“Poor
ELIA, the real, (for I am but a counterfeit) is dead. The fact is, a person of
that name, an Italian, was a fellow clerk of mine at the South Sea House,
thirty (not forty) years ago, when the characters I described there existed,
but had left it like myself many years; and I having a brother now there, and
doubting how he might relish certain descriptions in it, I clapt down the name
of Elia to it, which passed off pretty well, for Elia himself added the
function of an author to that of a scrivener, like myself.”
Lamb
published the first of his Elia essays in The
London Magazine in 1820, turning out fifty-two of them in five years, all
published in book form in Essays of
Elia (1823) and Last Essays of Elia
(1833). To the latter volume, Lamb appended a preface, “By a Friend of the Late
Elia,” in which he writes: “To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of
the thing, if there was ever much in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two
years' and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom.” For
another two paragraphs he eulogizes his mythical alter ego, who shares with
Lamb his stutter, his fondness for tobacco (“the Indian weed”) and an
occasional drink (“temperate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a
little on this side of abstemiousness”), and general oddness of character. Lamb/Elia
writes of Elia/Lamb: “Few understood him; and I am not certain that at all
times he quite understood himself. He too much affected that dangerous figure
-- irony.” Recounting to Taylor his attempt to have a reunion with Elia, Lamb
sounds a note of genuine fictional pathos:
“I
went there the other day (not having seen him for a year) to laugh over with
him at my usurpation of his name, and found him, alas! no more than a name, for
he died of consumption eleven months ago, and I knew not of it. So the name has
fairly devolved to me, I think; and ’tis all he has left me.”
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