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Charles Lamb's Insight Into the Nature of the Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Charles I. Patterson
Charles I. Patterson*
Affiliation:
Alabama Polytechnic Institute, Auburn
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Extract

Charles Lamb exhibited the same genial attitude toward books as toward people; he never expected too much of either, and was therefore seldom disappointed. This whimsical tolerance was especially evident in his reactions to prose fiction. He never went at a novel too seriously—with hammer and tongs, as we say; yet he could distinguish between the enduring works and the pulp. Moreover, he professed to like the same qualities in books as in people: individuality, personality, and even eccentricity. In 1821 he disclaimed a taste for the external events in narrative fiction, contrasting his attitude with that of his sister: “Narrative teases me. I have little concern with the progress of events. She must have a story.... The fluctuations of fortune in fiction ... and almost in real life ... have ceased to interest, or to operate but dully upon me. Out of the way humours and opinions—heads with some diverting twist in them—the oddities of authorship please me most” (ii, 75). There is, however, ample evidence that Lamb read widely in prose fiction and enjoyed the works of the great eighteenth-century masters—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. He also was acquainted with the writings of Sterne, Goldsmith, Henry Mackenzie, Robert Paltock, Aleman, Cervantes, Jane and Maria Porter, Godwin, Scott, and many figures of less note, including the Minerva Press offerings. As Lamb himself put it, “Defoe was always my darling” (i, 524). In 1829, at the request of his friend Walter Wilson, Lamb wrote a critical essay on Defoe's secondary novels for Wilson's book Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe.4

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , June 1952 , pp. 375 - 382
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952

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References

1 This research has been supported by the Grants-in-Aid Program of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute.

2 Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (London, 1903-05), ii, 44 (henceforth cited as Works). Lamb's liking for eccentric writers like Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne is well known.

3 Works, i, 43, 83, 86, 99, 272; ii, 172-173; v, 67.

4 Ibid., i, 325. The essay is an expansion of a fine critical letter to Wilson (16 Dec. 1822). Wilson printed part of the letter also, and Lamb was concerned about what readers would think of the similarity (i, 524).

5 William Hazlitt was obviously in error when he contended that Lamb considered Scott's novels as “trash,” and expressed vexation at Lamb's attitude: Complete Works, Centenary Ed., ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1930-34), xx, 262-263.

6 This is, of course, not true of a novel like Miss Burney's Evelina, in which the author's purpose is expressly to present the externals of society as they appear to a young girl. Perhaps it is significant that Lamb showed no great enthusiasm for Miss Burney.

7 In contrast to Lamb, Coleridge applauded Sterne's dramatization of inner character in scattered episodes of Tristram Shandy, as I have pointed out in a previous article: “Coleridge's Conception of Dramatic Illusion in the Novel,” ELH, xviii (June 1951), 123-137.

8 The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (London, 1935), i, 239-240.

9 Lamb anticipated by more than 120 years several of the cardinal points of Allan Swallow's excellent article, “Defoe and the Art of Fiction,” Western Humanities Review, iv, ii (Spring 1950), 129-136.

10 A shorter tale by Lamb called A True Story is even worse (Works, i, 329 ff.).

11 T. S. Eliot has recently stressed this point in “Poetry and Drama,” Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1951, pp. 30-38.