{"id":1012,"date":"2015-12-24T10:20:02","date_gmt":"2015-12-24T10:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1012"},"modified":"2015-12-24T10:20:02","modified_gmt":"2015-12-24T10:20:02","slug":"on-christmas-day-in-1815-charles-lambs-letter-to-thomas-manning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1012","title":{"rendered":"On Christmas Day in 1815: Charles Lamb\u2019s letter to Thomas Manning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thankyou to Lucy Hodgetts<\/a>\u00a0(University of York) for this festive post which continues the ‘On This Day’ series. Her blog discusses Charles Lamb’s letter to Thomas Manning exactly 200 years ago on the 25th December 1815.<\/em><\/p>\n

(If you’d like to contribute a post to this blog series next year please contact anna.mercer@york.ac.uk).<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Charles<\/a>

Charles Lamb, by William Hazlitt (1804)<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2018Dear Old Friend and Absentee\u2019: Charles Lamb\u2019s letter to Thomas Manning, 25th<\/sup> December, 1815.<\/strong>
\n<\/u><\/p>\n

by Lucy Hodgetts<\/em><\/p>\n

Very few letters addressed to Charles Lamb still exist, apart from those written by the sinologist Thomas Manning. One of the first British scholars of Chinese language and culture, Manning was a friend and inspiration to Lamb throughout his writing life. Manning was the \u2018friend M.\u2019 from whom Elia professed to have received the translated Chinese manuscript which inspired \u2018A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig\u2019.<\/p>\n

Manning was a gifted mathematician and was accepted to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1790 to study Maths, but sharing the Quaker antipathy towards oaths meant he never took a degree. He stayed in Cambridge studying medicine and teaching maths, and met Lamb in 1799. While at Cambridge, Manning became interested in the study of Chinese language and culture and in 1802 travelled to Paris to study Chinese under Dr Hagar at the Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale. Manning planned to travel to China and, in need of a useful trade, returned to England in 1805 to gain practical medical experience at Westminster Hospital. Manning was granted permission by the court directors of the East India Company to travel and live as a doctor in an English factory in Canton (Guangzhou), and left for China in May 1806. Unsuccessful in his attempts to travel into China\u2019s interior, Manning stayed mainly in Canton until 1810 when he set out for the holy city of Lhasa (now the capital of Tibet), via Calcutta. Manning travelled without government permission, but arrived in Lhasa in December 1811. He was the first British traveller to reach the holy city and was even granted an audience with the Dalai Lama, then a seven-year-old boy. Manning left Lhasa in April 1812 and remained in Canton until 1816.<\/p>\n

During Manning\u2019s long absence abroad, Lamb wrote to his friend on Christmas Day, 1815, pondering upon the supposed impossibility of Christmas in Canton:<\/p>\n

This is Christmas-day 1815 with us; what it may be with you I don\u2019t know, the 12th<\/sup> of June next year perhaps; and if it should be the consecrated season with you, I don\u2019t see how you can keep it. You have no turkeys; you would not desecrate the festival by offering up a withered Chinese bantam, instead of the savoury grand Norfolcian holocaust, that smokes all around my nostrils at this moment from a thousand firesides. Then what puddings have you? Where will you get holly to stick in your churches, or churches to stick your dried tea-leaves (that must be the substitute) in? What memorials you can have of the holy time, I see not.<\/p>\n

– (C.L. to Manning, Dec. 25th<\/sup>, 1815. From The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, vol 3: 1809-1817<\/em>, ed. Edwin W. Marrs. Cornell University Press, 1978.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In language prescient of De Quincey\u2019s opium-eater, Lamb encourages his friend to take leave of the \u2018Pagodas\u2019, \u2018idols\u2019, and \u2018wretched reliques\u2019 of \u2018Babylon\u2019, enticing him with the nostalgic tastes and smells of home. For Lamb, it is the \u2018faces fragrant with the mince-pies of half a century, that alone can authenticate the cheerful mystery\u2019 of the Nativity. It is the domestic comforts and folk traditions of Christmas at home, rather than any religious doctrine, that represents the civilized ideal of England in this letter. In pitting the festive traditions of the \u2018holy tide\u2019 against those of the \u2018unedified heathen\u2019, Lamb elides a personal nostalgia for home with a patriotic pride in Western civilisation.<\/p>\n

