Quote of the Day (Charles Lamb, on ‘The Only True Time’)

“I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own—that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's Time, not his.”—English essayist, critic, poet, and playwright Charles Lamb (1775-1834), “The Superannuated Man,” in Charles Lamb's Essays (1900)

I first encountered Charles Lamb—born 250 years ago today in London—through the children’s book Tales From Shakespeare, written with his older sister Mary. I wasn’t too impressed with it—and, consequently, him—at the time.

Then I found out that, like his friend William Hazlitt (whose picture of him accompanies this post), he was a talented practitioner of the personal essay—in a sense, the creative ancestor of bloggers like me.

Friends delighted in Lamb’s conversation, and it’s certainly the case that, with a few exceptions, what you see is what you get with him: a droll writer who liked to poke fun at himself, often using pseudonyms (including one for himself: “Elia,” taken from the last name of an Italian friend and fellow clerk).

I highlighted the quote above because, even with the vast changes in business and society that have taken place since the Romantic Era when Lamb wrote, the issues he raised in “The Superannuated Man”—working in a job that doesn’t always satisfy one’s deepest needs, and the proper use of time when employment comes to a definitive end—are ones that aging baby boomers like me are increasingly facing.

Lamb confronted these concerns himself because, family poverty forced him, at age 14, to quit school and start working as a clerk, his principal occupation until, 36 years later, he took his firm’s generous pension offer and retired.

Only a decade remained to the writer before his death. Much of that time was darkened by the growing mental instability of Mary, who had been under his care for three decades following her fit of temporary insanity that led her to fatally stab the Lambs’ mother and wound their father.

Lamb’s life underscores the predicament that so many writers who never achieve strong sales deal with: doing what you must versus what you want. We should all confront these challenges with the same perseverance, equanimity, and grace that Lamb summoned for so long.

Quote of the Day (Mary Lamb, Likening Envy to a ‘Blind and Senseless Tree’)

“Like such a blind and senseless tree

As I’ve imagined this to be,

   All envious persons are:

With care and culture all may find

Some pretty flower in their own mind,

   Some talent that is rare.”—Mary Lamb, from “Envy”

Mary Lamb, born on this date in London in 1764, was lucky to have “some talent that is rare,” along with a caring (and talented) brother. No other sister-brother literary combination in the Romantic Era may have surpassed the achievements—and life stories—of Mary and Charles Lamb except for inveterate diarist Dorothy Wordsworth and her poet sibling William. But even the Wordsworths didn’t collaborate as the Lambs did.

In 1796, lacking money and support from other family members as she coped with a senile father and a mother requiring round-the-clock help, Mary snapped one night. Grabbing a knife at dinnertime, she stabbed her mother to death. Only days after her act of matricide, she was expressing intense remorse over her moment of madness. The authorities agreed not to confine her to an insane asylum so long as Charles, 10 years younger—who himself had been institutionalized for six weeks—agreed to take care of her for the rest of his life.

Paradoxically, Mary—now believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder—was, Charles’ friend William Hazlitt once said, the only exception to his rule that he “never met with a woman who could reason, and had met with only one thoroughly reasonable - the sole exception being Mary Lamb.” Virtually all of his friends praised her warmth and gentleness. 

Though Mary published poetry for children, she is probably most famous for Tales From Shakespeare (1807). Though the first edition bore only the name, of Charles (who became famous as an essayist), his sister had actually written two-thirds of these retellings of dramas by The Bard. Perhaps her name was not included originally because of publishers’ sexism (the same reason why the Bronte sisters used pseudonyms when their great novels appeared in the 1840s).  Or, perhaps, Mary recoiled from anything that reminded readers of the tragedy that befell her years before.

Mary remained subject to episodes of mental illness throughout the rest of her life. Did this autodidact identify especially with Shakespearean heroes King Lear and Othello in their moments of temporary derangement? Surviving Charles by 13 years, she ended up being buried with him when her own time came to die in 1847.

Quote of the Day (Charles Lamb, on the Desire for Excellence)

“I gain nothing by being with such as myself—we encourage one another in mediocrity—I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.”—English essayist Charles Lamb (1775-1834), letter to his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, January 10, 1797, The Best Letters of Charles Lamb

One of these men “more excellent than myself” might well have been William Hazlitt, who, had he not decided to give himself entirely to his brilliant essays, might have done equally well with brilliant portraits such as this one of Lamb.