At
age fourteen, Lamb had dropped out of Christ’s Hospital, the charity boarding
school where he befriended Coleridge and Leigh Hunt, and went to work as a
clerk for Joseph Paice, a merchant in London. Lamb later wrote of Paice: “He
took me under his shelter at an early age, and bestowed some pains upon me. I
owe to his precepts and example whatever there is of the man of business (and
that is not much) in my composition. It is not his fault I did not profit more.”
After a year with Paice, Lamb moved on to a position in the Examiner’s Office
in the South Sea House, where his brother John was already employed. Lamb was
sixteen years old. He wrote of the place in the first of his Elia essays, “The South-Sea House” (1823).
After
five months, Lamb moved to the British East India Company where, for the first
two years, he received an annual “gratuity” of £30 in lieu of a salary. In his
letters, Lamb refers to his employment as “irksome confinement,” “captivity”
and “daylight servitude,” but the complaints sound less than anguished, at
least until his later years. Lamb was no proto-proletarian, no Bartleby. If he
preferred not to, he mostly kept it to himself except to laugh about it in
letters to friends. Sundays were his only days off, and Christmas
and Easter were the only holidays (a customary schedule at the time). He closes a letter
to Wordsworth in 1815 with this serio-comic rant:
“Confusion
blast all mercantile transactions, all traffick, exchange of commodities,
intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilization and wealth and
amity and link of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and knowlege of the
face of the globe—and rot the very firs of the forest that look so romantic
alive, and die into desks. Vale.”
Lamb
submitted his letter of resignation on Feb. 7, 1825, and the Board of Directors
took more than seven weeks to reply. All the while, Lamb agonized over the size
of his pension. In a letter to his friend Bernard Barton
written just days before the board responded, he says:
“I
am sick of hope deferred. The grand wheel is in agitation that is to turn up my
fortune; but round it rolls, and will turn up nothing. I have a glimpse of
freedom, of becoming a gentleman at large; but I am put off from day to day. I
have offered my resignation, and it is neither accepted nor rejected.”
On
March 29, the board accepted Lamb’s resignation and granted him a pension. On
April 6, he wrote to Wordsworth: “Here am I then, after thirty-three years'
slavery, sitting in my own room at eleven o'clock this finest of all April
mornings, a freed man, with £450 a year for the remainder of my life, live I as
long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at ninety.” He’s just
warming up:
“I
came home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my
condition overwhelmed me; it was like passing from life into eternity. Every
year to be as long as three, i.e., to have three times as much real
time--time that is my own--in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but
feeling I was not. But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to
understand the nature of the gift.”
In
retirement, Lamb used his new-found “gift” to write the funniest, most feeling
essays in the language. In “The Superannuated Man,” he describes how the
jubilation of retirement turns into uneasiness, which leads to a profound
meditation on the human experience of time:
“For
the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I could only apprehend my
felicity; I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking
I was happy, and knowing that I was not. I was in the condition of a prisoner
in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' confinement. I
could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into
Eternity -- for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to
himself.”
If
you’re a writer with a non-literary day job, think of Lamb before complaining of your
misfortunes. At least you get Saturdays off, and Independence Day.
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