Lamb Among the Lions

Abstract

The move to Southampton Buildings — a group of houses at the Holborn end of Chancery Lane — was happy for Charles in putting him immediately in touch with his London friends and soon into the much wider world of the famous and near-famous. He was now close to the Southampton Coffee House, and the taverns of Fleet Street where a man could drink beer of an evening with his male friends. Plain speech was the order of these evenings — as Lamb’s description of Sara Coleridge ‘with a child in her Guts’ — and Lamb enjoyed it as much as anyone. (E. V. Lucas, in editing Lamb’s letters, suppressed a few expressions he considered vulgar: Marrs has restored them.) Not far was the red light district around Covent Garden; by twenty-five such activity normally repelled him. Failing the happy marriage he would have preferred, celibacy appears to have been his choice, and his relation to his sister that of younger brother, companion, and protector.2