I have little acquaintance with Charles Lamb and until I purchased The Essays of Elia I had only read one of his poems and that assigned in an English class somewhere, at some time. The Old Familiar Faces is a bit sentimental for my tastes and so though his name (and that of his sister Mary) had floated around in the discussions of Wordsworth and Coleridge, I had read nothing of him that made me understand the felt equivalence of the authors.

And then I found – in probably my favourite tiny used bookstore in Vancouver – a delightful burgundy bound small volume of Elia’s essays published and printed by Collins’ Clear-Type Press sometime around 1905. Some $19 later, I carried the little book up the street to the coffee shop, ordered my latte and started reading. I read “The South-Sea House” first and was delighted by the whimsicality of the characters but there was something else, like a deep current under the words. I couldn’t stop there and glanced through the table of contents and came upon “Witches and Other Night Fears.” Given my fascination for the use of female power images in other writers, that was were I went next.

He seems to me a very careful writer. That is, I sincerely doubt whether his juxtapositions were not carefully considered. He seems an author that delights in the subtle indicator, the quiet joke to make palatable a difficult truth. So when he begins the essay with a discussion about the “creed of witchcraft” and the problem of interpretation (taking our ancestors to be fools for belief) only to follow it closely with a child’s interpretation of Stackhouse’s biblical explication (and his “brief, modest and satisfactory” solutions to numerous apparent biblical contradictions), it seems unlikely that such a juxtaposition was not intended to order our experience and create meaning.

For me the moment of deepest, although quiet, hilarity in that essay is the scene where the young Elia is exposed in his dedication to Stackhouse’s book. The pictures, it seems, had his devotion.

In my father’s book-closet, the “History of the Bible,” by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station.  The pictures with which it abounds–one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon’s temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot–attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes–and there was a pleasure in removing folios of tomes–and there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf.

Sitting in the coffee shop, I had to place the little red-ribbon book marker, place the book upon the table and simply grin.

That child, straining for a book probably placed on a high shelf just so he wouldn’t see it, just as parents in the ’70s hid their copy of The Joy of Sex from their children, this is Lamb for me, this quiet teaching, this delight in the whimsical, the deep respect for what is real about how people go about things.

It made me want to find a digital copy of Stackhouse just so I could see the Witch. So I did, and after a diligent search (which made me late for work), I found a copy of the volumes and a copy of the Witch. Here she is. Can you make her out?

More on Lamb later. The dude is my hero.