`O London With-the-Many-Sins!'

Unlike some of his friends, Charles Lamb was no nature lover. He was a London man, a lifelong dweller in the greatest city of his day, and it sufficed. Though a Romantic by chronology, his indifference to the natural world, like his prose style, suggests Lamb was a displaced native of the 17th or 18th century. Consider this passage from a letter he wrote his friend Thomas Manning on Nov. 28, 1800, when he was 25 years old:

“For my part, with reference to my friends northward, I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth and sea and sky (when all is said) is but as a house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits at an old coronation, if they can talk sensibly and feel properly, I have no need to stand staring upon the gilded looking-glass (that strained my friend's purse-strings in the purchase), nor his five-shilling print over the mantelpiece of old Nabbs the carrier (which only betrays his false taste). Just as important to me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world, -- eye-pampering, but satisfies no heart.”

Lamb is only getting warmed up. At this point, he makes one of his patented prose zigzags – inspired digressions from a mind, like Sterne’s, incapable of linear progression – and pens one of the great paeans to city life:

“Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and silversmiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchman at night, with bucks reeling home drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of `Fire!’ and `Stop, thief!’ inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, `Jeremy Taylors,’ `Burtons on Melancholy,’ and `Religio Medicis’ on every stall. These are thy pleasures, O London with-the-many-sins! O City abounding in--, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!”

Readers in England: What of this remains? Are traces of Lamb’s rambunctious London still discernable? What of the book-stalls? Taylor, Burton and Browne are tourist sites for Lamb, part of the urban landscape. He invokes them, his masters, by writing in their manner, a prose hommage. I’m always touched by Lamb’s eagerness to acknowledge his precursors, particularly Burton. In one of his Elia essays, “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire,” he lends his sister, “Mad” Mary Lamb, the persona of Bridget Elia, “my housekeeper for many a long year,” and contrasts their tastes in books:

“We are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teazes me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a story -- well, ill, or indifferently told -- so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in fiction -- and almost in real life -- have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinion -- heads with some diverting twist in them -- the oddities of authorship please me most.”

Lamb freely tips his hand. He wants us to know where he comes from and where he’s gone to school, and he makes an excellent companion. I hope some day to visit London – in particular, what remains of Lamb’s London.