'There Was No Buttering Her Parsnips'

In 1823, Charles Lamb and his sister moved from Covent Garden to a cottage in Islington, then a semi-rural district, and lived there until 1827. Lamb reveled in his new surroundings. On this date, Sept. 23, in 1823, he writes to his Quaker friend Bernard Barton:

“I have a cottage in Colebrook Row, Islington,--a cottage, for it is detached; a white house, with six good rooms, The New River (rather elderly by this time) runs (if a moderate walking pace can be so termed) close to the foot of the house.”

The cottage still stands, but rather more grandly than in Lamb’s day. It appears to have been fashionably gentrified, and today would price Lamb out of the market. For him, the major attraction was the garden:

“[B]ehind is a spacious garden with vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight the heart of old Alcinous. You enter without passage into a cheerful dining-room, all studded over and rough with old books; and above is a lightsome drawing-room, three windows, full of choice prints. I feel like a great lord, never having had a house before.”

In The Odyssey, Alcinous tended a large orchard of fruit trees. Another source says Lamb had a single pear tree, but he implies otherwise:

“I am so taken up with pruning and gardening,--quite a new sort of occupation to me. I have gathered my jargonels [OED: “an early ripening variety of pear”]; but my Windsor pears are backward. The former were of exquisite raciness. I do now sit under my own vine, and contemplate the growth of vegetable nature.”

Lamb’s pleasure in his garden is genuine but his newfound role as squire is also an opportunity to parody Romantic nature worship, especially as practiced by his childhood friend Coleridge:   

“I can now understand in what sense they speak of father Adam. I recognize the paternity while I watch my tulips. I almost fell with him, for the first day I turned a drunken gardener (as he let in the serpent) into my Eden; and he laid about him, lopping off some choice boughs, etc., which hung over from a neighbor's garden, and in his blind zeal laid waste a shade which had sheltered their window from the gaze of passers-by. The old gentlewoman (fury made her not handsome) could scarcely be reconciled by all my fine words. There was no buttering her parsnips. She talked of the law. What a lapse to commit on the first day of my happy ‘garden state’!”

One of Lamb’s most charming qualities, in addition to his sense of humor, is his inveterate stance as a spectator. Life is a form of theater. “Watch my tulips,” indeed.