Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine

Metropolitan Muse

Simon P Hull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317315698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The inherent 'metropolitanism' of writing for a Romantic-era periodical is here explored through the Elia articles that Charles Lamb wrote for the London Magazine.

1 Consuming the Periodical Text: Hunt, Hazlitt and the Anxiety of Cockneyism

DOI: 10.4324/9781315653310-2

Cockney [is a] nick name given to the citizens of London, or persons born within the sound of Bow bell … The king of the cockneys is mentioned among the regulations for the sports and shows formerly held on Childermass Day, where he had his officers, a marshall, constable, butler, &c.

Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811)

The Cockney School attacks, as Jeffrey Cox has observed, cleverly invert the elaborate mock court of the Cockney king in order to identify literary affectation and presumption. ¹ The burlesque pomp and ceremony of the Cockney ritual is generally appropriated to the provincial mindset and egoistic character of the Cockney author. Lamb’s ludic and self-denigrating persona appears closer in spirit to the carnivalesque festival described in the Dictionary than to the derogatory term that appropriates it. The periodical conditions of commodification and the anonymous, corporate identity simultaneously seem to inspire the Elian self, and cause the magazine in which Elia appears to be damagingly embroiled within the Cockney dispute, as an expression of anxiety over metropolitan culture. Both of Lamb’s metropolitan peers in this chapter, Hunt and Hazlitt, identify what are essentially Elian characteristics in their respective attempts to find a mode of periodical writing which is not synonymous with the all-pervasive, demonizing Cockney label. Because Lamb’s former editor and fellow periodical-writing Londoner Hunt is derided as the archetypal Cockney author he represents the prime agent of this anxiety, yet this is a position from which he offers a perceptive analysis of Lamb’s timely qualities as an antidote to Cockneyism. Responding in more ambivalent fashion to the rise of periodicals than the protagonists of the Cockney dispute and complicating the demonized figure of the Cockney itself, the foremost critic of the age, Hazlitt, tentatively gestures towards the irony-based defusion of metropolitan anxiety uniquely engineered by Lamb. Lamb writes not against Cockneyism or Hunt, therefore, but the virulent anxiety that gathers around the Cockney figure. In addition to the proselytizing of nature by the Lake School, Lamb’s periodical writing responds to the divisive, and ultimately implosive, forces within metropolitan culture itself.

In addition to the ones in which the terms of ‘Cockneyism’ are disputed, a number of self-reflexive articles in the London and concurrent magazines testify to this sense of uneasiness over periodical authorship. Such anxiety relates in turn to the new magazine’s ambiguous role within metropolitan culture, whereby periodicals such as the London attempt to capture the vibrant, dynamic spirit of the city, whilst exhibiting an uncomfortable sense of complicity with the more dubious features of novelty and consumerism. It will be argued in this chapter that an Elian mode of metropolitanism emerges in response to the ‘anxious’ image dramatized by the Cockney dispute.

The circumstantial evidence for such a reading is compelling. Elia first appears in the London in August 1820, when the Cockney attacks on Hunt and his radical circle had persisted for almost three years. Founded in January of that year, the London itself was about to become embroiled, an involvement culminating in February 1821 with the utterly wasteful death of its most talented editor, John Scott, in an infamous duel with a Blackwood’s ally, John Christie. With poignant timing, therefore, the ostensibly gentle, whimsical Elia is born into a highly competitive and often bitterly aggressive, literary environment. It might be added that Lamb’s literary career prior to the beginning of the dispute is characterized by a chequered assortment of occasional, short poems, a few acclaimed critical pieces, some co-written children’s literature, the odd short story, and failed attempts at playwriting. In contrast, the hiatus of Cockneyism and the new magazine coincides with the moment of Lamb’s eventual maturation as a writer, with what was to be his only conceptually sustained, and perhaps fully realized, body of work. And with the demise of Cockneyism and the periodical milieu it articulates, comes, fittingly, the end of Elia too. The fact, finally, that Elia appears predominantly in one of the key periodicals of the dispute, the London Magazine, makes it still more viable to interpret Elia as a response to Cockneyism.

However futile, Scott’s violent end does seem ironically appropriate. That is, if one views Scott as a named and corporeal casualty in a war of words fought out over the identity and role of the phantasmal ‘body’ of the pseudonymous periodical author. ² Yet a sense of the wastefulness of Scott’s death is unavoidable, not least of all because his defensiveness over Cockneyism was self-defeating. Worthy though Scott’s attempts might have been at redefining Cockneyism in order to distance his writers from its stigmatizing label, his efforts achieved almost the opposite by expanding the term to inescapable proportions – to the extent that it threatened, potentially, to signify all periodical writing. It is perhaps an uncomfortable consciousness of this possibility that informed both the intensity of the dispute and the longevity of the term.

