Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. VI-VII. Letters
Charles Lamb to Sir John Stoddart, [9 August 1827]
DEAR Knight—Old Acquaintance—’Tis with a
violence to the pure imagination (vide the “Excursion” passim) that I can bring
myself to believe I am writing to Dr.
Stoddart once again, at Malta. But the deductions of severe
reason warrant the proceeding. I write from Enfield, where we are seriously
weighing the advantages of dulness over the over-excitement of too much
company, but have not yet come to a conclusion. What is the news? for we see no
paper here; perhaps you can send us an old one from Malta. Only, I heard a
butcher in the market-place whisper something about a change of ministry. I
don’t know who’s in or out, or care, only as it might affect you. For domestic doings, I have only to tell, with
extreme regret, that poor Elisa Fenwick
(that was)—Mrs. Rutherford—is dead; and that we have
received a most heart-broken letter from her mother—left with four grandchildren, orphans of a living
scoundrel lurking about the
pothouses of Little Russell Street, London: they and she—God help ’em!—at
New York. I have just received Godwin’s third volume of the Republic, which
only reaches to the commencement of the Protectorate. I think he ![]()
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means to spin it out to his life’s
thread. Have you seen Fearn’s Anti-Tooke? I am no judge of such things—you
are; but I think it very clever indeed. If I knew your bookseller, I’d
order it for you at a venture: ’tis two octavos, Longman and Co. Or do you read now? Tell it
not in the Admiralty Court, but my head aches hesterno vino. I can scarce pump up words, much less
ideas, congruous to be sent so far. But your son must have this by
to-night’s post. [Here came a passage relating to an
escapade of young Stoddart, then at the Charterhouse,
which, probably through Lamb’s intervention, was
treated leniently. Lamb helped him with his imposition—Gray’s “Elegy” into Greek
elegiacs.] Manning is gone to
Rome, Naples, etc., probably to touch at Sicily, Malta, Guernsey, etc.; but I
don’t know the map. Hazlitt is
resident at Paris, whence he pours his lampoons in safety at his friends in
England. He has his boy with him. I am teaching Emma Latin. By the time you can answer this, she will be
qualified to instruct young ladies: she is a capital English reader: and
S. T. C. acknowledges that a part of
a passage in Milton she read better than
he, and part he read best, her part being the shorter. But, seriously, if
Lady St —— (oblivious pen, that was
about to write Mrs.!) could hear of such a young person
wanted (she smatters of French, some Italian, music of course), we’d send
our loves by her. My congratulations and assurances of old esteem.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
English poet and philosopher who projected
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
with William Wordsworth; author of
Biographia Literaria (1817),
On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and other
works.
John Fearn (1768-1837)
Scottish philosopher who published
A Rationale of the Laws of Cerebral
Vision (1830).
Eliza Fenwick [née Jago] (1766-1840)
The daughter of Thomas Jago and wife of the journalist John Fenwick; she was a novelist
and member of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin. In 1814 she emigrated to Barbados and spent her
later years in the United States.
Eliza Ann Fenwick (1789-1827)
The daughter of the writer Eliza Fenwick (d. 1840); she performed as an actress before
emigrating to America with her mother, where she was unhappily married the actor William
Rutherford; she died in New York.
William Godwin (1756-1836)
English novelist and political philosopher; author of
An Inquiry
concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793) and
Caleb
Williams (1794); in 1797 he married Mary Wollstonecraft.
Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
English poet, author of “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” “Elegy written in a
Country Churchyard,” and “The Bard”; he was professor of history at Cambridge
(1768).
William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
English essayist and literary critic; author of
Characters of
Shakespeare's Plays (1817),
Lectures on the English Poets
(1818), and
The Spirit of the Age (1825).
Thomas Norton Longman (1771-1842)
A leading London publisher whose authors included Southey, Wordsworth, Scott, and
Moore.
Thomas Manning (1772-1840)
Educated at Caius College, Cambridge, he traveled in China and Tibet, and was a life-long
friend of Charles Lamb.
John Milton (1608-1674)
English poet and controversialist; author of
Comus (1634),
Lycidas (1638),
Areopagitica (1644),
Paradise Lost (1667), and other works.
Emma Lamb Moxon [née Isola] (1809-1891)
The orphaned daughter of Charles Isola adopted by Charles and Mary Lamb; after working as
a governess she married Edward Moxon in 1833.
William Rutherford (1781-1829)
The son of the Rev. Thomas Rutherford; he married Eliza Ann Fenwick (daughter of the
novelist) in Barbados and left her to pursue an acting career in Britain; he died a
suicide.
Lady Isabella Stoddart [née Wellwood] (d. 1846)
The daughter of Sir Henry Wellwood-Moncreiff eighth baronet; in 1803 she married the
writer John Stoddart. She published novels under the pseudonym “Martha
Blackford.”
Sir John Stoddart (1773-1856)
Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, he befriended Coleridge and Wordsworth and after
abandoning his early republican principles became a writer for the
Times, and afterwards editor of the Tory newspaper
New
Times in 1817 and a judge in Malta (1826-40). His sister married William Hazlitt
in 1808.
