This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 69-4958 REECER, George Clay, 1934- THE PROSE STYLE OF CHARLES LAMB. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1968 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THE PROSE STYLE OP Oi ARIES LAMB DISSERTATION Presented In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of ftiilosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By George Clay Reecer, A.B., M.A, # -a- * -a -a The Ohio State University 1968 Approved by (i . Adviser Department of English VITA February 18, 1934 Born - Glasgow, Kentucky 1956 . • • A.B., Western Kentucky State College 1959-1961 . • Teaching A s s is ta n t, Depart meat of English, Temple University, Phila­ delphia, Pennsylvania 1961 . • • . M.A., Temple University 1961-1962 . • • Instructor, Temple University 1962-1963 . • • Mershon National Graduate Fellowship, The Ohio S ta te U n iv ersity , Columbus, Ohio 1964-1968 . • • Instructor, American International College, Springfield, Massachusetts FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Englieh Wordsworth Professor James V. Logan Studies in Bomantic Poetry and Poetics. Professor James V. Logan Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature. Professor Bioha rd D. A ltio k i i TAELS OF CONTESTS 2*6® INTRODUCTION......................................... ....................................... 1 Chapter I. D IC T IO N ........................................................................... 13 I I . SYNTAX ................. 61 III. STRUCTURE...................................................................... 105 IV. FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE.............................................. 141 V. IMAGERY............................................................................ 169 VI. EPISTOLARY INFLUENCE............................................... 224 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................... 251 i l l Introduction I Whatever the variations in Charles Lamb’s popularity among readers in general, scholarly interest In him and his writings has remained fairly constant. The most important change to be found in the recent books and articles on Lamb Is one of emphasis: from the man himself to his writings In prose. Readers have never totally ignored the qualities of h is prose s ty le , end indeed some of the e a r l ie s t comments upon his style ere among the most perceptive of all: those of Hazlitt certainly ere. But until fairly recently there has been a tendency to avoid anything resembling detailed analysis of his essays and other prose writings. Stuart Tave has summarized this tendency as follows: The refusal to criticize is a major tradition In the literature about Lamb. The best known expression of It, the one most often quoted in justification, Is Swinburne's (Miscellanies. 1 8 8 6): "Wo good criticism of Lamb, strictly speaking, can ever be written; because nobody can do justice to his work who does not love It too well to feel himself capable of giving Judg­ ment on i t ." And so love renders Impotent. Closely related is the tradition of Lamb as the shade of Creusa, eluding the touch, dainty gos­ samer defying the analytical grasp; he is ab­ sorbed, rather, as an odor or flavor. Scholar­ ship itself Is hesitant to identify Lamb’s literary allusions, lest "the dissolving pro­ cess of analysis" destroy the charm of the es­ s a y s.! 1 2 It is perhaps all too easy to disparage the tradition des­ cribed by Tave, and before rejecting Swinburne's comment al­ together one should ask whether the most detailed analysis ewer does "justice” to works of any subtlety. Moreover, scholarship has not been entirely negligent in identifying Lamb's allusions, os K. V. Lucas' edition of the works shows. But T ave's comments have a wide v a lid ity , and his encourage­ ment of a different attitude is no doubt partly responsible for the closer attention now being given to Lamb's prose. Recent studies of Lamb's prose hove resulted in a num­ ber of new conclusions, or at least modifications of tradi­ tional views. Of these, three seem especially important in an attempt to understand his prose style. First, in place of the predominantly gentle, whimsical Lamb, who "accepted life's little pleasures as they appeared and did not hesitate to make 'cults' of the ones that appeared most appealing, scholars such as E rnest Bernbaum and Bertram Jessup have em­ phasized the toughness of his mind, its tendency toward re­ alism and skepticism. 