Abstract
In this chapter takes Charles Lamb’s experiences of disability and his sister Mary’s ‘lunacy’ as critical background for the metropolitan aesthetic he develops, first, in his early letters and essays and later through his London Magazine persona, Elia. Lamb’s bitingly witty, theatrical approach to London foregrounds the intersubjective and aesthetic possibilities of disability, and reflects his preference for the performatively peculiar in others. But writing as Elia, Lamb’s metropolitanism becomes eulogistic. In the 1820s, Lamb registered the social developments that, as the nineteenth century progressed, made it increasingly difficult to acknowledge, and in many cases even encounter, disability’s expansive potential. Lamb’s blind beggars, driven from London’s streets into institutional confinement, are emblematic of the cultural shifts that he mourns. Lamb thus provides an especially compelling illustration of both the possibilities of Romantic disability and the increasingly normative attitudes that Victorian culture would come to adopt.
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- 1.
Tobin Siebers has usefully commented on visual artistic depictions of disability as opposed to health. “Healthy bodies in art do not have details,” but instead, “[t]hey are unmarked.” The presence of “details” tends to signal disability: “where there are details, human difference is not far away” (125).
- 2.
Mary had appeared in Coleridge’s earlier “Effusion XXII,” dedicated “To a Friend” (the unnamed Charles), as one with “soul affectionate yet wise,/Her polish’d wit as mild as lambent glories” (23–4). Here Mary’s identity is only thinly disguised by the pun “lambent,” and she is described in her sick bed with Lamb as her healer, “Soothing each pang with fond solicitude,/And tenderest tones medicinal of love” (10–1). The scene reminds Coleridge of his own sister, Anne, who had died years before, and the poet implies that a sick sister is far better than a dead one. “Effusion XXII” concludes with a prayer for the “healing ray” (30), a prayer that evidently remained unanswered as Coleridge composed “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.”
- 3.
Coleridge performs a not dissimilar effacement of his wife, Sara, who is the cause of the injury that creates the poem’s circumstances.
- 4.
Coleridge’s relationship with Wordsworth bears mention here. As Lucy Newlyn has written, “For Wordsworth and Coleridge, in the years 1797 to 1801, the opposition between city and country was not a literary cliché. It was a way of alluding to differences that were felt to lie very deep: differences on a personal level between their own childhood experiences, and on a purely symbolic level between states of mind” (“In City Pent” 408).
- 5.
In 1803, Coleridge wrote to his wife, Sara, of taking Mary to the asylum himself:
the next day she smiled in an ominous way—on Sunday she told her Brother that she was getting bad, with great agony—on Tuesday morning she layed hold of me with violent agitation, & talked wildly about George Dyer/I told Charles, there was not a moment to lose/and I did not lose a moment—but went for a Hackney Coach, & took her to the private Madhouse at Hogsden/She was quite calm, & said—it was the best to do so—but she wept bitterly two or three times, yet all in a calm way. Charles is cut to the Heart. (Letters I: 941)
Interestingly, London’s advantages for the medicalized patient were ones that Coleridge would benefit from when he took up residence with Dr. Gillman many years later.
- 6.
The 1822 letter to Wordsworth that I quoted at the opening of this chapter is also relevant here. Although I would not claim that Lamb’s evocative image of “queer points” and “answering needles” is sexual, neither can it be said to be nonsexual. Lamb does not anticipate modern usages of “queer” so much as he seems to have been attuned to the special charge of the word that later helped to transform it into a sexualized term.
- 7.
As E. V. Lucas explains, this informal sketch was written for William Upcott, “the autograph collector and assistant librarian of the London Institution”—though it was quoted in the New Monthly Magazine shortly after Lamb died (Lamb, Works I: 520).
- 8.
