Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. VI-VII. Letters
Charles Lamb to James Gillman, Jr., [7 May 1833]
BY a strange occurrence we have quitted Enfield for
ever. Oh! the happy eternity! Who is Vicar or Lecturer for that detestable
place concerns us not. But Asbury,
surgeon and a good fellow, has offered to get you a Mover and Seconder, and you
may use my name freely to him. Except him and Dr.
Creswell, I have no respectable acquaintance in the dreary
village. At least my friends are all in the public line, and it might not suit
to have it moved at a special vestry by John Gage at the
Crown and Horseshoe, licensed victualler, and seconded by Joseph
Horner of the Green Dragon, ditto, that the Rev. J. G. is a fit person to be Lecturer,
&c.
My dear James, I
wish you all success, but am too full of my own emancipation almost to
congratulate anyone else. With both our loves to your father and mother and
glorious S. T. C.,
Jacob Vale Asbury (1790 c.-1871)
English physician at Enfield who trained at the Middlesex Hospital; in 1820 he married
Dorothy Jacomb. He was a friend of Charles Lamb and Thomas Hood.
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.
Daniel Cresswell (1776-1844)
Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge where he was a fellow and tutor, he was vicar of
Enfield and JP for Middlesex. He published on mathematics; Charles Lamb was a
friend.
James Gillman Jr. (1808-1877)
The son of the biographer; educated at Merchant Taylors' School and St. John's College,
Oxford, he was a schoolmaster and rector of Barfreston, Kent and vicar of Holy Trinity,
Lambeth (1847).
