Schooling and Schoolfellows

Abstract

In thinking back upon his schooldays at Christ’s Hospital, Lamb quoted from Juvenal, the Roman poet, ‘Not easily do they rise, whose abilities are hampered by straitened means at home.’¹ But John Lamb had a way out of that for both his sons, if not his daughter. For Samuel Salt was a governor of Christ’s Hospital, and Christ’s Hospital was the best thing that ever happened to Charles Lamb. It gave him a liberal education, sensitive to moral issues, and it gave him gifted friends, chief of whom was Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The Christ’s Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character of his own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the public schools. There is pride in it …; and there is a restraining modesty. Lamb’s ‘Recollections of Christ’s Hospital’ (Misc., 141)

I have a strong recollection, that in my time there were two boys, one of whom went up into the drawing-room to his father, the master of the house; and the other, down into the kitchen to his father, the coachman …. The boys themselves… had no sort of feeling of the difference of one another’s ranks …. The cleverest boy was the noblest, let his father be who he might. Leigh Hunt on Christ’s Hospital, in his Autobiography (Hunt, 55)