The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb. Charles Lamb
H. Siddons was an excellent Edgar; his mad scenes displayed much chaste and natural acting, and several passages were marked with beauties peculiarly his own. His representation of the character would be still more interesting, were he to infuse into his manner more fondness for his mistress, Cordelia, and his unfortunate father, the Earl of Gloucester. Miss Murray, whose excellence in characters of simple pathos is so well known, was a most interesting portrait of Cordelia. She played the part with great delicacy and feeling, sweetness and simplicity.
"Mr. Hull, in Glo'ster, was natural and impressive; and Mr. Waddy, though a little coarse as Earl of Kent, was a good picture of blunt honesty in his humble disguise as Caius. The other characters did not possess much merit, or deserve much notice."
Page 44. II.—Grand State Bed.
Writing to Rickman about his Morning Post work, in January, 1802, Lamb says that in addition to certain other things it was he who made the Lord Mayor's bed. The reference is undoubtedly to this little article on January 4, 1802.
Page 44. III.—Fable for Twelfth Day.
On January 6 (Twelfth Night), 1802, this fable was printed in the Morning Post. That Lamb was the author no one need have any doubt after reading the Elia essay, "Rejoicings on the New Year's Coming of Age."
Page 46. IV.—The Londoner.
Morning Post. February 1, 1802. Works, 1818.
This paper, although it is included in the Works among "Letters under assumed signatures, published in The Reflector," and although it is nominally addressed to the editor of that paper, did not, however, appear in it. It was first printed in the Morning Post for February 1, 1802, during Lamb's brief connection with that paper, the story of which is told in the note to the essay on "Newspapers" in Elia.
"The Londoner" in the Morning Post differed from the version subsequently reprinted. See notes to vol. I. of my large edition.
John Forster, in his memoir of Lamb in the New Monthly Magazine in 1835, has the following passage, which, applying to Lamb's later life (Forster was only twenty-two when Lamb died), rounds off, with certain ecstatic passages in the letters, the present London eulogium. The lines quoted by Forster are from "The Old Familiar Faces":—
"We recollect being once sent by her [Mary Lamb] to seek 'Charles,' who had rambled away from her. We found him in the Temple, looking up, near Crown-office-row, at the house where he was born. Such was his ever-touching habit of seeking alliance with the scenes of old times. They were the dearer to him that distance had withdrawn them. He wished to pass his life among things gone by yet not forgotten; we shall never forget the affectionate 'Yes, boy,' with which he returned our repeating his own striking lines:—
"'Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood,
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse.'"
Page 46, line 11. Great annual feast. In stating that he was born on Lord Mayor's Day, Lamb stretched a point. His birthday was February 10.
Page 48. Characters of Dramatic Writers Contemporary with Shakspeare.
Specimens, 1808, and Works, 1818.
These notes are abridgments of the notes to Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, 1808. The whole work is reproduced in my large edition, where such annotation as seems desirable may be found. The abridgment is printed here in order that the text of Lamb's own edition of his Works, 1818, may be preserved.
Page 65. On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged.
To the circumstance that Leigh Hunt edited The Reflector, which was founded by his brother in 1810 as a literary and political quarterly, may be attributed in a large measure the beginning of Lamb's career as an essayist. Leigh Hunt, himself a Christ's Hospitaller, sought his contributors among old scholars of that school; from whom, as he remarked in the little note prefixed to the two-volume edition of the periodical, came "the largest and most entertaining part." Among these contributors were Lamb, George Dyer, Thomas Barnes, afterwards editor of The Times, Thomes Mitchell, classical scholar, James Scholefield, afterwards Greek Professor at Cambridge, Hunt himself, and Barron Field, who, though not actually a Christ's Hospitaller, was through his father, Henry Field, apothecary to the school, connected with it.
Until Lamb received Hunt's invitation to let his fancy play to what extent he would in The Reflector's pages, he had received little or no encouragement as a writer; and he was naturally so diffident that without some external impulse he rarely brought himself to do his own work at all. Between John Woodvil (1802) and the first Reflector papers (1810) he had written "Mr. H.," performed his share in the children's books, and compiled the Dramatic Specimens: a tale of work which, considering that it was also a social period, and a busy period at the India House, is not trifling. But between the last Reflector paper (1811 or 1812) and the first Elia essay (1820) Lamb seems to have written nothing save the essays on Christ's Hospital, the "Confessions of a Drunkard," a few brief notes, reviews and dramatic criticisms, mainly at the instigation of Leigh Hunt, and some scraps of verse chiefly for The Champion. The world owes a great debt to Leigh Hunt for discerning Lamb's gifts and allowing him free rein. The comic letters to The Reflector may not be Lamb at his best, though they are excellent stepping-stones to that state; but upon the essays on Shakespeare's tragedies and Hogarth's genius it is doubtful if Lamb could have improved at any period.
The Reflector ran only to four numbers, which were very irregularly issued, and it then ceased. It ran nominally from October 1810 to December 1811. Crabb Robinson mentions reading No. I. on May 15, 1811.
Lamb, it may be remarked here, was destined to contribute to yet another Reflector. In 1832 Moxon started a weekly paper of that name in which part of Lamb's Elia essay on the "Defect of Imagination in Modern Paintings" was printed. The venture, however, quickly failed, and all trace of it seems to have vanished.
Lamb's first Reflector paper was entitled "On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged."
It appeared in No. II., 1811, and was reprinted in the Works, 1818.
He made yet another use of the central idea of this essay. The farce, "The Pawnbroker's Daughter," written in 1825, turns upon the resuscitation of a hanged man, Jack Pendulous.
Page 68, line 6. Smoke his cravat. To smoke was old slang for to see, to notice. East-enders to-day would say "Pipe his necktie!"
Page 72, line 1. The solution … in "Hamlet."
First Clown. What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?
Second Clown. The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.
Act V., Scene I, lines 46–50.
Page 72. Footnote. "The Spanish Tragedy." A play by Thomas Kyd (1557?-1595?), from which Lamb quoted largely in his Specimens, 1808. This line is in Act III., in Hieronimo's instructions to the painter: "And then at last, sir, starting, behold a man hanging, and tott'ring, and tott'ring, as you know the wind will wave a man. … "
Page 72, line 3. That scene in "Measure for Measure."
Pompey. Master Barnardine! you must rise and be hanged, Master Barnardine!
Abhorson.