Witnessing Waterloo: 24 Hours, 48 Lives, A World Forever Changed. David Crane

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СКАЧАТЬ the last forty-five years this had been the whole circumference of Lamb’s world – the Temple, Christ’s Hospital, Bishopsgate, the clerks’ office in the East India Company – and the only world he had ever wanted. From time to time he and his sister Mary would be forced to move a few hundred yards in one direction or another, but it was only here among the clerks and Benchers of the Temple, in the prelapsarian world of their childhoods, that he was at home and as safe as he could ever be from the horror that for the last twenty years had shadowed the quiet, external tenor of their lives.

      The horror had begun one Thursday afternoon in September in 1796, as a young seamstress was preparing dinner for her family in their cramped Holborn rooms just to the north of the Temple. For some reason that the coroner’s court could only guess at, the girl had suddenly seized a knife that was lying on the table, and baulked of killing her child apprentice, had turned on her bedridden mother and savagely stabbed her through the heart before the child’s screams could bring their landlord. ‘It seems the young lady had once before, in her earlier years, deranged, from the harassing fatigues of too much business,’ the Morning Chronicle reported; ‘as her carriage towards her mother was ever affectionate in the extreme, it is believed that in the increased attentiveness, which her parents’ infirmities called for by day and night, is to be attributed the present insanity of this ill-fated young woman.’

      The fragile and harassed young woman was Mary, the bout of madness lasted only days – the coroner’s court found her insane but released her to her brother’s care – and for almost two decades that had been his life. Every few years rumours of their old tragedy would surface and the Lambs would be forced to shift their lodgings, but for nineteen heroic years Charles Lamb had fought to keep the world and his own incipient madness at bay, collaborating with Mary on her children’s stories and Tales, carrying her straitjacket for her on her sad, voluntary exiles to the Hoxton asylum whenever another attack threatened, and rising each day for thirty-three years to the drudgery of the East India Company accounts department to ensure that there would be a refuge to which she could return.

      Over the years the loss and the perpetual anxiety for both Mary and his own mental state had taken its toll on Charles – it was there in the face, in the lines of suffering, the sadness in the smile, the misanthropic edge to his humour, the alcohol, the dark, unnerving depths that lay just beyond the bubbling shallows of his talk – but perhaps the strangest thing of all about Mary’s illness is that she never felt any guilt for what she had done. In the first days after the attack she had come to believe that a benevolent providence had ordained her mother’s death, and at some subconscious level madness remained almost as much a release as an affliction for her, an escape from the dull chrysalis of a spinsterish middle-age into a brilliant, fantasy past through which she glided with the abandoned licence of some dazzling court beauty of the age of Queen Anne and Congreve.

      No one was more gentle or self-effacingly ‘feminine’ than Mary in her sane periods – the only woman of complete sense he had ever known, William Hazlitt claimed – and no one more brilliant or abandoned in her madness. It would have been less disquieting had their friends been able to see her insanity as something utterly unconnected with her ‘real’ personality, but nobody who heard her ravings – brilliant disjointed flashes of wit, sparkling jewels wrenched from their settings – could doubt that she was never so free as when she was in her straitjacket and never so restrained as when well.

      Even for the most seasoned Lamb-watcher, in fact, it was hard to be sure who was looking after whom in Hare Court, or who had sacrificed most to create one, indivisible being out of the wreckage of their damaged lives, but no household in London ever attracted more loyal friends. For those who did not know the history of mental illness there was always something inexplicably odd about Charles, but for his discreet and inner circle of devotees, his defensive carapace of jokes and puns and antique flights of humour, eccentricities, reckless bursts of levity and bouts of helpless drunkenness – the ‘between the acts’ of his ‘distressful drama’ as he engagingly called them – only added a note of vulnerability that bound them even more protectively to him.

      There were more glamorous, more distinguished, more powerful literary salons and coteries to be found in London – the room above Murray’s bookshop in Albemarle Street where, under the malignant Thomas Gifford, the Tory Quarterly was hatched; the great Whig Holland House set where Sydney Smith sang for his supper – but nowhere could you meet with such a mixed crowd of people as at Lamb’s. If Charles Lamb had any politics they were certainly on the liberal side of the debate, but that had never stopped his friends spanning the full gamut of political opinion, from Utopian revolutionaries-turned-Tories such as Southey, Coleridge or Wordsworth at one end of the spectrum, to the likes of Hazlitt, Godwin, Leigh Hunt and the radical journalist and satirist William Hone at the other.

      The Lambs’ was also the place where the age of Johnson met the age of Dickens and Browning in its embryonic state, and for Crabb Robinson this was its great charm. Robinson knew that the two great ‘beasts’ in the Lamb menagerie would not be there tonight, but he was seeing Wordsworth for breakfast in the morning, and in some ways it was easier when he was not there, less high-minded and, somehow – Robinson hated to let anything cloud his admiration of the man he recognised as the greatest poet since Milton – less constrained by the presence and dues of genius.

      Coleridge was away too, in Wiltshire, writing – or at least talking, as only Coleridge could talk – and Hunt would be busy at the Examiner’s office deep into the night; but so long as there could be one evening without Hazlitt and talk of Bonaparte, Robinson did not mind who else was there. He was painfully conscious that he got the worst of an argument with Hazlitt over the whist tables the last time they had met, and for a barrister it was doubly galling to be bested by a man ‘who was not just wrong but offensive in almost all he said’. ‘When pressed he does not deny what is bad in the character of Buonaparte,’ he had confided to his diary that night, part in anger, part in sadness at their parting of ways, ‘and yet he triumphs and rejoices in the late events. Hazlitt and myself once felt alike on politics, and now our hopes and fears are directly opposed. Hazlitt is angry with the friends of liberty for weakening their strength by going with the common foe against Buonaparte … Hazlitt says: “Let the enemy of old tyrannical governments triumph, I am glad, and I do not much care how the new government turns out … His hatred, and my fears, predominate and absorb all weaker impressions.”’

      There seemed to be no one, in fact, that Hazlitt had not offended these last weeks – Charles Burney over the review of his sister Fanny’s latest novel, Wordsworth with his attack in last week’s Examiner, Hunt who had been forced to disown the article – but not even Hazlitt could spoil the pleasure Robinson always felt as he made his way up the steep flights of stairs to the Lambs’ chambers. He was probably too late now to take a hand of whist but after the recent hash he had made of his cards that was probably no bad thing, and it was only deep into the evening, when they were done with cards and the tables put away, and the drink had begun to do its work, that the place came fully alive in all its strange, unruly charm.

      The Lambs’ Temple garret was a warren of small, shabby rooms under the roof and two sitting rooms on the third floor below. Charles Lamb had set aside the smaller of the rooms for a library so grimy that Robinson could never bring himself to go in, but the ‘state room’ would be looking as it always did for one of their soirées, with their old, petted servant Becky loading the sideboards with food and porter, while Mary glided in her quiet, measured way among the party and Charles – his hair, as black at forty as at twenty, the one grey and one brown eye already bright with fun and battle – sat like some diminutive, half-tipsy Quaker under the low, smoke-stained ceiling among his Hogarth prints, with his forbidden brandy and forbidden tobacco, and talked and stammered and joked and punned and drank to keep at bay the demons that no talk could hold off for ever.

      Even by Charles Lamb’s standards, Robinson thought, they were an odd lot that evening: old Burney talking whist as if he had never watched Captain СКАЧАТЬ