'Capital Kitchen-Reading'

Charles Lamb’s old friend from the India House, Walter Wilson, was preparing his Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe (1830), and had written Lamb asking for any material he might have regarding the author of Robinson Crusoe. In a letter written on this date, Dec. 16, in 1822, Lamb replies that he has only “two or three novels and the ‘Plague History’” – that is, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), which in fact is a novel written to resemble a documentary history.  

“I would say that in the appearance of truth in all the incidents and conversations that occur in them, they exceed any works of fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. The Author never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called, or rather Autobiographies), but the narrator chains us down to an implicit belief in everything he says. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it.”

When he cared to be, Lamb is an acute critic of literature. He understands Defoe better than many readers: “Facts are repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot

choose but believe them. It is like reading evidence given in a court of justice.” Even when writing ad hoc criticism, his approach is idiosyncratic, though less purely whimsical and fun-loving than in many of his letters and essays:

“His style is everywhere beautiful, but plain & homely. Robinson Crusoe is delightful to all ranks and classes; but it is easy to see that it is written in phraseology peculiarly

adapted to the lower conditions of readers: hence it is an especial favorite with seafaring men, poor boys, servant-maids &c. His novels are capital kitchen-reading, while they are worthy, from their deep interest, to find a shelf in the Libraries of the wealthiest and the

most learned.”

One of the most reliable bedside browse-fests is George Saintsbury’s A Short History of English Literature (1898), in which he describes Lamb as “more nearly unique than any other English writer outside the great poets.” High praise, though English literature is dense with such oddball characters of genius. Think of Browne, Burton, Swift, Sterne and Landor. Again, Saintsbury on Lamb:

“It is, however, improbable that he would have been much more than a curiosity of literature—one of those not so very rare figures who make us say, ‘What a pity this man never found his way!’—or that at best his real worth would have been known only from his letters, which are numerous and charming, if the establishment of the London Magazine, followed as it was by his retirement from his clerkship on a pension, had not elicited from him the famous Essays of Elia.”

Probably true, but the letters, after Keats’, remain the best-written and most entertaining in English literature.