Charles Lamb’s Beloved Liberalism: Eccentricity in the Familiar Essays

BRENT L. RUSSO Charles Lamb’s Beloved Liberalism: Eccentricity in the Familiar Essays HARLES l a mb ’s WRITINGS HAVE NOT ALWAYS BEEN MET WITH RESPECT, V>but when they have, respect has often been accompanied by love. In 1905 E. V. Lucas, editor of the standard edition of Lamb’s works and Lamb’s most influential biographer, credited Lamb with being “the most lovable figure in English literature,”1 and more recently Joseph Riehl has studied the way in which a “tendency to ‘cuddle’ Lamb” marked Lamb criticism for more than a century after his death and stifled the otherwise challenging nature of Lamb’s essays. For Riehl, Lamb represents a radical skeptic whose potential to rattle our deepest moral and metaphysical con­ victions makes him an uncomfortable author to take seriously, which is why Riehl believes many have resorted to sentiment—a way of circum­ venting the “insoluble problems” Lamb poses.2 A very recent critic of Lamb similarly hints at a critical collusion by posing the following rhetori­ cal question: “What is so unsettling about Lamb, we might wonder, that he has been so often quarantined by means ofan aggressive sentimentality?”3 I want to begin my analysis of Lamb’s authorship with a converse rhetor­ ical question: What if the affection so typically and characteristically felt for Lamb were in fact the key measure of his critical power as an author, rather than a sign of some cover up—a clue, in other words, rather than a distrac­ tion? As Deidre Lynch has argued, “possessive PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Jove” (her emphasis) of books and authors became an integral feature of late Romantic culture, as domestic libraries began to “win recognition as scenes of individuals’ affec1 . Edward Verrall Lucas, T h e L ife o f C harles L am b (London: Methuen & Co., 1921), 1:1. 2. Riehl, T hat D angerous F igure: C harles L am b and the C ritics (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1998), 1. 3. David J. Russell, “'Our Debt to Lamb’: The Romantic Essay and the Emergence of Tact,” E nglish Literary H istory 79, no. 1 (2012): 179. S iR , 52 (Fall 2013) 437 438 BRENT L. RUSSO tive lives.”4 Lamb, I will argue, responded to the diversification of reading practices along increasingly and often emphatically personal and affective lines5 by soliciting, deliberately and aggressively (ifnot intrusively), readerly love. This was not, in other words, something imposed upon him PONMLKJIHGF ex post facto by too scrupulous or timorous critics. While it is true that love as a di­ mension of Lamb’s authorship has been habitually misread and at times shunned, it would be misleading to pretend that it didn’t exist or that it was not, indeed, central to his authorial project. The unambiguous way in which Lamb’s work endeavors to inspire love among readers is by prizing and performing eccentricity. Eccentricity be­ comes lovable in Lamb’s essays on at least three levels: the vulnerability of eccentricity to judgment summons feelings ofbenevolence and admiration; the humor in the self-conscious exposure of eccentricity creates warmth; and the singularity of the eccentric persona stimulates attachment to Lamb as a writer eminently unlike any other. Not every reader will respond to Lamb’s eccentricity in all or any of these ways, to be sure; eccentricity may just as easily be found to be repellant, embarrassing, or ridiculous. But this is a risk Lamb is willing to take—the risk, indeed, on which the cultural import of his project depends. For the critical and historical relevance of Lamb’s essays lies in the liberal disavowal of cultural norms that attends their cultivation of eccentricity as a social value. Risk, thus, is essential to Lamb’s project. It was risk, I suggest, that led Lamb finally to favor the familiar essay as the literary form most proper to his goals, since risk was an essential feature of this form, as indicated by Montaigne’s application of the term essai (originally meaning a “trial,” “ex­ periment,” or “attempt”) to his invention of it. In essaying to be lovable by modeling eccentricity as a positive value, Lamb was also willing to be es­ tranged...