Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Forging of the Romantic Literary Coterie

Abstract

‘Oxford in the Vacation’, Charles Lamb’s second essay for the London Magazine, published in October 1820, begins with a question: ‘methinks I hear you exclaim, Reader, Who is Elia?’¹ Elia is a puzzle: a pseudonym which is partly ‘a lie’, partly a covert biographical reference, partly the fruit of many years’ thought about the nature of authorship, and experiments in creative collaboration. On one level, the essays are the product of their publication context, the London Magazine, ‘a quintessentially, consciously metropolitan periodical’ engaged in fierce rivalry with Blackwood’s Magazine. ² On another level, however, the essays are profoundly, if elusively, autobiographical, rich in allusion both literary and personal; as Robert Morrison analyses elsewhere in this volume, the Elia signature was very clearly identified by readers with Lamb himself. Although the Elia essays demonstrate Lamb’s skill at negotiating new urban print networks, they also bear the traces of earlier manuscript exchanges and friendly conversations stretching back to his schooldays. As such, they benefit from being read, to borrow from Arthur F. Marotti’s seminal interpretation of Donne’s work, as ‘coterie literature, as texts originally involved with both their biographical and social contexts’.³ Understanding, in Marotti’s terms, the specific ‘literary coordinates’ of Lamb’s work—such as his friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the shared language of allusion developed by the two men over many years of reading and revising one another’s work—gives insight into individual creative practice, and also into the workings of Romantic coteries more generally.⁴ As I will show, the figure of Elia demonstrates how an author might balance and play with different literary allegiances. He is a self-conscious reminder of—and reflection upon—the various communities to which Lamb belonged through his life. Yet Elia also allows us to reflect critically on the nature of the coterie, since he is a slippery figure who evades categorization, and whose closest textual relatives, as we will see, are forgers, fakes, and frauds.