In “Preface: By a Friend of the Late Elia,” Lamb echoes such characterizations. He notes that “I have seen him [Elia] sometimes in what is called good company, but where he has been a stranger, sit silent, and be suspected for an odd fellow; till some unlucky occasion provoking it, he would stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether senseless perhaps, if rightly taken), which has stamped his character for the evening.” He was an indulger, perhaps “he might be thought a little excessive,” of “Indian weed” (tobacco), which he took “as a solvent of speech,” describing how, “as the friendly vapour ascended, how his prattle would curl up sometimes with it! the ligaments, which tongue-tied him, were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist!” (Works II: 152–3).
- 9.
The essay was published in the London Magazine under the name of Elia, but not reprinted in his collected essays. The portrait is based on an actual woman, one Mrs. Smith of Cambridge, whom E. V. Lucas notes Lamb described in an 1821 letter to Dorothy Wordsworth (Lamb, Works I: 474).
- 10.
For more information on the history of chimney sweepers, see Fulford, Lee, and Kitson’s Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era; also see George L Phillips’ “The Abolition of Climbing Boys” and Tim Hitchcock’s Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London.
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For example, like Lamb’s sweeps, Wordsworth’s Johnny Foy is associated with animals (a pony, owlets), with things (the moon, a mill), and also with a racial other (Gypsies).
- 12.
The question of why Lamb does not name Horsey may be answered in two ways. First, he did not need to name Horsey because he was in the 1820s so well known that his readers would immediately recognize him. While we do still read Lamb’s essays, one of their challenges to a modern readership is their timeliness, a quality related to generic expectations. Unlike such literary works as Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poetry, Lamb’s magazine writing seems to have been produced with an eye to immediacy rather than posterity; Lamb presupposes a reader who would be well versed with popular debates of the day and also with London’s streets. The second (and not incompatible) possibility as to why Lamb did not name Horsey is that by withholding his name, Lamb is able to comment more generally on the types of bodies that inhabit urban spaces. As I will describe, Lamb’s portrait of Horsey departs from other contemporaneous portraits of the man, and it may be the case that he aimed to construct a Horsey-like character who would allow him to more pointedly make his claims about the value of non-normative bodies. It is worth noting that Wordsworth’s disability poetry also capitalizes on sociomedical categories, even when a character is named or had a historical model. Sometimes the poet uses a name in conjunction with a title (e.g. Simon Lee, the old huntsman; Johnny Foy, the idiot boy), and sometimes he uses only a title (e.g. the Blind Beggar, the Mad Mother).
- 13.
This 1819 edition is marketed as a “New Edition,” and revises the editions printed earlier that decade.
- 14.
Interestingly, Kirby never indicates whether or not Richards is in fact blind, and therefore whether Richards’s speech and affect are the only feigned elements of his performance. Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum (later Wonderful and Eccentric Museum) is ambivalent as to the disabled figures it describes—a topic somewhat beyond the purview of my argument here, but a fact that aligns with my characterization of the early Romantic period as one in which competing ideas of disability coexisted.
- 15.
Interestingly, for Caulfield, the idea of legitimate need may be based on disability alone. Although Caulfield relates a rumor that Horsey “is in possession of several houses,” he indicates “there are few, we believe, who envy his lot, or who regret having contributed to [his] amelioration” (162). The striking crossover of Caulfield’s description of Horsey with Lamb’s “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis” would suggest that Lamb wrote his essay partly in response to Lives and Portraits of Remarkable Characters.
References
Caulfield, James. The Lives and Portraits of Remarkable Characters, Drawn from the Most Authentic Sources. 2 vols. London: W. Lewis, 1819.
Christensen, Jerome. Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Kirby, R. S. Kirby’s Wonderful and Eccentric Museum: Or, Magazine of Remarkable Characters; Including All the Curiosities of Nature and Art, from the Remotest Period to the Present Time, Drawn from every authentic Source. Vol. III–VI. London: 1805, 1820.
———. The Wonderful and Scientific Museum: Or, Magazine of Remarkable Characters; Including All the Curiosities of Nature and Art, from the Remotest Period to the Present Time, Drawn from every authentic Source. Vol. I–II. London: 1803, 1804.
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Stanback, E.B. (2016). “queer points” and “answering needles”: Lamb’s Spectacular Metropolitanism and Modern Disability. In: The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51140-9_7
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