Poetry in Letters and Journals

Lady Caroline Lamb began writing poetry as a child and never stopped. Her earliest efforts were precocious and idiosyncratic. Like the sketch-art and watercolors in her notebooks, her early poetry shows that she was a writer long before her affair with Byron in 1812.[1] Many themes, turns of phrase, and names found in Glenarvon (1816) were in her poetry before she met Byron. The poems below are arranged in rough chronological order. Exact dates are noted, whenever possible.

The first poem (‘I’m Mad’) dates from January 1797, when she was eleven years old. Her mother Harriet, Lady Bessborough, and her Aunt Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, delighted in her juvenile self-expression in letters that frequently break into rhyme. Her aunt wrote verses for young Caroline one Christmas, titling her poem ‘To Lady Caroline Ponsonby With a New Year’s gift of a pencil’, calling upon her, ‘Fairy, sprite, whatever thou art’, to employ her ‘[m]agic genius’, and without ‘fear / Boldly mould, invent, design’.[2] By age twelve, LCL was sketching, writing, and generally seeking to fulfill her image as the ‘sprite’ of the household. She knew her letters and their poetry would be passed around and shared.

Poems in letters are finished works – although she often revised them. Many poems in her letters, drawn from the Archives at Chatsworth, West Sussex, Castle Howard, The Brotherton Collection of Leeds University, the Murray Archive in the National Library of Scotland, and the Bodleian Library, have been published in part in biographical and critical works focusing on Lamb, her family and circle of acquaintances, and are thus known to scholars and readers interested in the Regency period. These have been augmented by others previously unpublished to give a full sense of Lamb’s poetic achievement.

Like most educated women of the period, Lamb compiled ‘commonplace books’ containing sketches, original verse and commentary, together with quotations and translations. Also like many other women, she created bound books of sketches, verse, descriptions and fiction, handwritten but intended as keepsakes for friends and family. The gift book is a form of publication we have honored by the inclusion of poetry drawn from two such.

One gift book is held in the Hertfordshire Archives. Its date and intended recipient are not known, but the book may have been intended for a friend of Lamb’s grandmother. The other gift book dates from around 1807, and its recipient was Lamb’s cousin Georgiana, also known as ‘Little G’, the eldest daughter of Lamb’s Aunt, the Duchess of Devonshire, who later became Lady Morpeth. This second gift book is held in the archives of Little G’s husband’s estate, Castle Howard. From early childhood, Lamb shared intimacy with G, or ‘Jarry’, as she calls her in letters written after her eleventh birthday. Their closeness continued after G’s marriage to Lord Morpeth (the future 6^th Earl of Carlisle) in 1801. They shared an important connection in both suffering from depression. With a few notable exceptions, the verses in Lamb’s letters and gift books concentrate on themes of love, friendship and nature, traditional topics of poetry. Their occasions are also familiar ones: pain at the loss of a lover or friend, distress at the flux of time, joy in friendship and love, a favorite pet, the beauty of the natural scene. A number of these poems are spontaneous, but the great majority show an effort to practice the craft of prosody. An important theme in the second gift book is Lamb’s acknowledgement that her devoted husband, William Lamb, had first loved Little G.

When she turned to fiction, Lamb did not leave verse behind, even temporarily. Lamb’s first novel, Glenarvon (1816) is unusual in having incorporated numerous song lyrics, and even, in two cases, printing music for the verses printed. In this, her fiction is almost unique, although it also mirrors a practice in popular journalism that dates from at least the 1790s. For example, The Lady’s Monthly Magazine of the period had been publishing music along with embroidery patterns, and other women’s magazines had emulated the practice; Godey’s Lady’s Book is one example. Still, printing extensive passages of song lyrics, much less actual musical settings, was highly unusual. Lamb also followed her Aunt Georgiana and other ladies of high social standing in dabbling in sheet music publications.

Song lyrics written by women were competitive in the London market, but tended to conform to conventional models. A poem published in the Scots Magazine in 1795, for example, was titled ‘Ellen; or, the fair insane’. Another, printed in the Monthly Magazine and British Register in 1797, was called ‘The Penitent Mother’.[3] Lamb’s Aunt Georgiana had published a song that Jane Austen chose for her personal songbook: ‘I have a Silent Sorrow Here’. The titles typify the roles in which female writers were cast, and the characters in Lamb’s fiction mirror that social stereotype. But her ambitions in the song market were anything but typical. By 1814 she was collaborating with a young Jew named Isaac Nathan on settings of her lyrics, and it is he who provided the music for Glenarvon. Lamb probably believed the music was a selling point for the novel, because the second and final volume of Byron and Nathan’s Hebrew Melodies had just been published on 18 April 1816, scarcely a month before Glenarvon appeared. The Melodies were popular (the first volume had sold well the year before), and Byron’s well-publicized departure on 23 April made sales even better. Nathan’s friendship with Byron (Nathan set more than thirty of Byron’s lyrics to music with his permission) was an important point in his favor, from Lamb’s perspective.[4]

