Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. VI-VII. Letters
Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth, [January 1823]
[No date. January, 1823.]
DEAR Wordsworth, I beg your acceptance of Elia, detached from
any of its old companions which might have been less agreeable to you. I hope
your eyes are better, but if you must spare them, there is nothing in my pages
which a Lady may not read aloud without indecorum, which is
more than can be said of Shakspeare.
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LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB |
Jan. |
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What a nut this last sentence would be for Blackwood! You will find I availed
myself of your suggestion, in curtailing the dissertation on Malvolio.
I have been on the Continent since I saw you.
I have eaten frogs.
I saw Monkhouse
tother day, and Mrs. M. being too poorly
to admit of company, the annual goosepye was sent to Russell Street, and with
its capacity has fed “A hundred head” (not of Aristotle’s) but “of
Elia’s friends.”
Mrs. Monkhouse is sadly confined, but
chearful.—
This packet is going off, and I have neither time, place nor
solitude for a longer Letter.’
Will you do me the favor to forward the other volume to
Southey?
Mary is perfectly well, and joins me in
kindest remembces to you all.
Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC)
Athenian philosopher and scientist who studied under Plato; the author of
Metaphysics,
Politics,
Nichomachean Ethics, and
Poetics.
Mary Anne Lamb (1764-1847)
Sister of Charles Lamb with whom she wrote Tales from Shakespeare (1807). She lived with
her brother, having killed their mother in a temporary fit of insanity.
Jane Monkhouse [née Horrocks] (d. 1834)
The daughter of Samuel Horrocks, MP (d. 1842); she married Thomas Monkhouse, friend of
the Wordsworths, and after his death in 1825, in 1827 Paris Dick, a Clifton
physician.
Thomas Monkhouse (1783-1825)
A London merchant and cousin of Mary and Sarah Hutchinson; he was a friend of William
Wordsworth and Charles Lamb.
Robert Southey (1774-1843)
Poet laureate and man of letters whose contemporary reputation depended upon his prose
works, among them the
Life of Nelson, 2 vols (1813),
History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (1823-32) and
The Doctor, 7 vols (1834-47).
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Coleridge, author of
Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. (1817-1980). Begun as the
Edinburgh Monthly Magazine,
Blackwood's assumed the name of its proprietor, William Blackwood after the sixth
number. Blackwood was the nominal editor until 1834.
