by Frances Thomas
What? Did he really say ‘I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life?’ Charles Lamb said this to Wordsworth?
Well, yes, he did, in a letter of February, 1801. And he was prepared to defend himself; ‘My attachments are all local, purely local….The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a bookcase which has followed me about…old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school,- these are my mistresses – have I not enough without your mountains?’
Charles Lamb was very much a Londoner – born and grew up in the pleasant surroundings of the Inner Temple, later attending the London Christ’s Hospital School. There he met Coleridge, who became a lifelong friend. Coleridge was unhappy and lonely at school, but Lamb – in spite of the brutal regime- could always go home at weekends and get fed properly and relax.
Christ’s Hospital School
Like Wordsworth, Lamb had a beloved sister with whom he lived all his life – but there was a streak of mental illness running through the Lamb family, and on one dreadful day in 1796 Mary Lamb stabbed their mother to death. Yet, with surprising humanity for the time, she was released into the care of her brother, and between them they managed her recurring psychotic fits– or ‘illness’ as they called them.
Mary Lamb c 1847
It was in 1802 that Lamb and Wordsworth first met in London, and Lamb showed him and Dorothy round the sights, hoping Wordsworth could be made to share his enthusiasm. It was soon after this that he wrote the letter, with its heretical statement:
‘Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life.- I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you Mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, play houses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the Town, the Watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself, a pantomime and a masquerade. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much Life.’
The Strand
We don’t know how Wordsworth received this letter, or whether Dorothy had to calm him down and console him. But the poet was no longer the ardent youth, striding joyously through life, attentive to every new impression – he was settling into the role of infallible sage, whose ideas on the sanctity and spiritual value of Nature could not be gainsaid (‘Mr Wordsworth is never interrupted,’ Mrs Wordsworth once said to an eager Keats, anxious to break into the poet’s monologue.) He didn’t actually dislike London, though he liked it to be calm and quiet and glittering, unlike Lamb who enjoyed all the dirty, decadent life, but he felt it to be intrinsically inferior to the countryside.
Lamb had sent his letter in response to a present from Wordsworth of a new copy of Lyrical Ballads, and while he was enthusiastic about the gift, he had dared to make a few mild criticisms. Wordsworth had been a slow correspondent before when Lamb had sent a copy of one of his plays, but this time, ‘The Post did not sleep a moment. I received almost instantaneously a long letter of four sweating pages,’ in which Wordsworth corrected Lamb’s criticism and instructed firmly him about what he ought to be feeling; ‘This passage as combining in an extraordinary degree that union of Imagination and tenderness, which I am speaking of, I consider as one of the Best I ever wrote.’
But in spite of this, the relationship was repaired. Lamb admired Wordsworth, and Wordsworth liked Lamb, and their friendship lasted until Lamb died, following a fall in the street, in 1834. In fact, everyone seemed to have liked Lamb, and he was a popular dinner-guest, known for his gentle humour and frolicky drunkenness. His life was darkened, though, by his anxiety about his sister, and his own fear of insanity – he too had spent a period in an asylum in his youth, though the symptoms of what he called ‘madness’ never recurred in his life. Much of his life was passed in quiet domestic happiness with his sister, whom he called his ‘best friend.’ Unlike Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Lamb didn’t stride over mountains, or keep frantically busy with domestic chores. Charles tried to keep her life tranquil, and free from excitement, to minimise her periods of psychosis. They seemed to be able to predict these, however, and when she felt one coming on, Charles had to take her in a straitjacket to a house in Hackney, where she was constrained and kindly looked after, until the fit passed. Then she was her normal, gentle, humorous self again. The relationship was especially important to Charles, because Mary had a capacious memory for the events of their shared youth, and they could discuss these endlessly. Although Charles had been in love, he felt he could never marry because of the fear of insanity – so the only family he could have was that of his own past relayed through memories; and of course many of the inhabitants of this past were dead:
Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?
I had a mother, but she died and left me,
Died prematurely in a day of horrors –
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I loved a love once, fairest among women;
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her —
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man;
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.
Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood.
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father’s dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces —
How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
(this is usually printed without the first verse.)
The woman he loved was probably Ann Simmons, who married a silversmith called Bartrum. In his most poignant essay, ‘Dream Children’ he (‘Elia’) imagines he is married to Alice, as he calls her, and has two children, Alice and John, who play lovingly at his feet while he tells them stories of his childhood and their family.
Lamb did finally accept Wordsworth’s invitation to visit the Lakes, and seemed to have enjoyed himself among the mountains. But, he said to a friend, ‘I could not live in Skiddaw. I could spend a year, two, three years among [the mountains] , but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time.’
A View of Derwent Water and Skiddaw, c1768, by Francis Towne, Leeds Museums and Galleries
Wordsworth and Lamb did not write to each other very often (perhaps Lamb was daunted by the prospect of more ‘sweating pages’ arriving) but Mary and Dorothy kept up a warm and friendly correspondence. And when Lamb died, Wordsworth celebrated him in an epitaph: ‘O he was good, if e’er a good man lived.’ But in the end, what seems to remain of Lamb is his intermittent sadness, and the closing paragraph of ‘Dream Children’ which remains one of the most heart-rending passages in the English language:
‘…while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which , without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech. ‘We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice called Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have an existence, and a name.’
Frances Thomas was born in Wales during the war, lived most of her life in London, and now lives in mid-Wales. She went to London University and is married to Richard Rathbone, a professor of African history. She’s written many books for young people, as well as a couple of adult novels, a biography of Christina Rossetti, and recently poetry. She has won the Welsh Books Council Tir na nOg prize and Scottish Arts Council award for her children’s books.
