Streets, Streets, Streets

I’m deep in mountain territory, with a pot noodle and a stack of Post-its in front of me. It’s past midnight, and my final undergraduate exams are just around the corner. Feverishly, between forkfuls, I’m wandering on high over hill and vale; I’m crossing the Alps; I’m brooding on the Wordsworthian sublime. Every so often, I’ll note down an Important Thought on my pink Post-its. Nature! Morality! Mountains!

The Prelude is open in front of me, Wordsworth’s epic poem of natural inspiration, nourished by the Lakeland landscape of his childhood:

Ye Presences of Nature, in the sky And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!

Alongside this, I’m reading Coleridge’s unsurpassed conversation poem ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’, addressed to his friend Charles Lamb, ‘of the India House, London’. Here the poet must rest at home, debarred by injury from accompanying his friends on a country walk. Those friends were William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb, on a rare, brief visit from London. Lamb is depicted as ‘my gentle-hearted Charles’, ‘who has pined and hunger’d after Nature, many a year,/ In the great City pent,’ but who is now released to enjoy the true delights of the countryside. Confined to the lime-tree bower, the poet enviously imagines the pleasures they are experiencing in the ‘wide landscape’. But gradually he comes to the realization that nature may be appreciated even in the smallest of spaces, focusing on the sun-dappled detail of a leaf and the ‘solitary humble-bee’ in the nearby bean flowers. And he hopes that Lamb, too, who has struggled with ‘evil, and pain/And strange calamity’, may find a healing power in nature. My eye drifts down to the footnote, which gives some details of the ‘strange calamity’ that had befallen Charles Lamb the year before: the death of his mother at the hands of his sister, Mary, in a fit of mania. Charles, just 21 at the time, undertook to look after Mary himself, saving her from consignment to Bedlam. Apart from some brief spells she had to spend in asylums, the two lived together in a sort of ‘double singleness’ until Charles’s death in 1834. This is what lies behind Coleridge’s evocation of his ‘gentle-hearted’ friend, and his hope that Charles will find ‘deep joy’ in nature. But it’s with a slight shock that I see what Lamb actually thought about his beautiful portrayal in this poem. ‘For God’s sake (I never was more serious),’ he told Coleridge in August 1800, ‘don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print.’ A week or so later, in case Coleridge hadn’t got the message, he returned to the complaint: ‘Please to blot out gentle hearted, and substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-ey’d, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the Gentleman in question’.* Steeped in Romantic transcendence, this strikes me with the thrill of blasphemy. I’m hooked. Charles Lamb is better known – if known at all these days – as an essayist, and his marvellously eclectic, evasive Essays of Elia featured in the last issue of Slightly Foxed (no. 64). With Mary, he collaborated on some of the best-loved children’s books of the nineteenth century, their prose adaptations Tales from Shakespeare, and the poignant stories of Mrs Leicester’s School. But it’s as letter-writers that they truly excel. When I tracked down a copy of the letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, I discovered that this habit of answering back, of wry, sly, disputation with the greats, was no one-off. Take Lamb’s letter to his friend the mathematics tutor and sinologist Thomas Manning in November 1800. He is sorry to tell Manning that he won’t be able to come to see him in Cambridge after all, since there is a chance of visiting the Lake District. And who would turn down the chance actually to see Wordsworth and Coleridge amid the mountains?

I need not describe to you the expectations which such an one as myself, pent up all my life in a dirty city, have formed of a tour to the Lakes. Consider, Grasmere! Ambleside! Wordsworth! Coleridge! I hope you will.

There follows a contemplative pause, a blank space. Manning must meekly accept his demotion. But when he, and the reader of Lamb’s letters, turns the page, we find a bold statement:

Hills, woods, Lakes and mountains, to the Eternal Devil. I will eat snipes with thee, Thomas Manning. Only confess, confess a Bite.

A bite, in eighteenth-century terms, could mean a hoax or fraud – and Lamb’s letters take great delight in hoaxing, joking, trickery. But the ‘bite’ is also a peculiarly appropriate term for Lamb’s letters, because they are distinguished by their witty, cutting edge, made the sharper because he is such a good reader, and devoted friend, of the poets he criticizes. Here he knowingly takes the phrase from the Coleridge poem, ‘in City pent’, and turns it around. Forget nature: he can find joy and healing in London itself. For Lamb, it is not a ‘dirty city’, but a place (like Coleridge’s lime-tree bower) where each tiny detail can bring inspiration and pleasure:

Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, Shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, Ladies cheapening, Gentlemen behind counters lying, Authors in the street with spectacles . . . Lamps lit at night, Pastry-cook & Silver smith shops, Beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drousy cry of mechanic watchmen at night, with Bucks reeling home drunk if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of fire & stop thief; Inns of court (with their learned air, and halls, and Butteries, just like Cambridge colleges), old Book stalls, Jeremy Taylors, Burtons on melancholy, and Religio Medici’s on every stall – . These are thy Pleasures O London with-the-many-sins –

Those three opening beats – ‘Streets, streets, streets’ – act as an incantation, summoning the tumbling, breathless hurry of London life to the page. Things and places and noises crowd into the same sentence with amoral urban haste. Instead of the steady, timeless ‘presences of Nature’ made sacred in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, we encounter bargaining ladies, lying salesmen, drunks, thieves, whores. This is no random assortment of city objects but is carefully structured around allusions to Lamb’s own life – his unrequited affection for a young beautiful Quaker lady, his birthplace in the Inner Temple, his love of Jeremy Taylor and Robert Burton’s seventeenth-century texts. Just as Wordsworth’s poetry shows how important the scenes of childhood are to shaping later life, so too does Lamb emphasize the power of his own local affections, his favourite homely things:

– old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school, – these are my mistresses, have I not enough, without your mountains? –

This comes from a letter to Wordsworth, of all people, where Lamb thanks him for a copy of Lyrical Ballads, and an invitation to visit, but tells him, ‘I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life’ (30 January 1801). Instead, he gently offers a city-based appreciation of his friend’s poetry – part defiance, part homage. The Lake poets did not take the criticism well. As Lamb tells Manning in subsequent letters, both Wordsworth and Coleridge immediately sent long letters of ‘four sweating pages’ apiece rebuking him and assuring him, ‘when the works of a man of true Genius, such as W. undoubtedly was, do not please me at first sight, I should suspect the fault to lie “in me & not in them” – &c. &c. &c. &c. &c. . . .’ That clutter of etceteras tells us all we need to know about Wordsworth and Coleridge’s high-handed style, but Lamb was unabashed, commenting to Manning that ‘my Arse tickles red from the northern castigation’. In spite of this ticklish irreverence, the letters are also testaments of friendship, running from the 1790s to the 1830s. Nothing, deep down, could shake the affection between Charles and Mary and old friends such as William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge or William Hazlitt. Charles worked tirelessly to get information and consolation from his India House connections when the Wordsworths’ brother John went down off the Dorset coast with the East India vessel he commanded. ‘You have not mourned without one to have a feeling of it,’ he wrote to the Wordsworths (4 March 1805). Alongside his letters mourning John come words from Mary, who reassures Dorothy that her memories of her lost brother will eventually become ‘a real & everlasting source of comfort to you’, a truth drawn from ‘my own experience in sorrow’ (7 May 1805). This, perhaps, is what gives the letters of the Lambs a lasting power: that shared experience in sorrow, and the knowledge of grief and pain and strange calamity which deepens and darkens their writing. Charles’s letters far outnumber Mary’s, but her voice is everywhere in his prose, sometimes quoted, sometimes in the shape of postscripts or comments. Her letters to her friend Sarah Stoddart (later Hazlitt’s wife) are gems, ‘journal-like letters, of the daily what-we-do-matters’, brimming with gossip and affection. She shows herself as keen a reader of the London scene as Charles, evoking the city life she and Sarah had enjoyed together from a slightly different angle, ‘bustling down Fleet-Market-in-all-its-glory of a saturday night, admiring the stale peas and co’lly flowers and cheap’ning small bits of mutton and veal for our sunday’s dinner’s’ (1 December 1802). You’ll have to engage in your own bargaining, though, to find an edition of the letters. Other Romantic writers have lavish sets of published correspondence and annotated works, but the Lambs have been poorly served by posterity. A new edition of their work is under way, but for the moment even to find a complete set of the letters is a difficult task. Hunt out the E. V. Lucas editions of the 1930s, if you can. Edwin Marrs’s fine scholarly edition undertaken in the 1970s was left uncompleted at his death, but it scrupulously attempts to render the Lambs’ enthusiastic hands, veering into huge capitals or breaking off to doodle. There are plenty of Victorian volumes of selections of the Lambs’ letters, though, and burrowing into secondhand stock is a particularly appropriate way to remember these authors, with their love of ‘Old Book stalls’ and battered copies. And you’ll have the deep satisfaction of having tracked down the hidden byways of Romantic writing: not sublime mountain visions, but side-streets, smoky rooms and friendly, rum-flavoured conversations. * Lamb had one blue and one brown eye. He was also a stutterer, slightly unkempt and given to over-indulge in rum and water, and ‘egg-hot’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 65 © Felicity James 2020