'Letting Loose His Outlandishness'

Some of us know Thomas Manning (1772-1840) second-handedly, by way of Charles Lamb. The better informed know him as a pioneering sinologist who, in 1811, became the first European to enter Lhasa, Tibet, where he met the 9th Dalai Lama, a six-year-old boy. He had studied Chinese and medicine in Paris, and lived in China from 1807 to 1817. He is said to have known fifteen languages. He interviewed Napoleon on St. Helena. Lamb had met Manning at Cambridge in 1799. His first letter to his new friend, dated December 1 of that year, begins: “The particular kindness, even up to a degree of attachment, which I have experienced from you, seems to claim some distinct acknowledgment on my part.” In Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb (Yale University Press, 2022), Eric G. Wilson writes: 

“Lamb would have evolved his bizarre wit on his own, but Manning evoked a comic energy from Lamb that he wasn’t aware he possessed. Over the next twenty years, Lamb intensified this vigor until it condensed into the essays of Elia. Lamb’s letters to Manning are test runs for his mature style, in some cases serving as first drafts for Elian essays.”

 

Imagine if Manning had been a humorless, dry-as-dust academic. What might have become of Elia? The most entertainingly eccentric of essayists and letter-writers, Lamb had a gift for attracting comparably entertaining and eccentric friends. Wilson describes the tone of that first letter to Manning as “demure, Lamb doesn’t feel comfortable letting loose his outlandishness.”

 

Manning makes a cameo appearance in Lamb’s Elia essay “The Old and New Schoolmaster": “My friend M., with great painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second.” At Cambridge, Manning served as a tutor in mathematics. He shows up again in “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig,” in which Manning is anonymously identified as the translator of a Chinese text:

 

“Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day.”

 

Lamb and Manning hit it off – not always the case with eccentrics, who often find the eccentricity of others intolerable. Wilson writes: “Fashion and irreverence weren’t the only things Manning shared with Lamb. He also had dark features, a taste for the odd, a love of drink, and a penchant for quirky wordplay.” Humor tends not to travel well, in time or space. Lamb’s sense of comedy and pure silliness has a modern feel. It’s often compatible with what we find funny. Lamb and Manning were fortunate to have found each other.

 

I would love to read a detailed biography of Manning. No dry pedant, he could easily keep up with Lamb at his silliest. Here’s a sample from the letter Lamb wrote to Manning on May 28, 1819: “Mrs. Gold is well, but proves `uncoined,’ as the lovers about Wheathamstead would say.” In his reply, Manning tops him:

 

“I took all your letter very kindly, except the word uncoined—as you & I have barred punnin, I could not tell at first what to make of it—I’m afraid it will not pass current. I thought at first you alluded to her not being in a Family way. The phraze was familiar in Dryden’s time—’stampt an image.’ But what interest could you or I take in that? She’s not likely to produce young Napoleons, I suppose: Then I exchanged that for another idea — but still unfavorably.  Just as the circulating medium of my brain was at a standstill, & I feared I must let it aLoan . . . Nothing in this life, as you justly observe, is without alloy — not even uncoin’d Gold—but let’s change the note.”