Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s by Felicity James

Abstract

Felicity James. Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in 1790s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. 265. $75.00. In foreground of James Gillray's Anti-Jacobin cartoon New Morality, Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd, caricatured as Toad & Frog and surrounded by Liberty Caps and Sansculottes, croak out passages from their 1797 collection Blank Verse. Contemporaries were puzzled by Lamb's appearance in this mock-triumph of Jacobin tendency. Southey (who, like Coleridge, is depicted in cartoon as braying ass) commented: I know not what poor Lamb has done to be croaking there. Many readers since, with Lamb as poet of mournful sensibility, and, in guise of Elia, as familiar essayist of paradox and whimsicality, have echoed Southey's bewilderment. In her searching study of Lamb and his circle, however, Felicity James argues that Lamb's inclusion in revolutionary throng is not as odd as it might appear, indeed, that the suspicions of Anti-Jacobin might not have been misplaced. Gillray, she suggests, chose his target wisely. James's scholarly and accessible work situates Lamb's early in context of febrile revolutionary debates of 1790s. Building on recent work on romantic collaborative networks and ideas of sociability, it traces Lamb's politics to utopian ideas of community and sympathetic feeling fostered by meetings with Lloyd and Coleridge in little smoky room in Salutation & Cat. James argues that for Lamb and his circle, friendship itself is maintained by literary techniques of quotation, echo, and personal reference. Through art of allusion, Lamb's translates revolutionary debates of era into pragmatics of friendly conversation. The struggle to reposition politics of sentiment and affections in wake of Burke and Godwin, however, leave group's early utopian ideals of friendship and community based on home-born Feeling hovering uneasily between conservative retreat and radical engagement. By end of decade, it is apparent that Lamb and Coleridge have quite different ideas about friendship and community. James explores causes and consequences of this disagreement in way that combines detailed textual scrutiny with sharp awareness of personal and ideological tensions between parties. Among many delights of this book is its ability to suggest particular times and locations; James is an evocative scene-setter. The first chapter recreates atmosphere of Salutation & Cat, with friends engaging in conversation amid steaming egg-nog, in lug of Orinoco tobacco-smoke. James's carefully modulated reading of Lamb and Coleridge's work in 1790s rightly stresses inchoate nature of their political views, as well as influences such as electrical fluid theories of Thelwall and Godwin and, more importantly, Unitarianism. Unitarian notions of friendship form bedrock of Lamb and Coleridge's politics in 1790s, and James vividly situates Coleridge's ideal of Pantisocracy, his attempt to bridge Godwin and Burke with Unitarian idea of vast family of love, to economic transformation of family life during eighteenth century and to theorization of affect by Hume, Smith and Rousseau. Consequently, for James, smoky little room takes on role comparable to Thomas Poole's bower at Nether Stowey, representing Hartleyan small spot which lies at heart of larger benevolence. Seen this way, Salutation & Cat gatherings are both performative rebuttal of Godwin and an anxious revision of Burke--an attempt to protect fraternal affections, dismissed by Godwin, from anti-Jacobin appropriation. James's argument that allusion constitutes a key factor in Lamb's development of sympathetic mode of reading and writing is amply supported by her readings of individual poems. …