Studies in Romanticism

KATIE S. HOMAR “Rehearsing Continually the Part ofthe Past”: Lamb’s Elia Essays and the Classical Curriculum at Christ’s Hospital I N “ON FAMILIAR STYLE,” WILLIAM HAZLITT COMPARES CHARLES LAMB’S Elia Essays in the London Magazine to “Erasmus’s Colloquies or a fine piece of modern Latin,” linking the archaic diction and syntax of Lamb’s persona to the Latin exercises taught in English grammar schools.1 Hazlitt also associates Elia’s style with the classically educated authors of the Ren­ aissance like Sir Thomas Browne. Elia’s classicism complements the subject matter of the essays because he celebrates defunct institutions like the South Sea House and memorializes the “old familiar faces” of his youth. Through this seemingly obsolete classical style, Lamb creates a magazine persona by repurposing his training from Christ’s Hospital, the London charity grammar school that he attended from 1782 to 1789. In this essay, I argue that the classical rhetorical practices ofChrist’s Hos­ pital are crucial to understanding Lamb’s Elian performances. Elia is a so­ phisticated schoolboy declaimer who repurposes classical writing exercises, ceremonial school oratory, and a ludic counter-curriculum in his essays. As Elia, Lamb translates these older rhetorical practices to address the middleclass readers of the London Magazine and playfully challenge their values. This reuse of classical rhetoric ties the seemingly apolitical, whimsical Elia to a history of classical education and enables him to make literary inter­ ventions in contemporary political debates. Lamb, through his comic per­ sona, transforms stale school rhetorics into fresh literary performances that demonstrate the importance of classical rhetoric as a strategic resource for Romantic authors. I. William Hazlitt, “On Familiar Style,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, vol. 8, ed. P. P. Howe (New York: AMS, 1967), 245. Lamb’s 1823 essay collection Elia (known as Essays of Elia) contains essays published in the London Magazine from 1820—1823. A second collection, The Last Essays of Elia, was published in 1833. SiR, $3 (Spring 2014) 79 80 KATIE S. HOMAR My reading ofclassical rhetoric in the Elia essays extends recent efforts to recover Lamb’s participation in Romantic-era political and cultural de­ bates. Since the 1970s, critics have historicized the ways Lamb “ironizfes] conventional responses for new ends.”2 Scholars like Gerald Monsman, Karen Fang, Felicity Janies, and Mark Parker have discussed the veiled po­ litical commentary of the Elia essays in the context of Lamb’s participation in 1790s Dissenter circles, the London Magazine, and the East India Com­ pany.3 Simon Hull most recently has illuminated the political dimensions of the Elia essays in the London Magazine. Expanding on Jeffrey Cox’s “Cock­ ney School,” Hull places Lamb at the head of a “metropolitan” group that includes Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey, and Hazlitt. This group, an 1820s “urban counterpart to the Lake School,” promotes an alternative model of Romantic authorship rooted in political engagement, periodicals, and urban sociability.4 Yet despite the recent recovery of Lamb’s work, few have discussed clas­ sical rhetoric in his performances as Elia. With the exception of Richard Clancey, who reads the essays alongside Horace’s Epistles, most who discuss Lamb’s education at Christ’s Hospital focus on Lamb’s “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago” (LM, November 1820) and his non-Elia piece “On Christ’s Hospital and the Character of Christ’s Hospital Boys” (Gen­ tleman’s Magazine, June 1813).5 They discuss the content of these essays, such as the class politics ofthe charity grammar school, rather than examine how this institution’s practices are refracted in the rhetorical moves of Lamb’s essays. While Lamb contributes to early-nineteenth-century de­ bates about charity grammar schools, Christ’s Hospital provides him with 2. Gerald Monsman, “Elia as Clerk: The Employment of a Commercial Writer,” Die Wordsworth Circle 21, no. 3 (1990): 99. 3. For contemporary readings of Lamb in historical context, see Fred Randel, The World ofElia (London: Kennicat Press, 1975); Monsman, Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984); Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Fang, “Empire, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb’s Con­ sumer Imagination,” Studies in...