Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth Reading Friendship in the 1790s

by James, Felicity

• ISBN13: 9780230545243
• ISBN10: 0230545246
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book makes the case for a re-placing of Lamb as reader, writer and friend in the midst of the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s. Reading his little-known early works alongside others by the likes of Coleridge and Wordsworth, it allows a revealing insight into the creative dynamics of early Romanticism.

Author Biography

FELICITY JAMES is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford, UK, where she completed a doctorate on Charles Lamb. She is currently working on a project exploring Unitarian networks of readers and writers.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations	p. viii
Acknowledgements	p. xi
Permissions	p. xiii
Introduction: Placing Lamb	p. 1
Idealising Friendship
Frendotatoi meta frendous: Constructing Friendship in the 1790s	p. 13
December 1794	p. 13
'Bowles, Priestley, Burke': The Morning Chronicle sonnets	p. 18
New readings of familial and friendly affection	p. 24
Pantisocracy and the 'family of soul'	p. 26
Unitarian readings of friendship	p. 30
Sensibility and benevolence	p. 34
Reading David Hartley	p. 39
Readings of feeling in Coleridge and Lamb	p. 43
Lamb's sensibilities: two early sonnets	p. 47
Rewritings of Friendship, 1796-1797	p. 55
Spring 1796	p. 55
Coleridge's rewritings of Lamb	p. 56
Trapped in the Bower: Coleridgean reflections in retirement	p. 62
'Ears of Sympathy': Lamb's sympathetic response	p. 71
Rewritings of Coleridge	p. 74
Doubting Friendship
The 'Day of Horrors'	p. 83
September 1796	p. 83
Aftermath	p. 85
Reconstructing the poetry of familial affection	p. 91
Nether Stowey: 'an Elysium upon earth'?	p. 96
'Cold, Cold, Cold': Loneliness and Reproach	p. 101
June 1797	p. 101
'Gloomy boughs' and sunny leaves: the Wordsworth-Coleridge conversation	p. 103
Visions of unity: This Lime-tree Bower my Prison	p. 105
The Overcoat and the Manchineel: Lamb's response	p. 111
The 'Reft House' of the 'Nehemiah Higginbottom' sonnets	p. 114
Blank Verse and Fears in Solitude	p. 120
February 1798	p. 120
Blank Verse and Lyrical Ballads	p. 125
Midnight reproach	p. 130
'Living without God in the World'	p. 134
Edmund Oliver: forging a 'common identity'	p. 136
Coleridge and the 'lying Angel'	p. 139
Reconstructing Friendship
A Text of Friendship: Rosamund Gray	p. 145
Spring 1798	p. 145
Anxieties of friendship: letters to Robert Lloyd	p. 146
'Inscribed in friendship': the sensibility of Rosamund Gray	p. 149
The novel's family loyalties	p. 152
Rosamund Gray and The Ruined Cottage	p. 155
Communities of feeling in Rosamund Gray	p. 163
Sympathy, Allusion, and Experiment in John Woodvil	p. 167
Late 1798	p. 167
Redemptive family narratives	p. 169
Elian identifications	p. 173
Forgeries and medleys: Lamb's imitations of Burton	p. 176
'Friend Lamb': John Woodvil and its readers	p. 177
Reading and resistance: 'What is Jacobinism?'	p. 180
The Urban Romantic: Lamb's Landscapes of Affection	p. 185
Early 1801	p. 185
Reading Lyrical Ballads (1800)	p. 188
Lamb's Wordsworthian attachments	p. 195
The voice of the 'Londoner'	p. 200
'The greatest egotist of all': some Elian sympathies	p. 203
Wordsworth's readings of Lamb	p. 210
Lamb's afterlives	p. 211
Notes	p. 215
Bibliography	p. 240
Index	p. 251
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