Charles Lamb - The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb

The autumn of 1811 was a sad one for the Lloyd family. Thomas Lloyd died on September 12, Caroline on October 15, and Robert on October 26. The Gentleman's Magazine obituary just mentions Thomas and Caroline, and passes on to Robert. We know the article to be Lamb's from a letter from Charles Lloyd to Robert's widow, enclosing the memoir (which Lamb had sent to him), and adding, "If I loved him for nothing else, I should now love [Charles Lamb] for the affecting interest that he has taken in the memory of my dearest Brother and Friend."

Page 154.Confessions of a Drunkard.

The Philanthropist , No. IX., 1813. Some Enquiries into the Effects of Fermented Liquors , 1814; second edition, 1818. London Magazine , August, 1822. Last Essays of Elia , second edition, 1835.

The first appearance of this paper was in a quarterly magazine entitled The Philanthropist ; or, Repository for Hints and Suggestions calculated to promote the Comfort and Happiness of Man . Vol. III., No. IX., 1813. It was there unsigned and addressed "To the Editor of The Philanthropist ." The editor of this magazine was William Allen (1770–1843), the Quaker, and his chief associate was James Mill, the Father of John Stuart Mill. Lamb's friend, Basil Montagu (1770–1851), was among the contributors; and another prominent name was that of Benjamin Meggot Forster (1764–1829), who, like Montagu, opposed capital punishment, and was zealous in the cause of chimney-sweepers.

In its original Philanthropist form the essay differs from its later appearances. Concerning the differences I should like to quote from an interesting article by Mr. Thomas Hutchinson in The Athenæum of August 16, 1902:—

The text of the "Confessions," as it stands in The Philanthropist , bears evident traces of Mill's editorial hand; the verbal changes smack of those precise and literal modes of thought and expression which Lamb found so uncongenial in the Scotsman. "They seemed to have something noble about them," writes Lamb of the friends of 1801. "But moral qualities are not external to us, they are resident in us," objects Mill; and so "about" is struck out and "in" substituted. "Avoid the bottle as you would fly your greatest destruction," says Lamb. "But," interposes the precisian, "the idea of destruction does not admit of more or less ; besides, 'to fly' is properly a verb intransitive"—and thus the sentence is rewritten: " … fly from certain destruction." "The pain of the self-denial is all one "—"is equal ," substitutes the Scot. "I scarce knew what it was to ail anything "—"to have an ailment," corrects the lover of plain words; and so on. Of the sixth paragraph of the essay only the opening sentence ("Why should I hesitate," etc.) is suffered to stand. The rest is cancelled—doubtless as at variance with Utilitarian views. Again the close of the fourteenth paragraph ("But he is too hard for us," etc., onwards) is struck out—either by Mill, as too broadly implying the existence of the "muckle deil," or by Allen, as too flippant an allusion to that fearsome personage. Lastly, the second paragraph is wanting and the third reduced by half, the conclusion (from "Trample not," etc., on), in which the miracle of the raising of Lazarus is referred to, being omitted.

I cannot, however, quite accept Mr. Hutchinson's theory that Lamb wrote the "Confessions" as a joke at the expense of the seriousness of the Quaker editor and his Benthamite assistant. Mr. Hutchinson writes: "We can fancy with what glee the sly humorist, who found the world as it was so lovable and good to live in, prepared to hoax the fussy John Amend-All of Plough Court and his fiery lieutenant, James Mill," and he adds later, "An amusing feature of the 'Confessions' is the introduction, twice over, of the sacred Benthamite catchword, 'Springs of Action,' and, once, of its equivalent, the 'Springs of the Will,' a plausible device to bribe the judgment of the editors." But Lamb's jokes were always jokes, and it is difficult, sitting down to these "Confessions" with what anticipation we will of humour or whimsicality, to rise from them in anything but sadness. They are too real for a "flam." Of this, however, more below.

The "Confessions" made their second appearance in Basil Montagu's collection of arguments in favour of teetotalism— Some Enquiries into the Effects of Fermented Liquors . By a Water Drinker. 1814; and second edition, 1818. This volume was divided into sections, Lamb's contribution being ranged under the question, "Do Fermented Liquors Contribute to Moral Excellence?" Montagu's book was reprinted in 1841, when Lamb's contribution was acknowledged as from the Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb (more properly the Last Essays ). Lamb's "Confessions" were also reprinted separately in a series of tracts called "Beacon Lights," in 1854, as being a true statement of their unhappy author's case, under the title, "Charles Lamb's Confessions." This misrepresentation led to some correspondence in the press, and the tract was withdrawn, a new edition being substituted in 1856 with the harrowing story of poor Hartley Coleridge in the place of Lamb's essay.

The "Confessions" were reprinted in the London Magazine , August, 1822, under the following circumstances. In the summer of 1822 Lamb and his sister visited the Kenneys at Versailles—an absence which interrupted the regular course of the Elia essays. The Editor therefore reprinted one or two of Lamb's old papers, the first being these "Confessions," advising his readers of his action in a note in which Lamb's own hand is plainly apparent. This is the note:—

" Reprints of Elia.—Many are the sayings of Elia , painful and frequent his lucubrations, set forth for the most part (such his modesty!) without a name, scattered about in obscure periodicals and forgotten miscellanies. From the dust of some of these, it is our intention, occasionally, to revive a Tract or two, that shall seem worthy of a better fate; especially, at a time like the present, when the pen of our industrious Contributor, engaged in a laborious digest of his recent Continental Tour, may haply want the leisure to expatiate in more miscellaneous speculations. We have been induced, in the first instance, to re-print a Thing, which he put forth in a friend's volume some years since, entitled the Confessions of a Drunkard, seeing that Messieurs the Quarterly Reviewers have chosen to embellish their last dry pages with fruitful quotations therefrom; adding, from their peculiar brains, the gratuitous affirmation, that they have reason to believe that the describer (in his delineations of a drunkard forsooth!) partly sate for his own picture. The truth is, that our friend had been reading among the Essays of a contemporary, who has perversely been confounded with him, a paper in which Edax (or the Great Eater ) humorously complaineth of an inordinate appetite; and it struck him, that a better paper—of deeper interest, and wider usefulness—might be made out of the imagined experiences of a Great Drinker . Accordingly he set to work, and with that mock fervor, and counterfeit earnestness, with which he is too apt to over-realise his descriptions, has given us—a frightful picture indeed—but no more resembling the man Elia , than the fictitious Edax may be supposed to identify itself with Mr. L., its author. It is indeed a compound extracted out of his long observations of the effects of drinking upon all the world about him; and this accumulated mass of misery he hath centered (as the custom is with judicious essayists) in a single figure. We deny not that a portion of his own experiences may have passed into the picture, (as who, that is not a washy fellow, but must at some times have felt the after-operation of a too generous cup?)—but then how heightened! how exaggerated!—how little within the sense of the Review, where a part, in their slanderous usage, must be understood to stand for the whole!—but it is useless to expostulate with this Quarterly slime, brood of Nilus, watery heads with hearts of jelly, spawned under the sign of Aquarius, incapable of Bacchus, and therefore cold, washy, spiteful, bloodless.——Elia shall string them up one day, and show their colours—or rather how colourless and vapid the whole fry—when he putteth forth his long promised, but unaccountably hitherto delayed, Confessions of a Water-drinker."