3 These q u a litie s , however, are some­ times attributed only to the man himself, to his thought as distinct from hla actual published writings; and because they are qualities which provide a welcome antidote to the supposed "escapist” qualities of the essays, many readers prefer the letters, where the skepticism is quite evident. But not only does this tendency appear also In the essays, the very form of the essay as Lamb adapted It entails an almost consistently questioning or skeptical point of view. Not only the announced th e s is , when th e re is one, but the very elements of style are those of a writer whose purpose is to go against the grain of orthodox opinion. The second result of recent studies of Lamb’s prose is that its indebtedness to the conventions of his own time is now better understood. The older view is perhaps best ex­ pressed by Lucas: ...Hazlitt was in the direct line froe Lryden, Addison, Steele, Goldsmith; Lamb was an Indi­ vidual sport. Hazlitt wrote the prose of his own day as well as he could; Lamb played many pranks, annihilated "Progress," in his own words wrote "for antiquity."4 In different ways, Melvin Watson, George Barnett, and Hunt­ ington Brown have shown that Larrb, despite his "pranks," was not entirely outside any tradition. Watson is one of the few scholars to give attention to the essays written before Ella. and he clearly demonstrates that they owe much to the Specta­ tor tradition as it had developed through the eighteenth cen­ tu ry . He also shows th a t Leigh Hunt and H a z litt were con­ forming, more or less, to the same conventions, a fact which places Lamb all the more solidly In a historical context.^ In referring to Lamb as "an Individual sport," Lucas of course has in mind ch ie fly the E lla essay s. But George Bar­ nett points out that there are features of even these essays which are anticipated in such late eighteenth-century peri­ odicals as the European Magazine and the Monthly Mirror. He finds "a tendency toward the personal element" in the 4 "Man of the Town" series In the former; and in the latter he cites such anticipations of Ella as an essay on "The Wretched Situation of the Chimney-Sweepers" (including an account of an annual feast, rather like that of Elia's Jem White), bio­ graphical sketches of actors (including Elliston), and a list of "Antipathies," resembling Ella's "Popular Fallacies."^ Such details do not mean, of course, that Ella is thoroughly in the tradition of the eighteenth-century essay, and indeed Barnett fully recognizes Lamb's originality and idiosyncrasy of s ty le . But they do somewhat weaken Lucas' p at summary of Lamb as "an individual sport." The idiosyncrasy of Lamb's style is also recognised by H untington Brown, and in some ways h is comments rep resen t a return to the older view: Lamb's style is contrasted with "the elegant periodical essays of the Addisonian tradition." But what Brown sees as Lamb's rejection of this tradition is itself, he contends, a part of the "Horaantlc Revival," and as such is "simply a phase of the general revival of interest in all things pre-Augustan." In Brown's opinion, Lamb be­ longs historically neither in the Spectator tradition nor alone as a "sport." He belongs with Southey, Heslitt, Cole­ ridge, and Carlyle, writers who in varying degrees were in­ fluenced by the "'humours' of the seventeenth-century prose­ men, their outworn erudition, their love of strange words, their delight in paradox and pun, and their unbuttoned syn­ tax..#."^ In placing Lanfc's style in the Romantic tradition, Brown offers an historical context which Is different from 5 that suggested by Watson end Barnett, As this study will show, both have considerable validity. The third result of recent studies is that Lamb may now be given greater credit for craftsmanship than has usually been accorded. Although there were exceptions, earlier critics tended to emphasize the whimsical element in his style, on occasion even apologizing for it, end to consider the style as in some way a natural and unconscious extension of Lamb's character or sensibility. And indeed Lamb does have Elia refer to the essays as "any thing but methodical." But Barnett's study of the manuscripts has demonstrated that Lamb took pains in revising both them and the finished essays which reappeared in the collections, Elia and Last Essays of Ella.fl Moreover, there is now reason to believe that at least some of the Elia essays are Tnethodicel" in structure, although Richard Haven sees the method as being essentially Romantic.9 Haven's study, like other recent ones by Daniel MulcahylO and Donald Reiman,H offers what has been most conspicuously lacking in most criticism of Lamb: a careful and detailed analysis of specific essays. The discovery that some of the essays are both carefully constructed and thematically unified in itself modifies the traditional view of the essays as "unlicked, incondite things," as the "Friend of the Late Elia" calls them. It also suggests that essays other than the six or seven which ere considered in detail by Haven, Mulcahy, and Reiman might be constructed with similar care. 6 This study of Lamb’s pros© style will go further than previous studies have done In giving detailed attention to the style of Individual essays.