NOTES TO "LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA" BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA ("London Magazine," January 1823) A CHOICE of reasons has been suggested why Lamb wrote this, though the most sufficient reason seems to be that it was like him to do it, and that the notion was favoured by the assumption of intimacy, of personal familiarity between writers and readers, which prevailed in the pages of the "London Magazine." There was an epidemic of playful deaths in that quarter just then; the pages were ghost-haunted; and presently were full of protests or explanations from persons in the Shades, declaring (like the poor brave fellow entombed in the ruins, what time a whole "land,” or block of houses, collapsed in Old Edinburgh) that "I'm no deid yet!" We can hardly doubt, however, that Lamb meant by this declaration of his own death to free himself from the shackles which the character of Elia, he already felt, was putting upon the free play of his personality and his intellect. This feeling became still stronger a few years later, so much so that in the " Englishman's Magazine " he would not have a name at all, but had his contributions put under the general heading of Peter's Net, all being fish that came to him there. In the present instance, however, he did not at once effect his release; for in the March number he gave official denial to the report of his death, and continued his contributions with considerable regularity for two years more. But there can be little doubt as to his inclinations, for in that month (March 1823) he writes to Bernard Barton: "They have dragged me again into the Magazine; but I feel the spirit of the thing in my own mind quite gone." It is evident, also, that the article was intended to be used as a Preface to the Essays of Elia," which were then in the press. He decided, however, that the book should have neither that Preface, nor another, which he had written in the form of a "Dedication to the Friendly and Judicious Reader." At the last minute he wrote to the publisher: "The Essays want no Preface: they are all Preface. Let Elia come forth bare as he was born." And so he did; without even a name of his own. 66 But ten years later, when preparing the "Last Essays of Elia " for the press, he unearthed this buried article, cleaned it off, or cut it down, by about a third, and so gave it to the world in the form in which the reader finds it here. With Lamb, cancellation was no mere cutting down, but the finishing of a work of art; and so it was in this case. Nevertheless, to us in these later days, who delight to trace Charles Lamb in every line of his writing, there is in the discarded passages of this Essay much that it were a pity to lose. For this reason, and also because the article suits itself peculiarly well to the talent of Mr Brock, it will be reproduced in its original entirety, with illustrations by that artist, in vol. iv. of this Edition. ("London Magazine," September 1824) This was Blakesware, 'the family seat of the Plumers, and situated about five miles from Ware. For fifty years or more Lamb's maternal grandmother, Mrs Field, had been housekeeper here; and it was during their holiday visits to her that both Charles and Mary gathered those deep impressions of the place which have yielded so beautiful a literary transcript-enriched with the colours of time, the mellowings of imagination--both in this Essay and in Mary's Tale, entitled Margaret Green or The Young Mahometan (for which see "Mrs Leicester's School" in vol. vii. of this Edition). Even at that early time its owners had almost deserted Blakesware ("the home of their fathers") and had made their other house, at Gilston (" a newer trifle "), near Marlow, their principal seat. And what a great good fortune that was! since, however estimable the Plumers might be, their full occupancy of the place, and their filling it with a world of attendants and a whole machinery of duties and services, would have ruined its solitude, agitated its atmosphere, broken the spell of its magical, Spenserian stillness-and life there for little Mary and Charles Lamb would have been greatly different-and literature would have lost, how much! The devastation described in the opening of the Essay was witnessed on a return to those scenes in 1822. See also Lamb's letter to Bernard Barton, Aug. 10, 1827. "The garden-loving Poet." Marvell on Appleton House, to the Lord Fairfax. [Note by Lamb in "London Magazine."] "I was the true descendant of those old Ws." Here Lamb's mystification has in a curious way approximated to an actual fact, and so has begotten confusions. Blakesware came (by a third marriage of Mrs Plumer) into the possession of a Mr Ward, who thereupon changed his family name to Plumer-Ward; consequently, some editors have thought that the initial in the above passage was a slight veiling of the word "Wards." Canon |