Chapter CC: Letter 465: Charles Lamb to Thomas Hood

Late autumn, 1828.

Enfield.

Dear Lamb--You are an impudent varlet; but I will keep your secret. We dine at Ayrton's on Thursday, and shall try to find Sarah and her two spare beds for that night only. Miss M. and her tragedy may be dished: so may not you and your rib. Health attend you.

Yours, T. HOOD, ESQ.

Miss Bridget Hood sends love.

[In _The Gem_, 1829, in addition to his poem, "On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born," Lamb was credited with the following piece of prose, entitled "A Widow," which was really the work of Hood (see letter above):--

A WIDOW

Hath always been a mark for mockery:--a standing butt for wit to
level at. Jest after jest hath been huddled upon her close cap, and
stuck, like burrs, upon her weeds. Her sables are a perpetual "Black
Joke."

Satirists--prose and verse--have made merry with her bereavements.
She is a stock character on the stage. Farce bottleth up her
crocodile tears, or labelleth her empty lachrymatories. Comedy
mocketh her precocious flirtations--Tragedy even girdeth at her
frailty, and twitteth her with "the funeral baked meats coldly
furnishing forth the marriage tables."

I confess when I called the other day on my kinswoman G.--then in
the second week of her widowhood--and saw her sitting, her young boy
by her side, in her recent sables, I felt unable to reconcile her
estate with any risible associations. The Lady with a skeleton
moiety--in the old print, in Bowles' old shop window--seemed but a
type of her condition. Her husband,--a whole hemisphere in love's
world--was deficient. One complete side--her left--was
death-stricken. It was a matrimonial paralysis, unprovocative of
laughter. I could as soon have tittered at one of those melancholy
objects that drag their poor dead-alive bodies about the streets.

It seems difficult to account for the popular prejudice against lone
women. There is a majority, I trust, of such honest, decorous
mourners as my kinswoman: yet are Widows, like the Hebrew, a proverb
and a byeword amongst nations. From the first putting on of the
sooty garments, they become a stock joke--chimney-sweep or
blackamoor is not surer--by mere virtue of their nigritude.

Are the wanton amatory glances of a few pairs of graceless eyes,
twinkling through their cunning waters, to reflect so evil a light
on a whole community? Verily the sad benighted orbs of that noble
relict--the Lady Rachel Russell--blinded through unserene drops for
her dead Lord,--might atone for such oglings!

Are the traditional freaks of a Dame of Ephesus, or a Wife of Bath,
or a Queen of Denmark, to cast so broad a shadow over
a whole sisterhood. There must be, methinks, some more general
infirmity--common, probably, to all Eve-kind--to justify so sweeping
a stigma.

Does the satiric spirit, perhaps, institute splenetic comparisons
between the lofty poetical pretensions of posthumous tenderness and
their fulfilment? The sentiments of Love especially affect a high
heroical pitch, of which the human performance can present, at best,
but a burlesque parody. A widow, that hath lived only for her
husband, should die with him. She is flesh of his flesh, and bone of
his bone; and it is not seemly for a mere rib to be his survivor.
The prose of her practice accords not with the poetry of her
professions. She hath done with the world,--and you meet her in
Regent Street. Earth hath now nothing left for her--but she swears
and administers. She cannot survive him--and invests in the _Long_
Annuities.

The romantic fancy resents, and the satiric spirit records, these
discrepancies. By the conjugal theory itself there ought to be no
Widows; and, accordingly, a class, that by our milder manners is
merely ridiculed, on the ruder banks of the Ganges is literally
_roasted_. C. LAMB.

"Miss M. and her tragedy." I fancy Miss M. would be Miss Mitford, and her tragedy "Rienzi," produced at Drury Lane October 9, 1828. It was a success. Hood's rib would probably be the play I have not identified. See letter to Barton of October 11.

Here, a little out of its order, might come a letter from Lamb to Hood, December 17, 1828, which is facsimiled in a privately-printed American bibliography of Lamb, the owner of which declines to let not only me but the Boston Bibliophile Society include it with the correspondence. In it Lamb expresses regret, not so much that Hood had signed "The Widow" with Lamb's name, but that an unfortunately ambiguous jest, pointed out to him by certain friends, had crept into it. He asks that the subject may never be referred to again.

Here perhaps should come a note to Miss Reynolds, Hood's sister-in-law, accompanying Lamb's Essay on Hogarth.]