week three: memorializing and remembering

One of the purposes of my field study has been to not only study the words of London essayists but to see how they interacted with the city, and to see how the city remembers and memorializes them. I've more than enjoyed reading their essays (I've finished with two of Lamb's essay collections and am in the middle of Hazlitt's), and have tried to explore the city through an essayist's eye. I want to spend time looking for memorials to these authors, because I think it's interesting to see how London remembers these writers. I had read of a few sites in London associated with Lamb and Hazlitt, and I've gone to see a couple of them (there are some outside of London a bit, so I'll need to travel probably an hour or so one day to see them). Anyway, the picture below is a fountain dedicated to Charles Lamb, and is situated in the Inner Temple Gardens right off of Crown Row Lane, which is where Lamb was born. The fountain, flanked by the statue of a small boy, is––as you can see––very understated less than grandiose. There is no plaque dedicating the fountain to Lamb, but the boy is carrying a book with the quote, "Lawyers I suppose were children once," inscribed on it (one of Lamb's more well-known quotes). In the park there were a lot of people in business suits eating lunch and chatting, but they trickled out as the lunch hour came to a close. There were people sitting on benches around the fountain, but no one paid heed to the fountain or statue itself; I wondered, how many of these people know that this fountain is actually dedicated to Lamb? how many of these people know who Charles Lamb is? There are many more popular writers, like Charles Dickens, whose names are widely recognized and remembered with larger statues and museums and graves in Westminster. Lamb might not have achieved the fame and success during his lifetime as many of these great writers, but still it seemed sad to me that he is less remembered and memorialized. 

But fame doesn't always mean genius, and while we celebrate writers like Wordsworth and Shelley–and rightly so–we miss out on so many writers that might not have been as published or recognized in their time, thus not standing the test of time. Still, we judge great literary works by how they stand the test of time, but how much we might miss! How many beautiful sentences sat on a desk, unpublished, in their time and were thrown away after the unknown writer died? We put so much trust in publishers to filter and sift through literature, but how much certainly must slip through the cracks, to stay sitting in the slush pile while other essays or poems or novels are published. 

It's kind of a dizzying thought. 

Maybe my point is that it doesn't really matter that Charles Lamb or William Hazlitt don't have grand statues or graves in Westminister because it doesn't really change how much I enjoye and learn from their writing. One thing my project is teaching me is that public memorials matter less than the writing itself, that the words of the essayists I'm studying are more important than how they are remembered (or forgotten) by others.  

This is Lamb's memorial in the Inner Temple Gardens

And this is the church, St. Andrews, where Hazlitt was married with Lamb acting as best man. St Andrews was a Christopher Wren church, but was unfortunately bombed and gutted in WWII, and all that remained were the outer walls and tower. The public, however, decided to restore it to its original state. It's in the middle of busy London, sandwiched in between new buildings and thousands of businessmen and women rushing to and from work. The inside was, despite its central location, quiet and nearly empty. 

annotated source 02.13

Hazlitt, William. "Essays by William Hazlitt." Ed. Patrick Madden. Quotidiana. Web. 11 Feb 2012.

William Hazlitt is another essayist that will be part of my repertoire. Hazlitt was one of the "greats"; he and Charles Lamb were buddies; in fact, at one point Lamb was Hazlitt's only friend because Hazlitt had offended all of his other friends. The friendship of Hazlitt and Lamb is one particular detail I'd like to study while I'm in London. I want to get at not only how essayists interacted with London; I want to, wherever possible, find out how essayists interacted with each other. So I want to study Hazlitt not only because he is a canonical essayist, but because he and Lamb will be interesting to study together. One of Hazlitt's essays, "On the Pleasure of Hating," is indicative of not only his style but his crotchety and temperamental behavior which alienated him from others. Hazlitt will be fascinating to study, and he will also be fun to try and imitate once I get to that point.

annotated source 01/11

Lamb, Charles. Essays of Elia. Iowa City: U of Iowa, 2003. Print.

Originally published in 1823, Essays of Elia is a collection of personal essays containing Lamb's musings and observations of life. Although creative nonfiction is autobiographical in nature, Lamb's personal essays avoid a chronological view of time. In the introduction, Lamb is hailed as "a cornerstone of the personal essay tradition." This statement justifies his position as one of the central essayists I'll be studying while in London. Lamb is one of the most important--if not the most important--British essayists in all of time, forever, the end. He merits such high praise because his writing exemplifies the classical essay at its best; in his essays, he starts with one idea or event and meditates on it, sometimes drawing a conclusion and sometimes just letting his thoughts rest on the question. His work will be a major part of my field study as I will be studying Lamb in his own city--London. I will be able to read his essays and more fully understand the context in which he wrote.

And then I will write. Using Lamb as a guide will give me plenty to experiment with, and using his city as inspiration will give me plenty to write about.

Everybody wins.

learning journal 3: thoughts on history

There is one dilemma that we discussed in class as we discussed the history of England:

How do you summarize London's history into such a short time? 

It's impossible, surely, to summarize thousands of years of London's history into a few class periods--I'm not entirely convinced that it could happen thoroughly in a semester.

That aside, the most important question I came away considering is this: how I will connect the history of London with my own project? I don't know that I've entirely figured out the answer, but I know that the most important way that history will interact with my own project is by studying the history of the essayists that I will be reading. In literature courses, we typically turn to authors' lives and the times they lived in to get an idea of the context in which the text was written. So by studying the history of the essayists I'll be reading, I can connect their personal history with events and happenings that were occurring as they lived and worked and wrote. The ways that these authors intersected with general history of London (and England in general) will be good ground for analysis and discovery.

For example, studying the life of Charles Lamb will tell you that he was was born in 1775 and died in 1834. His parents had seven children, only three of which lived to adulthood. When Lamb was twenty, he experienced a horrible tragedy in his family life: his sister Mary, in a bout of temporary insanity, stabbed to death their mother and critically wounded their father. Because of her mental illness, she was released from prison, and Charles ended up taking care of her his whole life. Because of the shock, Lamb ended up having a mental breakdown himself and spending time in the asylum. What would be interesting to study historically with this specific story from his life is to look at how mental illness was treated and handled during that time period. Because my project is to write in the style of the classical British essay, this information may not seem completely vital, but it's interesting to get a larger picture of the authors I'm going to be studying. 

Especially considering the fact that with all Charles Lamb wrote about his life, he never once mentioned his family tragedy.

Interesting.