'The Time That is a Man's Own'

I’ve always had a job, even if it was freelancing, a tough way to earn a living. Even better, I’ve always enjoyed the jobs I had, at least most of the time. Old grudges fade. Work seems to me like a natural extension of education, especially for a writer. There’s always something to pick up along the way, scraps of information, a growing sense of competence that grows into confidence, camaraderie, a front-row seat at the human comedy. Still, I understand why some people look forward to retirement, especially if you’ve simply had enough or your health is failing.

In 1792, Charles Lamb went to work as a clerk at East India House, the home office of the East India Company, and though he often complained about it, his clerkship reliably supplied him with comic fodder. After thirty-three years, he retired. On this date, April 6, in 1825, he wrote two letters to friends announcing his new-found liberation. The first went to William Wordsworth, not a notably humorous fellow who must frequently have been baffled by Lamb:

“Here I am then after 33 years slavery, sitting in my own room at 11 o’Clock this finest of all April mornings a freed man, with £441 a year for the remainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at 90.”

Little was sacred to Lamb, even his own fortunes:

“I came home for ever on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelm’d 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.”

That same day he wrote to his Quaker friend Bernard Barton: “My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my recent emancipation, that I have scarce steadiness of hand, much more mind, to compose a letter. I am free, B.B.--free as air.” He repeats much of what he has already told Wordsworth, and adds:  

“I will live another 50 years; or, if I live but 10, they will be thirty, reckoning the quantity of real time in them, i.e. the time that is a man’s own.”

Lamb almost reached the ten-year mark, dying on Dec. 27, 1834, at age fifty-nine.