In an extended conceit, Lamb exaggerates the time Manning has spent abroad to imagine the future decay of his homeland. \u2018And in sober sense what makes you so long from among us, Manning?\u2019 asks Lamb. \u2018You must not expect to see the same England again which you left.\u2019 Lamb describes a near future in which England has altered radically in Manning\u2019s absence: \u2018empires have been overturned, crowns trodden into dust, the face of the western world quite changed\u2019. London landmarks, icons of empire and progress, have decayed and vanished: \u2018St. Paul\u2019s Church is a heap of ruins; the Monument isn\u2019t half so high as you knew it, [\u2026] the horse at Charing Cross is gone, no one knows whither\u2019. Lamb joshes that in the time it has taken Manning to master the arcane minutiae of a foreign civilisation, he has missed the total downfall of his own: \u2018and all this has taken place while you have been settling whether Ho-hing-tong should be spelt with a —- or a —-.\u2019<\/p>\n

In typical digressive style, Lamb\u2019s reverie of the future shifts into a more personal key. \u2018Poor Godwin!\u2019 he laments. \u2018I was passing his tomb the other day in Cripplegate churchyard. There are some verses upon it written by Miss Hayes [sic].\u2019 Coleridge is \u2018just dead, having lived just long enough to close the eyes of Wordsworth, who paid the debt to nature but a week or two before\u2019. Godwin and Coleridge do not escape Lamb\u2019s lampoon of academia either. While Godwin\u2019s theories die with him, \u2018ten feet deep in Cripplegate mould\u2019, Coleridge has left behind \u2018more than forty thousand treatises in criticism and metaphysics, but few of them in a state of completion. They are now destined, perhaps, to wrap up spices\u2019. A light hearted warning to his friend on the ephemeral nature of cloistered scholarship, and on the cyclical rise and fall of empires, Lamb\u2019s letter can also be read as a reproach on neglected friendships: \u2018You see what mutations the busy hand of Time has produced, while you have consumed in foolish voluntary exile that time which might have gladdened your friends\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"Thomas<\/a>

Thomas Manning, by J.M. Davis (1805)<\/p><\/div>\n

Despite the decay of civilisation, and the mutability of its monuments and institutions, the precious friendship between Lamb and Manning endures. Lamb depicts a future in which the elderly friends will reminisce nostalgically for their Cambridge youth. In a touching conclusion, he implores the future Manning to \u2018come to your old home. I will rub my eyes and try to recognise you. We will shake withered hands together, and talk of old things – of St. Mary\u2019s Church and the barber\u2019s opposite, where the young students in mathematics used to assemble\u2019. Here, temporal distance emphasizes geographical division. Lamb\u2019s intense and evocative yearning for a recent past is projected onto Manning\u2019s physical remoteness. Lamb asks Manning to imagine a future in which their shared memories of a recent life will then be remembered as \u2018old things\u2019, perhaps with the aim of intensifying his friend\u2019s twinges of homesickness. Lamb plays upon the precarious definitions of nostalgia and homesickness for emotive effect in this letter. Nostalgia is a Greek neologism, from \u2018nostos\u2019 meaning home, and \u2018algos\u2019 meaning a \u2018painful longing\u2019, and in the eighteenth century was regarded as an acute homesickness in those who travelled widely. Lamb\u2019s letter demonstrates the transition of nostalgia from a form of homesickness for a physical place, to a longing for an idealised past or nationhood. Most of all, it shows how the pinning for idealised places or experiences often belies a powerful longing for an absent friend:<\/p>\n

You like oysters and to open them yourself; I\u2019ll get you some if you come in oyster time. [James] Marshall, Godwin\u2019s old friend, is still alive, and talks of the faces you used to make.
\nCome as soon as you can.<\/p>\n

\u00a0C. Lamb<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thankyou to Lucy Hodgetts\u00a0(University of York) for this festive post which continues the ‘On This Day’ series. Her blog discusses Charles Lamb’s letter to Thomas Manning exactly 200 years ago… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1012"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1018,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012\/revisions\/1018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}