At the Year’s End

Abstract

Charles Lamb felt that every man has two birthdays which ‘set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration’. One is special to the individual; the other, New Year’s Day, marks ‘the nativity of our common Adam’. He had never, he writes, heard the bells which ring out the Old Year without ‘a gathering-up’ of his mind ‘to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth’, all that had been ‘done or suffered, performed or neglected’. Hence the ‘ring out the old, ring in the new’ syndrome, the traditional Janus reckoning, accompanied by New Year resolutions, and the kind of moral stocktaking found, for example, in Pepys’s diaries or Sir Walter Scott’s Journal. On 1 January 1826 Scott writes:

These solemn divisions of time influence our feelings as they recur. Yet there is nothing in it — for every day in the year closes a twelvemonth as well as the 31st December. The latter is only the solemn pause, as when a guide, during a wild and mountainous road, calls on a party to pause and look back at the scenes which they have just passed.