Selected Prose

"Lamb is a figure who through the nineteenth century and early twentieth century became so sentimentalized. I thought something very important here is being defended against if sentimentality is being thrown over him in buckets. The more I read about Lamb, the stranger and more insightful I found him about social relations and aesthetic relations—the idea that they’re somehow the same thing. It was really the Leavisites that couldn’t stand him. And they were reacting to the High Victorian sentimentalizing of him. There’s a story about Thackeray pressing a volume of Lamb to his forehead and declaring, “Saint Charles!” But I came to find in his essays—for all their irony, or rather through their irony—a suggestive alternative to major questions of social life that were circulating around the same time as, say, the writings of the Utilitarians. Lamb offers the essay form as a sociable, playful alternative to a systemizing insistence on transparency, information, and regulation as means of organizing how we live together. It’s a poetic response. Through essays like ‘Valentines Day’, ‘The Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’ or ‘Distant Correspondents’, he produces a home in social, ethical and aesthetic life for what Keats calls ‘negative capability’—this idea that we can go through life without needing to know too much about others. Not knowing might open possibilities of creativity and a space between people. Attempting to get as much information as you can about others is limiting. It makes us overlook how interesting, strange and excessive other people are. He’s writing in relatively inexpensive magazines in the early 1820s, such as the London Magazine . He was writing while holding down a really demanding job as a civil servant in the East India Company. He didn’t have a lot of free time. He wrote these pieces in evenings and odd days off, so they’re brief by necessity. But they’re very rich responses to the London of the early nineteenth century, and to the role of aesthetic experiences in ordinary life. He was a deeply sociable and kind person who faced a lot of horror in his past. The famous story about Lamb (an origin of his saint-like reputation) is that he came home one day to find his sister had murdered their mother in a fit of psychosis. Rather than send his sister to a grim institution, he took on her full-time care. In spite of all this, Lamb managed to celebrate his own daily life and write about his environment so compellingly. He’s a counterpoint or alternative to the big ‘ Lake School’ Romantics —Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey—who could find the urban scene anathema to their poetic sensibilities. Like Ruskin, Lamb really valued the way the vestiges and scars of the past endure in the social scene around him. It was one of his sources of tenderness for others. He’s a great appreciator of people, buildings and ideas that have somehow survived. His elegiac eye is valuable to us now, in a time when it seems there is less and less concern for the traces of the past in our present, and what they might mean to us. And one of the other timeless elements of Lamb’s essays is their delight in interactions with other people that surprise us. Essays can convey and model that delight in fresh and inventive ways."