I will argue that Elia represents a parodic engagement with the anxiety-ridden figure of the periodical writer. A pseudonymous phantom himself, Elia’s characteristic self-deprecation and ‘othering’ of the self together embody a critique of the dispute’s paradoxical meaninglessness, and of the defensive egoism from which it grows. The first of the essays on which this reading is based is ‘Jews, Quakers, Scotchmen, and other Imperfect Sympathies’ (August 1821), which, in the light of the attacks of Blackwood’s suggestively begins with a discussion of the Caledonian mindset and casts its perspective through the example of an overtly critical figure who self-contradictorily confesses to the prejudicial nature of his own judgement. Following this are two essays that offer wryly alternative, non-confrontational models of, in the first case, reading, and in the second, writing. The first essay is ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ (July 1822), in which Elia describes a democratic taste in literature paradoxically arrived at through materialistic or non-literary criteria. The second is a much later essay, ‘Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago’ (October 1831). As a retrospective on the turbulent history of the periodical press since 1796, this essay effectively circumscribes Lamb’s entire journalistic career – from his position on the fringes of the Jacobins to the periphery of the Cockneys – within an intrinsically Elian style of writing. Moreover, as usage of the Cockney label prevailed until the early 1830s, the essay reminds us that Elia’s ‘life’ roughly spans the era of the new miscellaneous magazine. First, however, the fraught self-image in the early 1820s of both the new magazine and the periodical author needs to be established.

The New Magazine and Professional Anxiety

In recent analyses of the magazine market of the early 1820s, the image emerges of a confused or contradictory sense of authorial identity. Discussing Hazlitt’s notion of ‘literary Cockneyism’, Gregory Dart argues that a predominantly ‘self-reflexive writing style’, as evidenced also in examples from P. G. Patmore and John Scott, manifests a ‘troubling self-consciousness’ among magazine writers working within a revolutionized profession. ³ This ‘periodical revolution’, according to Dart, had begun serenely enough in the early 1800s and 1810s, with the rebirth of the review essay as a ‘prestigious and influential cultural form’ due to the prominence of the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews. With the arrival of literary monthlies such as Blackwood’s, the New Monthly and the London Magazine, however, in the revolution’s ‘second phase’, came an anxiety-inducing attempt to mix high and low cultural forms: the education and erudition of ‘critical reviews, travel accounts and analytical essays’ were combined with the popular, sensationalist material of ‘gothic tales, city sketches, crime stories and satirical squibs’. ⁴ The crux of Dart’s model of anxiety, therefore, has less to do with written style than textual register. Although not, apparently, entailing a compromise of literary principles in terms of what they actually wrote, in other words, the aspirational kind of writer that Dart identifies nevertheless occupies an ambiguous, sub-literary register. It is a sense of this position of cultural dubiety that causes writers from all participants in the dispute, Lockhart and Wilson from Blackwood’s, Hunt from the Examiner, and Patmore and Scott from the London, to make the subject of periodical writing itself dominate periodical writing. The issue of how and to what degree the above authors, and others, can be said to aspire to ‘high’ literature remains problematic, nevertheless Dart’s hypothesis on the new magazine’s split identity and its effects on the author seems otherwise credible. It perhaps equates to another instance of the timeless conflict between tradition and modernity: an established, monolithic concept of authorship attempting to reassert itself within and against the new, destabilizingly plural text of the miscellaneous magazine. If so, then Elia’s appropriation of, instead of resistance to, those conditions defines this apparently nostalgic figure as surprisingly modern.

By the 1830s, as I will discuss, the periodical veterans Lamb and Hunt were already historicizing the magazine revolution in terms of the above thirty-year period. The protracted Cockney debate in which both were very differently but equally involved, arose not simply out of market competition but from a broader cultural source. The Blackwood’s attacks ultimately represent, in Dart’s analysis, ‘a series of misgivings’ about periodical literature and its role in ‘modern urban culture’, an ‘anxiety … displaced onto a variety of London writers and publications’, epitomized by Hunt and the Examiner. ⁵ As will be the practice in the present study, ‘Cockneyism’ can therefore be said to refer to any or all such expressions of professional anxiety, and not simply a defensive, geographically localized term of abuse. The fear behind the disputation was that the new magazines, even the more literary ones, mindlessly mirrored the transience and ephemerality of the city that spawned them, by reproducing the city’s degrading predilection for spectacle and fashion at the cost of the supposedly timeless, humanistic products of fine art and canonical literature.

