Charles Lamb | Page 2

was given the now familiar name.
Seven children had been born from 1762 to 1775, but of them all these
three alone survived. The father and his employer are sketched,
unforgetably, in Lamb's essay on "The Old Benchers of the Inner
Temple," Salt, under his own name, and Lamb under that of Lovel: "I
knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A
good fellow withal and 'would strike.' In the cause of the oppressed he
never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his
opponents." The whole passage must be read in the essay itself. From
his father Charles Lamb inherited at once his literary leanings and his
humour, both heightened to an incalculable degree. We have Elia's
word for it that John Lamb the elder "was the liveliest little fellow

breathing" with a face as gay as Garrick's, and we know further that he
published a small volume of simple verse. From the father, too, the
family derived a heavier inheritance, which was to cast its shadow over
their lives from the day of Charles's early manhood to the day half a
century later, when his sister Mary, the last survivor of the family circle,
was laid to rest.
Lamb's mother, Elizabeth Field, is--for obvious reasons--the only
member of the immediate family circle whom we do not meet in his
writings. His maternal grandmother--the grandame who is to be met in
his verses and in some of his essays--was for over half a century
housekeeper at Blakesware in Hertfordshire, and with her, as a small
boy, Charles spent pleasant holidays.
Little Charles Lamb was sent for a time to "a humble day-school, at
which reading and writing were taught to us boys in the morning, and
the same slender erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters,
etc., in the evening." In a letter to Coleridge (5th July, 1796) we have a
hint that Lamb may have had yet earlier teaching in an infant school in
the Temple for he writes: "Mr. Chambers lived in the Temple; Mrs.
Reynolds, his daughter, was my schoolmistress"; though it may be that
the lady referred to was employed in Mr. Bird's school. This school,
kept by William Bird "in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into
Bartlett's Buildings," was the one to which Mary Lamb appears to have
owed her regular training; but Samuel Salt had a goodly collection of
old books in his chambers, and among these the brother and sister
browsed most profitably, to use his own expressive word, acquiring an
early liking for good literature and learning to take their best recreation
in things of the mind. But if from the "school room looking into a
discoloured dingy garden" Mary Lamb was presumed to be able to
acquire a sufficiency of knowledge, it was seen that her younger
brother needed something more than Mr. Bird could give to fit him for
a life in which he would have to take an early place as bread-winner.
John Lamb's friendly employer--whom lovers of Lamb can never recall
but to honour--secured a nomination for the boy to Christ's Hospital,
and thither in his eighth year the little fellow was transferred from the
home in the Temple.

Should a zealous compiler seek to arrange an autobiography of Charles
Lamb from his writings he would not have a difficult task, and he
would find two delightful essays devoted to the famous school--so long
the distinguishing feature of Newgate Street--where "blue-coat boys"
passed the most importantly formative period of their lives.
Handicapped somewhat by a stuttering speech Charles Lamb did not
perhaps join in all the boyish sports of his fellows, though there are
many testimonies to the regard in which he was held by his
school-mates, and the fact is stressed that though the only one of his
surname at Christ's Hospital, he was never "Lamb" but always "Charles
Lamb," as though there were something of an endearment in the
constant use of his Christian name. "The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat
boy, has a distinctive character of his own, as far removed from the
abject qualities of a common charity-boy as it is from the disgusting
forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the public schools." In
the essay from which this is quoted, Charles Lamb, looking back a
quarter of a century after leaving the old foundation, summed up the
characteristics of his school as reflected in the character of its boys of
whom he and the close friend he made there are the two whose names
are the most commonly on the lips of men. It is, indeed, worthy of
remark that from amid the countless boys educated at Christ's Hospital
since it was founded three centuries and a half ago by "the flower of