Charles Lamb and the Spy System

Abstract

In A History of English Literature, Michael Alexander writes that Charles Lamb ‘was indifferent to ideas, to politics’.¹ It is a long-standing view of someone who is often called ‘gentle Lamb’.² Hazlitt says much the same thing in his essay ‘Elia — Geoffrey Crayon’: ‘Mr. Lamb has succeeded, not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it. He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction … He evades the present; he mocks the future’ (Howe, XI: 180).³ However, as Felicity James states, although Lamb’s ‘politics were never overt or easily categorised’⁴ this does not mean that he was apolitical. In fact, it was Lamb, not Hazlitt (who has practically nothing to say about the Cato Street conspiracy⁵) who responded immediately and publicly to the most dramatic political event of 1820. This chapter will demonstrate that although Lamb’s politics seemed to be hidden under his good-natured personality, they did emerge immediately and particularly at moments of political crisis and were not ‘gentle’ or ‘indifferent’.