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

I do not think there is anything deserving the name of society to be found out of London…. First, there is neighbourhood elsewhere, accidental or unavoidable acquaintance…; you can pick your society nowhere but in London. The very persons that of all others you would wish to associate with in almost every line of … intellectual pursuit, are to be met with there. Secondly, London is the only place in which each individual in company is treated according to his value in company, and to that only … it is not inquired whether he is rich or poor … but whether … he is a man of understanding or a blockhead…. William Hazlitt, ‘On Coffee-House Politicians’^l

Among the most remarkable [of Godwin’s friends] was the great Irish orator, Curran—a man extremely ugly…; his talk rich in its idiom and its imagery; and in the warmth of his feelings, he was all passion… Henry Crabb Robinson. (Morley, 14)

No man of liberal tendences could have talked in 1788 with Horne Tooke, then in the thick of his fight for Parliamentary reform, without having his heart moved as by a trumpet. M. Ray Adams, Studies in the Literary Background of English Radicalism (p. 30).