‘Writing on One Table’

“’Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense,” Charles Lamb told his school friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797, “and to have her nonsense respected.” Lamb’s nonsense consisted of puns and mischief and the creation, in 1820, of a middle-aged memory machine named Elia, whose autobiographical ramblings, for five years the pride of The London Magazine, were published in two volumes, Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833). Elia did not “conform to the march of time,” wrote Lamb, but was dragged along in the procession…. The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood. These were weaknesses; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings. The single-word name, a homonym of “a liar,” should be understood, Lamb wrote, as “without a meaning,” while the relationship between the author and his nom de plume was “a tissue of truth and fiction impossible to be extricated….I will not explain it.”Both meaningless and inexplicable, Elia was, as Lamb put it, the very “Genius of Nonsense,” and his essays were “sort of unlicked, incondite things—villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases.”...