Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Text
- Introduction
- 1 Consuming the Periodical Text: Hunt, Hazlitt and the Anxiety of Cockneyism
- 2 Domesticating the Flâneur: Coleridge, De Quincey and the Forms of Metropolitanism
- 3 The Great Wen and the Rural Gothic
- 4 Utility and Pity: Wordsworth, Blake and Egan, and the Act of Charity
- 5 Lamb, Theatricality and the Fool
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Introduction
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Text
- Introduction
- 1 Consuming the Periodical Text: Hunt, Hazlitt and the Anxiety of Cockneyism
- 2 Domesticating the Flâneur: Coleridge, De Quincey and the Forms of Metropolitanism
- 3 The Great Wen and the Rural Gothic
- 4 Utility and Pity: Wordsworth, Blake and Egan, and the Act of Charity
- 5 Lamb, Theatricality and the Fool
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In a study that is very much about the essay and its formal effects, I begin with a particularly rich example of the most pertinent of those effects – the power of suggestion. Here is Hazlitt's description of Lamb's most successful literary persona, Elia, from the Spirit of the Age essays:
Mr Lamb has succeeded not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it. He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction. He prefers bye-ways to highways. When the full tide of human life pours along to some festive shew, to some pageant of a day, Elia would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a tottering door-way, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative of embryo art and ancient manners.
The first thing to notice is the image of the epochal spirit as the modern metropolis. This indicates that the only recently challenged association of British Romanticism with nature and rural life is linked to a bias towards poetry and against prose such as Hazlitt's and Lamb's. Yet even the alternative focus on the city and urban culture which has gathered momentum over the last ten years, through research into spectacle, theatrical culture and consumerism, as well as projects that more directly discuss the theme of literature and the city, is lacking in the figure especially of Lamb. If Hazlitt himself does not appear to see Lamb as part of the metropolis, he still perceives him in urban terms. Lamb's contrariness to the metropolitan spirit is presented as an alternative sense of the city. The powerful and dominant spirit equates to a metropolis defined by the relentless dynamic of fashion and modernity, a circus of spectacular attraction and mass consumption.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Charles Lamb, Elia and the London MagazineMetropolitan Muse, pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014