schoolboy Coleridge's experiences in ‘Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’. McFarland considers the impact of Coleridge on Lamb to have been so overwhelming, his comparative withdrawal of friendship so hurtful, that Lamb had to cope not only by seeking alternative relationships, such as those with Manning and (at various times) with Charles Lloyd, Southey, and (unrelentingly) Wordsworth, but by constructing a literary persona for himself which could stand without any evident relationship with Coleridge's mind or personality.

The early 1960s saw several profitable lines of development laid down. For example, Donald Reiman's ‘Thematic Unity in Lamb's Familiar Essays’⁹ stressed the extent to which Lamb's material and his manner of treating it links him to the great modern myth-makers. He says, for instance, of the essay ‘Old China’:

Bridget bemoans the loss of human youth and novelty and joy against the backdrop of a world where Beauty can keep her lustrous eyes and where youth does not grow pale and specter-thin, and die. Like Keats's Grecian urn, Yeats's lapis lazuli sculpture, or T. S. Eliot's Chinese jar, Elia's china tea-cups present a still point amid a world of flux and, at the same time, a stimulus for the human imagination, both of him who creates and him who contemplates them.¹⁰

Reiman's essay was a stimulus for two particularly rewarding approaches to Elia: first that which searches for the archetypal in materials and situations, as James Scoggins did in his essay, ‘Images of Eden in the Essays of Elia’ of 1972. He offers a view of Elia the childhood-lover which is a valuable corrective to older pictures of Elia as childish:

Vestiges of the past remain in all of us, but most of all in those to whom childhood virtues still have the predominant influence. … [for Lamb the figure of Adam dis-Paradised is] a quiet, mock-apologetic man, finding whatever happiness he can in his time and place, while longing for a more comforting home that seems locked in the past.¹¹

The second way in which Reiman's 1965 essay stimulated criticism was in directing attention towards the literary relations of the images and situations in the essays. A good example of the rewards which careful examination of these can produce is Mary Wedd's article on ‘All Fools' Day’, published in 1979.¹² She unravels a web of literary allusions in the essay, links it to Roman and later ideas of the fool and folly, and stresses the fact that the essay, like Lamb's view of life, gives folly its head for a time, only to reassert the controlling limits of duty and everyday reality, linking mirth and melancholy in ways that look backward to Burton and forward to I Pagliacci and its sad, self-pitying clown.

Writing in 1987, Jane Aaron noted how Roy Park and other critics of the seventies had concentrated on Lamb's characteristics and importance as one of the great Romantic critics.¹³ She thought that they had still felt shy of trying to re-establish Lamb's imaginative fictions in the canon. But she also found present-day American critics increasingly willing to tackle the Elia essays head-on, sensing that their ambiguities and the scope which their use of persona gave Lamb for self-concealment foreshadowed many of the features of language and irresolvable paradox which contemporary French theoreticians emphasize: the Elia essays ‘avoid definitive closure’ and are ‘inherently plural, a weave of varied meanings rather than a single message’. And Jane Aaron felt that such an approach, according to current lines of thought, might do much to re-establish Lamb's fictions in critical respectability. She instanced, and I would certainly agree with her view, that Gerald Monsman's Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer and Charles Lamb's Art of Autobiography of 1984, opens valuable areas of future exploration with its view of Lamb's fictions as redemptive imagination, compensating for the losses inherent in the human condition: products of a Romantic mind, but compatible in their structures with modern theories of literature as expression of alienation and unsettledness.

I hope this survey of mine, touching on what seem interesting points here and there, without trying to discuss everything of merit that has appeared of recent years, may have served to suggest why I found Lamb criticism in both a healthy state and one which allows for development in a good many worthwhile directions at present. Facts are still turning up. Jonathan Bate, for example, notices in his edition of Elia that the first essay in the collection, ‘The South-Sea House’, not only immortalises Lamb's brief spell of employment there but also marks the centenary of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, which turned a once-prosperous concern into the commercial ghost which Lamb describes. And Jonathan Bate's assertion that a reprinting of the London Magazine for the 1820s would reveal how much cross-reference there was among the contributions reminds us that there is still spadework to be done.¹⁴ Lamb and Hazlitt, Lamb and Leigh Hunt … Already the work of Grevel Lindop and others is establishing De Quincey connections.¹⁵ There's still so much that we don't know and that is worth finding out.

And enough detailed criticism of several of the Elia essays now exists to show how much close readings of various kinds—historical, thematic, imagistic, mythic, and so on—can reveal. And old issues could do with a fresh airing—for example, Lamb on the ‘world of the imagination’ in Restoration comedy, which Macaulay took such exception to. Now that Elia is being explored as a series of constructs, I think his views on the theatre and stage illusion ought to have half a century's dust blown off them. Unless someone has looked at them from a different standpoint since L. C. Knights that is, and I haven't noticed. But I think I've said enough now—and I hope I've whetted your appetite. …

Notes

1. This article is transcribed from a manuscript in Bill Ruddick's hand, found among his papers relating to the Charles Lamb Bulletin [CLB]. It is dated 3 April 1989, and is reprinted here by kind permission of his literary executors, T. W. Craik and W. Hutchings. Ed.

2. Since this was written, Professor Bate's edition has, alas, gone out of print. Ed.

3. Bill's remarks here have been superseded by Winifred Courtney's sad death in September 1994; she was remembered by Mary Wedd and Nicholas Roe, CLB NS 89 (1995) 43-5. Ed.

4. English Literary History 30 (1963).

5. ‘Lamb, Lloyd, London: A Perspective on Book Seven of The Prelude’, CLB NS 47-8 (1984) 169-87.

6. ‘Artist or Novelist? Lamb, Hazlitt and the Nineteenth-Century Response to Hogarth’, CLB NS 61 (1988) 145-55.

7. This suggestion has recently been vindicated by David Chandler's ‘A Sign's Progress: Lamb on Hogarth’, CLB NS 94 (1996) 50-63, and Frederick Burwick's lecture, delivered at the 1996 Wordsworth Summer Conference, ‘Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey on Hogarth’. Work on Lamb and Leigh Hunt has yet to be undertaken. Ed.

8. CLB NS 55 (1986) 196-210.

9. JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology] 64 (1965) 470-8; reprinted Romantic Texts and Contexts (Missouri, 1987), pp. 251-9.

10. Romantic Texts and Contexts 258.

11. JEGP 71 (1972) 204, 199.

12. CLB NS 28 (1979) 61-81.

13. ‘Charles and Mary Lamb: The Critical Heritage’, CLB NS 59 (1987) 73-85.

14. See, for instance, Joel Haefner, ‘The Two Faces of the London Magazine’, CLB NS 44 (1983) 69-81.

15. Grevel Lindop is the general editor of a forthcoming edition of the works of De Quincey, to be published by Pickering and Chatto.