New Friends: Dyer and Southey

Abstract

It was time, in 1798, that Lamb had something to laugh about, and life had recently sent him George Dyer, the Cambridge Classics scholar. Soon it would send him Robert Southey, as well turned out, earnest, and sure of himself as Dyer was shabby, earnest, and absent-minded. Both were poets and radicals. Lamb had been much acted upon; now he began to mould and direct the currents of his own life, within the limits set, drawing to himself the friends who appealed to him. These became, gradually, a regiment of intimates and near intimates. More than most of us Lamb was driven to live through his friends and to make of those like George literary and epistolary capital; Southey, not written about except to friends, would now be his confidant in place of Coleridge. Mary was Charles’s central concern as his father failed, but Lamb would not write about her until later. We barely hear of the elder John now, or even (in letters still extant) of his death in the spring of 1799.

I have never made an acquaintance… that lasted; or a friendship, that answered, with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters…. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you… he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition. Lamb, ‘All Fools’ Day’ (Elia, 44)

He was as simple as the daisy, which we think we admire, and daily tread under foot. Bryan Waller Procter (‘Barry Cornwall’) on George Dyer¹

He hangs like a film and cobweb upon letters… he would not hurt a fly.William Hazlitt, ‘On the Conversation of Authors’, also on Dyer²

Are you intimate with Southey?—what poems is he about to publish—he hath a most prolific brain, & is indeed a most sweet poet. Lamb to Coleridge, 10 January 1797 (M i, 90)