Charles Lamb's Romantic Collaborations Author(S): Alison Hickey Source: ELH, Vol
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Double Bonds: Charles Lamb's Romantic Collaborations Author(s): Alison Hickey Source: ELH, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Fall, 1996), pp. 735-771 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030122 Accessed: 27/01/2009 15:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ELH. http://www.jstor.org DOUBLE BONDS: CHARLES LAMB'SROMANTIC COLLABORATIONS BY ALISONHICKEY Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiae et similium junctarumque Camoenarum; quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas! -Groscollius "Double is the chain that binds us-both of friendship and of like Muses joined together. Would that neither death nor distance of time could dissolve it!" So reads the invented epigraph to Poems, by S. T Coleridge, Second Edition, to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd (1797).1 The volume bears witness to another bond as well: Lamb's portion of the text is dedicated, "with all a brother's fondness ... to Mary Ann Lamb, the author's best friend and sister"-and later his partner in domestic and authorial"double singleness" (LW, 5:283, 2:75). An account of these overlapping and sometimes competing sets of double bonds can give us insight not only into the Lambs' particular authorial relations to each other and to others, but also into collaboration in its "Roman- tic" contexts. Collaborative relations are an indisputable fact of the Romantic period, traceable through authors' published accounts of the genesis of their texts; through personal journals, epistolary exchanges, publi- cation history, and the testimony of contemporaries; and through allusion, echo, thematic resemblances, and shared ideas. Relying on such evidence, scholars have produced numerous detailed studies of the indebtedness of the Romantics (particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge) to each other, as well as to other sources. But we have yet to comprehendthe extent to which Romantictexts-both those that we commonly associate with collaboration (such as the Lyrical Ballads) and those that we routinely attribute to single authors-represent their own collaborative origins.2 Romantic texts thematize and stage collaboration in metaphors of organic relation and in dialogic patterns and strategies that have become the hallmark of recent Romanticist criticism, though (mis- ELH 63 (1996) 735-771 c 1996 by The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press 735 leadingly) with little explicit reference to collaboration. In addition to reflecting and being reflected in Romantic preoccupations, Ro- mantic collaboration has implications beyond Romanticism. If its emergence is an inaugural moment, rather than a transient one, we may think of subsequent generations as writing within or against its structures, metaphors, and rhetorical strategies: Romantic collabora- tion becomes something for later writers to collaborate with. More- over, since the still-prevalent assumption that creation is a solitary process owes much to insufficiently-considered notions of Romanti- cism as the flourishing of individual genius, a reexaminationof the origins of such notions can contribute to a broader revision of the history of collaboration, and of authorship generally. This is a revision that recent studies of "discourse" and "the dialogic"have alreadybegun, mounting an arrayof strong challenges to the idea of the author as a unitary subject. But while these analyses are important for suggesting that writing is not the expres- sion of individual identity, they do not offer a complete critical framework or vocabulary for an account of collaboration.3Rather than elaborating upon the opposition between the traditionalsingle- figure approach and Foucauldian notions of discourse-a procedure that would risk marginalizingonce again the considerable territory on which the death of the mythical single author may mean the birth of what JackStillinger calls "realmultiple authors"-this essay explores Romantic collaboration in one of its complex manifestations, by looking at the ways in which Charles Lamb's, S. T. Coleridge's, and Mary Lamb's writings represent the collaborative relations that bound the three authors together.4 The role of collaborationin the Romantic period is tied to political and social developments ranging from ideals of revolutionaryfrater- nity to changing gender roles, attitudes toward sexuality,and concep- tions of family, friendship, and marriage. At a time when periodicals were shaping public opinion to an unprecedented degree, the idea of collaboration became an important instrument in the division of audiences along political and aesthetic lines. Writers of the period exploited the perception of collaboration for their particularcritical, authorial, or political ends.5 In one of the most famous instances, "C-dge and S-t-y, L-d and L-be and Co." were pilloried together in Canning's "New Morality"verses in the Anti-Jacobin, alongside the usual "Jacobin" suspects.6 (Coleridge and Southey were already known for their revolutionary sympathies; Lloyd had dedicated Blank Verse, his joint volume with Lamb, to Southey and, 736 Charles Lamb's Romantic Collaborations moreover, had opened the volume with a tribute to Pantisocracy, sounded some Godwinian and Priestleyan notes, included lines to MaryWollstonecraft, and in short done everything possible to arouse anti-Jacobin sentiments.) The verses were reprinted in the new monthly Anti-JacobinReview with Gillray'snotorious cartoon depict- ing Coleridge and Southey as asses, holding "Dactylics"and "Saphics," respectively. Lloyd and Lamb appear as a toad and a frog, reading from Blank Verse, by Toad and Frog. These representations in the Anti-Jacobin anticipate such defining gestures as Francis Jeffrey's referring to Wordsworth,Coleridge, and Southey as "asect of poets," or, in turn, Southey's labelling the Shelleys and Byron "a league of incest."' Such groupings precede and underlie subsequent notions of Romanticism as a "movement"and suggest the extent to which the perception of collaboration may have helped to determine the classifications on which literary histories have been based.8 In dedicating his 1818 Works to Coleridge, Lamb recalls with some ambivalence the features of the relation that bound the three in their early writing years: his own verses, he admits to Coleridge, "were first published among your poems, and were fairly derivatives from you and them. My friend Lloyd and myself came into our first battle (authorship is a sort of warfare) under cover of the greater Ajax." The battle image figures Lamb and Lloyd as comrades entering the antagonistic realm of the literary marketplace together, but also as rivals competing for fame, in an engagement that blurs the distinction between love and animosity. Lamb goes on in the Dedication to refer somewhat cryptically to a "snapp[ing of] the threefold cord," a falling-out among the three friends that took place on the battlefield of publication (LW, 5:1). In the Monthly Magazine of November 1797, Coleridge (alias "Nehemiah Higginbottom") published Sonnets attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writ- ers, mocking Lloyd, Lamb, and himself for "affectation of unaffect- edness, of jumping & misplaced accent on common-place epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by Italics . puny pathos &c &c."9 Southey, already estranged from Coleridge, thought he recognized himself in the sonnet "To Simplicity"and was outraged-a response that baffled Coleridge: "how you could apply to yourself a Sonnet written to ridicule infantine simplicity, vulgar colloquialisms, and lady-like Friendships-I have no conception" (CL, 1:359). The complicated plot is still further "embroil[ed] & embrangle[d]" (CL, 1:563) by the possibility that "some ungracious bookseller" (the publisher Cottle) was an "authorof the separation"(LW, 5:1). Lloyd Alison Hickey 737 declared through Cottle that he did not wish to have his poems included in a new edition of Poems (which never came about).'oThe quarrel was escalated with the publication, in April 1798, of Lloyd's Edmund Oliver, whose debauched hero was clearly modelled on Coleridge. The novel, which Lloyd dedicated to Lamb, was itself the product of a collaborationwith Southey, with whom Lloyd was living at the time; in fact, Southey had himself planned a novel by the same name in 1796." The particularsof the quarrel have been the subject of ample documentation and speculation by Lamb's and Coleridge's editors and biographers;'2 although a permanent break between Lamb and Coleridge seemed likely, they eventually managed to forgive each other, agreeing that most of the blame lay with the unstable Lloyd.13A weary Coleridge commented to Southey (with whom he was now restored to speaking terms), "I have great affection for Lamb / but I have likewise a perfect Lloyd-and- Lambophobia!"(CL, 1:542). The 1818 Dedication is mainly concerned with the double bond that has linked Lamb and Coleridge as friends, fellow-poets, collabo- rators, and rivals.