An Hour With Lamb

 

Yesterday, people at the village were hosting a jumble sale with tea, coffee and cakes to raise funds for conservation of the village church’s bell tower. I told the lady who was organising the event that I would be willing to contribute home baked cupcakes for her tea shop if she could serve the customers. She agreed and asked me to make twenty cupcakes.

 

The Hyperion Schubert Edition, Vol. 19. Schubert's songs about flowers and nature. Soprano: Dame Felicity Lott. Pianist: Graham Johnson.

While the cupcakes were in the oven, I sat down to read a book and listened to the music of Schubert, beautifully sung by the soprano, Dame Felicity Lott. 



One of my all time favourite books - Everybody's Lamb: Being a Selection from the Essays of Elia, the Letters and the Miscellaneous Prose of Charles Lamb edited by A C Ward and illustrated by Ernest H Shepard.

 

From a young age, I had been absorbed in stories which dealt with distant lands or vanished civilisations. I had a longing to make friends with books and their writers because I would like them to tell me more of what happened to the characters after the stories ended. I preferred the company of books because it is more stimulating and vitalizing, like the autumn sunshine which uplifts one’s spirit even when it does not warm.    

 

It was bad luck for me that Charles Lamb (1775 - 1834) had died by the time I discovered his Essays of Elia at the age of eleven because I felt sure that Lamb was a man who could have been my friend and who ideally fitted to share my thoughts and aspirations. His experience of childhood could be seen in parallel with mine despite the fact that we were born many years apart, on the other side of the world and in a different social background.

 

One of his essays that I love so much is called Dream-Children: A Reverie. It was first published in 1822 in The London Magazine. It is the most beautiful piece of writing with full of evocations of a childhood. Similar to my summer holidays at my grandparents’ seaside house, Lamb spent his summer at the country house known as Blakesware in Norfolk where his grandmother worked as a housekeeper. When her employer, Mrs Plummer died, Lamb's grandmother was left to look after the large country house. Lamb had free rein of the place during his visits to his grandmother.  



'Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had magic in it. I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy: and the contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions...’ Charles Lamb recalling his visit to the country house where he spent his summer with his grandmother.

 

There are so many beautiful descriptions about the house and its gardens in Lamb’s Dream-Children (I find a greater beauty in Lamb’s prose than his poetry):

‘I never could be tired with roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken pannels, with the gilding almost rubbed out – sometimes in the old-fashioned gardens…I had more pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-looking yew trees…watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish-pond, at the bottom of the garden…’

Reading these beautifully composed sentences, one is deeply touched by the imagery as well as the re-living imaginatively of the writer's past. There is a kind of Wordsworthian loneliness (Lamb was a friend of both William and Dorothy Wordsworth) and peace in them. The writer, Arnold Bennett wrote about this essay by Lamb in his book, Literary Taste:

‘The key to this essay one of profound sadness. But note that he makes his sadness beautiful; or, rather, he shows the beauty that resides in sadness. You watch him sitting there in his ‘bachelor arm-chair’, and you say to yourself: ‘Yes, it was sad, but it was somehow beautiful’.         



Portrait of Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

 

‘One of profound sadness’ described by Arnold Bennett is matched with Lamb’s soaring imagination and absolute precision of language, chiselled with care. If you read this essay, you would discover the three yearnings Lamb was expressing. He was approaching fifty when he wrote it.

 

The first yearning was for the innocent and carefree days he spent at Blakesware house with his grandmother. 

 

The second was for the company of his brother and the memories of him ‘haunt’ Lamb because he was dead and nothing could be replaced his loss. It seems as though a part, and that a very happy part, of his life had gone with his brother. Lamb wrote:

 

‘…when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and death…I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed his kindness, and I missed his crossness, and wished him to be alive again, to be quarrelling with him rather than not have him again…’

 

Anyone who have ever experienced the loss of loved ones would share and understand his lament. And, last but not least, his third yearning was for his first love, a girl known as ‘Alice W___n’ who ended up marrying a man called Bartrum.

 

Arnold Bennett called this piece of writing ‘a supreme expression of the loneliness of life’. Lamb was never married and a bachelor throughout his life and he had to look after his sister whom he nicknamed in the story as ‘faithful Bridget’. Her real name was Mary Lamb, and she suffered from periodic attacks of insanity and spent most of her life in and out of psychiatric care.

Lamb wrote more detailed descriptions of the big house where he spent many of his happy days during his visits in another essay called Blakesmoor in H—shire – both of the essays are available in Everybody’s Lamb edited by A. C. Ward and beautifully illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard.

G Bell & Sons, London, 1933 edition of Everybody's Lamb includes beautiful illustrations by E. H. Shepard.

 

Lamb’s prose is like flowers pressed tightly between the pages - take, for instance, one profound sentence in his recollections of his childhood in the essay,  Blakesmoor in H—shire, which struck a chord with me:

 

‘The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration.’ 

I returned to my kitchen after the delicious hour of reading Charles Lamb’s essays. My cupcakes were ready in the oven. I took them out and left them to cool before I put icing on them.

 

 

I do not know why Charles Lamb's Essays went out of vogue. In the 1950s, his books of essays were often given as the prize to the best students at schools by the headmasters. The testimony of a good book is that it changes you and your perspective whether you read it in youth, in maturity or in old age. Holbrook Jackson once wrote: 'The end of reading is not more books but more life...[Books] teach us how to live and how to die; they dispel melancholy by their mirth, and amuse by their wit; they prepare the soul to suffer everything and desire nothing; they introduce us to ourselves.'

I looked out of the kitchen windows. Gulls screamed and squawked across the grey sky. The colours of afterglow were fading from the cloud-filled skies and the incoming tides were washing over the footprints left by the sandpipers and smoothing out uneven ground. The autumn twilight had left the earth with a deeper shade of gloom.