That the rise of periodical writing at this time is fearfully associated with a wen-like metropolitan culture is supported by David Higgins’s proposal that the notion of ‘original genius’ in the 1820s and 1830s was deemed to have been ‘swallowed up or stifled by the anonymous, teeming mass of periodical writing’. As a figure, in a sense, ‘consumed’ by the corporate mass of the periodical text the very concept of author was among the established traditions perceived to be under threat from the all-devouring metropolitan monster. Higgins indeed associates the periodical with that other, highly prevalent form of ‘press’, the crowd: ‘Like the urban crowd the periodical press was imagined as being both dangerously various and fragmented, and disturbingly amorphous and uniform’. ⁶ It might be added that Mark Parker’s notion of how the miscellaneous items of a magazine are arranged according to the politico-cultural agenda of the editor parallels the way in which the crowd absorbs the individual into a social, political or religious collective. ⁷ Periodical writing thus becomes a subtle example of John Plotz’s claim of the 1800 to 1850 period, that ‘literature records features of the era’s crowd’s that no other historical sources can supply’. ⁸

The crowd appears only fleetingly and occasionally in Elia: as the ‘high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry’ (LM, 5, p. 533) who pause for the beggar, or, as discussed in Chapter 4, the ‘mob’ for whom Elia makes himself a spectacle in the essay on chimney-sweeps. With the notable exception of the reader himself – in the guise of the preoccupied, ‘lean annuitant’ who passes by the South-Sea House, or the unimaginative ‘connoisseur’ – public figures in Elia are eccentric or aberrant individuals who, like Lamb’s persona itself, are defined by exclusion or deviation from the crowd. Such exaggeratedly individual figures are Bridget and John Elia, George Dyer (‘G. D.’), Jem White, Bigod (John Fenwick), Captain Jackson, or any or all of the South-Sea clerks, old benchers and old actors. Jon Klancher is perhaps the first writer to associate periodicals with the crowd, but although the Hogarthian sweep and the Elgin Marble beggar discussed in Chapter 4 could be described as social types identified from amongst the crowd, these disenfranchised non-readers clearly do not qualify, in Klancher’s terms, as potential subjects for audience-making. Drawn from the crowd, it is specifically and explicitly the periodical reader him or herself to whom Lamb appeals, thus immediately pre-empting or overwriting a discourse which would transcend the author. Elia indeed resists the above correlation between the periodical and the crowd, particularly where the latter pertains, in accordance with how John Plotz defines the crowd, to orchestrated demonstration rather than random street aggregation. ⁹ As will become apparent, although the crowd seems to inform in general the coalescent ethos of Elia’s extra-essayistic figure, the genius of Lamb is, to once again use Hazlitt’s ‘Spirit of the Age’ analogy, his deviation from the anxious ‘press’ of the periodical.

How the consciousness of an uncertain cultural identity is manifested in the magazine author is also explored in Margaret Russett’s analysis of De Quincey as a ‘“minor” author’: ‘neither a canonical figure nor a disenfranchised marginal author’. According to Russett, the prostitute Ann in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which first appeared in the London, allegorizes a ‘professional dilemma’ for the magazine writer: namely, ‘how can anonymous “articles” and standardized “characters” be imprinted’ with a ‘traceable identity’, as the predominant requirement of literary discourse? Ann’s prostitution represents the ‘burgeoning and “promiscuous” readership’ of the London, and the absence of her surname the writer’s anonymity. ¹⁰ With an anonymous and corporate form of authorship, but one which produces widely read – or perhaps consumed – texts, the magazine writer’s position is inherently ambiguous. This is to say that as a new social entity, the magazine writer:

occupies not only an alien work ‘environment’ but a defamiliarized body. His disproportion of cultural capital and circulating capital gives rise to that cluster of anxieties about prestige, continuity, and the legibility of identity that may collectively be called professional. ¹¹

The collaborative nature of magazine writing implicitly renounces, in Russett’s terms, the ‘properly named individualism and relative prestige of the book market’. ¹² This issue of prestige is taken up by Higgins, with ‘anxiety’ once again cropping up in reference to periodical writing, in an ‘anxiety and tension’ identified in the marginalized magazine writer’s often embittered treatment of the relatively enfranchised poet. ¹³ The writer’s precarious material circumstances, moreover, could only have added to an uncertain sense of cultural worth. Russett points out that in 1820, the year the London was founded, the very idea of magazine-writing as a paid job was still relatively new, having been introduced in 1802 with the Edinburgh Review’s compulsory payments for its editors and writers. But, as with the London, contributors usually had no guaranteed salary and were expected to contribute exclusively to the one magazine on a ‘fee-for-work basis’, even though the basic rates were barely enough for writers who subsisted wholly on such work, while any ‘profit or surplus value’ from the magazine naturally went to the publishers. ¹⁴ Even Lamb, the London’s highest-paid contributor, was required to continue toiling at the East India House up to the age of fifty. Yet at the same time, the submersion of the writer’s identity within that of the magazine conferred a kind of power, by allowing critics to attack their targets without danger of incrimination. Critical clout compensated for a dubious relation to the literary establishment, even as it represented to a degree the cause and effect of that relationship. Arising thus from professional anxiety, it is the embittered abuse of this power to which Elia responds.

The tone of Elia’s response is established almost immediately with an assertion of ‘literary dignity’ at the start of the second essay, ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ (October 1820). As discussed more fully in Chapter 3, Elia’s wry self-justification here suggests that an indeterminate and elusive identity is in itself a valuable commodity within the otherwise restrictive world of urban wage-labour. Elia makes great play in this essay of retrieving a measure of emancipation from the fixed, corporate identity, ironically dramatizing in the process the magazine writ...