Nathan would publish twelve songs with lyrics by Lamb [see biographical note on Nathan for a list of the songs]. Lamb was so proud of the songs in Glenarvon that in 1819 she arranged to have them printed in Verses from Glenarvon, perhaps as gifts for friends and family. The songs of Glenarvon are at the core of Lamb’s artistic vision and mode of expression. Seven of the fourteen lyrics are sung by Elinor St. Clair (also known as St. Clara), who accompanies herself on harp, an instrument LCL played. Lamb identified strongly with St. Clara, the rebel whose voice dominates the latter half of the story. In her fiction about the relationships between herself, her cousin Georgiana, and her husband William, LCL gave herself the name of ‘Clare’. The last song of Glenarvon is sung by St. Clara just before she plunges to her death – and political martyrdom – in the sea.[5]

To this point in her career (1816), Lamb’s poetry is intended for family and friends. Thereafter, she published in more public venues, with A New Canto (1819), followed by another more extended response to Byron: Gordon: A Tale, A Poetical Review of Don Juan (1821). She paid to have Gordon published, gave copies to friends, and sent some to the magazines. No reviews appeared until two years later, when the Monthly Review printed a notice expressing the hope that the author ‘will suffer many, many suns and moons to rise and set, to grow and wane, before he re-commits himself to the press’.[6]

Whether she took this advice or not, Lamb apparently made no further attempts at longer verse. But she kept writing poetry. Graham Hamilton (1822) contains one song, and Ada Reis (1823) prints six. Five of these seven lyrics were published as sheet music by Isaac Nathan, with the lyrics later printed after Lamb’s death in January 1828, in Nathan’s Fugitive Pieces (1829). Nathan’s involvement with Lamb, which had begun when he sang one of her songs (‘The Kiss That’s On Thy Lip Impressed’) at a concert in 1814, lasted her lifetime. She was godmother to one of his children, and she was delighted when the songs from the novel came out as sheet music.

Though her health declined after Ada Reis, and her literary output dropped, Lamb kept writing poetry. A late, despairing poem written while she was under a house arrest engineered by her in-laws, is ‘Cold Was the Season Of the Year’. It is a typical note in what would become an increasingly melancholy disintegration, concluding with her death at age forty-two from the effects of drug and alcohol abuse. She died on 25 January 1828, three days after what would have been Lord Byron’s fortieth birthday, had he lived. While her contribution was not extensive, Lamb played a mostly posthumous role in the emergence of a literary fashion that was just beginning as her life was ending: the annual literary gift book, a collection of short verses, illustrations, and fictional pieces by contemporary authors mixed together with works of previous eras. These decoratively-bound volumes with steel plate engravings of nationally-recognized artwork and sentimental poetry and prose were published in the fall and sold as Christmas gifts or simply tokens of love or friendship. The first annual, Forget Me Not, appeared in 1822. By 1828, when Lamb died, 100,000 copies of fifteen separate annuals were sold in England.[7]

Of the four poems by Lamb known to have appeared in the annuals, the first, ‘To the Hon. William Lamb’, seems to have been written in the heat of her separation from William and published immediately in 1826. Three other poems were published after Lamb’s death, and two of these are versions of lyrics found in the gift books extant at Castle Howard and the Hertfordshire Archives. The poem beginning ‘Oh balm of nature to the mind opprest’ speaks to Lamb’s years-long struggle with drug and alcohol addiction, a struggle she eventually lost. It is perhaps fitting that the last poem here, ‘Did ever man a woman love’ (titled ‘The Walze’ in the Hertfordshire Archive book), treats the double standard of male-female relations. It may have raised eyebrows and a few tempers in drawing rooms where proper middle class ladies displayed their gift books as evidence of culture and breeding, nonetheless sometimes chafing under the collar of contemporary patriarchal mores.

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Notes

[1] For further discussion of the promise of Lamb’s early work, see Paul Douglass and Rosemary March, ‘That ‘Vital Spark of Genius’: Lady Caroline Lamb’s Writing Before Byron’ Pacific Coast Philology 41 (2006), pp. 43-62.

[2] Poem held in manuscript in the Osborne collection of Yale University’s Special Collections.

[3] Philip W. Martin, Mad Women in Romantic Writing (New York: St. Martin’s Press), pp. 23-24.

[4] Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1957), p. 608. And see Byron’s Letters and Journals, Ed. Leslie Marchand. 12 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973-1995) Vol. 5, pp. 68-69.

[5] Glenarvon, Vol. 3.

[6] Review of Gordon: A Tale, Monthly Review, second series, Vol. 96 (1822?), pp. 325-26.

[7] Please see ‘History: A Small Genre Succeeds', a subpage of The Forget Me Not Hypertextual Archive, a website devoted to the genre of Literary Annuals by Professor Katherine D. Harris. (Visited 2021). You will have to navigate to the subpage once you enter the site.