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Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine
Metropolitan Muse
Simon P Hull
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eBook - ePub
Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine
Metropolitan Muse
Simon P Hull
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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.
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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. Lambâs 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 Lambâs 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 Lambâs 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 Lambâs 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, Lambâs periodical writing responds to the divisive, and ultimately implosive, forces within metropolitan culture itself.
In addition to the ones in which the terms of âCockneyismâ 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 magazineâs 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 âanxiousâ 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 Blackwoodâs 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 Lambâs 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 childrenâs 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 Lambâs 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, Scottâs 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 âbodyâ of the pseudonymous periodical author. 2 Yet a sense of the wastefulness of Scottâs death is unavoidable, not least of all because his defensiveness over Cockneyism was self-defeating. Worthy though Scottâs 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 â 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, Eliaâs characteristic self-deprecation and âotheringâ of the self together embody a critique of the disputeâs paradoxical meaninglessness, and of the defensive egoism from which it grows. The first of the essays on which this reading is based is âJews, Quakers, Scotchmen, and other Imperfect Sympathiesâ (August 1821), which, in the light of the attacks of Blackwoodâs 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 âDetached Thoughts on Books and Readingâ (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, âNewspapers Thirty-Five Years Agoâ (October 1831). As a retrospective on the turbulent history of the periodical press since 1796, this essay effectively circumscribes Lambâs entire journalistic career â from his position on the fringes of the Jacobins to the periphery of the Cockneys â within an intrinsically Elian style of writing. Moreover, as usage of the Cockney label prevailed until the early 1830s, the essay reminds us that Eliaâs âlifeâ 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 Hazlittâs notion of âliterary Cockneyismâ, Gregory Dart argues that a predominantly âself-reflexive writing styleâ, as evidenced also in examples from P. G. Patmore and John Scott, manifests a âtroubling self-consciousnessâ among magazine writers working within a revolutionized profession. 3 This âperiodical revolutionâ, according to Dart, had begun serenely enough in the early 1800s and 1810s, with the rebirth of the review essay as a âprestigious and influential cultural formâ due to the prominence of the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews. With the arrival of literary monthlies such as Blackwoodâs, the New Monthly and the London Magazine, however, in the revolutionâs âsecond phaseâ, came an anxiety-inducing attempt to mix high and low cultural forms: the education and erudition of âcritical reviews, travel accounts and analytical essaysâ were combined with the popular, sensationalist material of âgothic tales, city sketches, crime stories and satirical squibsâ. 4 The crux of Dartâs 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 Blackwoodâs, 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 âhighâ literature remains problematic, nevertheless Dartâs hypothesis on the new magazineâs 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 Eliaâs 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 Blackwoodâs attacks ultimately represent, in Dartâs analysis, âa series of misgivingsâ about periodical literature and its role in âmodern urban cultureâ, an âanxiety ⊠displaced onto a variety of London writers and publicationsâ, epitomized by Hunt and the Examiner. 5 As will be the practice in the present study, âCockneyismâ 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 cityâs 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 Higginsâs proposal that the notion of âoriginal geniusâ in the 1820s and 1830s was deemed to have been âswallowed up or stifled by the anonymous, teeming mass of periodical writingâ. As a figure, in a sense, âconsumedâ 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 âpressâ, the crowd: âLike the urban crowd the periodical press was imagined as being both dangerously various and fragmented, and disturbingly amorphous and uniformâ. 6 It might be added that Mark Parkerâs 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 Plotzâs claim of the 1800 to 1850 period, that âliterature records features of the eraâs crowdâs that no other historical sources can supplyâ. 8
The crowd appears only fleetingly and occasionally in Elia: as the âhigh and rushing tide of greasy citizenryâ (LM, 5, p. 533) who pause for the beggar, or, as discussed in Chapter 4, the âmobâ for whom Elia makes himself a spectacle in the essay on chimney-sweeps. With the notable exception of the reader himself â in the guise of the preoccupied, âlean annuitantâ who passes by the South-Sea House, or the unimaginative âconnoisseurâ â public figures in Elia are eccentric or aberrant individuals who, like Lambâs persona itself, are defined by exclusion or deviation from the crowd. Such exaggeratedly individual figures are Bridget and John Elia, George Dyer (âG. D.â), 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 Klancherâs 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 Eliaâs extra-essayistic figure, the genius of Lamb is, to once again use Hazlittâs âSpirit of the Ageâ analogy, his deviation from the anxious âpressâ of the periodical.
How the consciousness of an uncertain cultural identity is manifested in the magazine author is also explored in Margaret Russettâs analysis of De Quincey as a ââminorâ authorâ: âneither a canonical figure nor a disenfranchised marginal authorâ. According to Russett, the prostitute Ann in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which first appeared in the London, allegorizes a âprofessional dilemmaâ for the magazine writer: namely, âhow can anonymous âarticlesâ and standardized âcharactersâ be imprintedâ with a âtraceable identityâ, as the predominant requirement of literary discourse? Annâs prostitution represents the âburgeoning and âpromiscuousâ readershipâ of the London, and the absence of her surname the writerâs anonymity. 10 With an anonymous and corporate form of authorship, but one which produces widely read â or perhaps consumed â texts, the magazine writerâs position is inherently ambiguous. This is to say that as a new social entity, the magazine writer:
occupies not only an alien work âenvironmentâ 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 Russettâs terms, the âproperly named individualism and relative prestige of the book marketâ. 12 This issue of prestige is taken up by Higgins, with âanxietyâ once again cropping up in reference to periodical writing, in an âanxiety and tensionâ identified in the marginalized magazine writerâs often embittered treatment of the relatively enfranchised poet. 13 The writerâs 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 Reviewâs 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 âfee-for-work basisâ, even though the basic rates were barely enough for writers who subsisted wholly on such work, while any âprofit or surplus valueâ from the magazine naturally went to the publishers. 14 Even Lamb, the Londonâs 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 writerâs 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 Eliaâs response is established almost immediately with an assertion of âliterary dignityâ at the start of the second essay, âOxford in the Vacationâ (October 1820). As discussed more fully in Chapter 3, Eliaâs 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...