'Those Sciential Apples Which Grew Amid the Happy Orchard'

Two-hundred years ago this month, in October 1820, Charles Lamb published the second of his Elia essays, “Oxford in the Vacation,” in London Magazine. Lamb was working as a clerk for the East India House, where he would retire in 1825 after thirty-three years. The first Elia essay, “The South-Sea House,” dealt playfully with his job and had been published two months earlier in the same magazine. The second essay further develops the Elia persona as “a votary of the desk–a notched and cropt scrivener.” Lamb was a good employee, but he permits Elia to make fun of his clerkship and the tension it created with his literary endeavors:  

 

“Well, I do agnize [sic] something of the sort. I confess that it is my humour, my fancy–in the forepart of the day, when the mind of your man of letters requires some relaxation–(and none better than such as at first sight seems most abhorrent from his beloved studies)–to while away some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. ‘[I]t . . . sends you home with such increased appetite to your books . . . not to say, that your outside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays–so that the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author.”

 

Anyone who has held down a “day job” – the reliable sort, with a steady paycheck and benefits – while scavenging for time to write in what remains of the day, will appreciate Elia’s bemused quandary. His life was complicated. He had a gift for friendship. Lamb loved food and drink, and his mentally ill sister Mary. He took his responsibilities as her caretaker (she had fatally stabbed their mother in 1796) seriously while maintaining a fulltime job and writing his poems and essays. He enjoyed taking his annual vacations near England’s great universities – Oxford and Cambridge. Lamb had never attended a university. He was, he writes in the essay, “defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic institution,” His biographer and editor E.V. Lucas writes:

 

“My own impression is that Lamb wrote the essay at Cambridge, under the influence of Cambridge, where he spent a few weeks in the summer of 1820, and transferred the scene to Oxford by way of mystification. He knew Oxford, of course, but he had not been there for some years and it was at Cambridge that he met [the poet George] Dyer and that he saw the Milton MSS.”

 

Lamb gained a fallacious reputation. He has been pigeonholed as strictly a sentimental or whimsical writer, a favorite of schoolmasters for generations. Much humor is time- and place-dependent, and few writers from two centuries ago can make us laugh aloud. But Lamb is more than a verbally sophisticated clown. His near-poverty as a child, the horrific nature of his mother’s death, his sister’s frequent “spells” and stays in insane asylums – all contributed to a certain nobility of the soul, a natural empathy for the cast-off and misunderstood. He was flawed. He was a drunk and expressed stupidly anti-Semitic sentiments in one of his essays. But my favorite Lamb/Elia is the one who celebrates books, who takes his place in the great English literary tradition we have inherited:

 

“What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.”