I’m increasingly turning to essays with the greatest pleasure for their extraordinary and specific ability to capture a moment, an idea, an experience so completely. That’s what made me pull this off the shelf to read this week. Published in 1927 it was given to my father in 1944 as a Sunday School prize while he was evacuated. I wonder where it had sat in the years between.
A bold, full of expectation choice to give to a teenager. The greatest of essay writers are represented here from Montaigne, Bacon and Browne through Addison and Steele to Lamb, Thackeray and Stevenson. In my earlier posts holidays to Margate, actual and aborted, have featured several times. So I was drawn to the essay by Charles Lamb ‘The Old Margate Hoy’.
Charles Lamb, whose essays I very much admire, included this piece in his ‘Last Essays of Elia’ published in 1833. The essay is a memory of a holiday excursion taken with a cousin when Lamb was fifteen, placing the events around 1790. Single masted ships called ‘hoys’, originally carried cargo between London and Margate but increasingly carried passengers and it was by far and away the cheapest way for visitors to reach Margate. Presumably that made it the choice for the teenage Lamb and his cousin.
Lamb’s voyage is packed with encounters which fill his imagination but arrival brings a disappointment. It allows a Lamb a digression on the dissatisfaction people often feel when seeing the sea for the first time. This digression shows how far we can sometimes find ourselves from the imaginative world of people in the past. The trip to Margate was the first time Lamb had seen the sea but his reading life up to that point had been full of the seas and oceans of the world.
Lamb’s head is full of whirlpools, sunken ships, sea monsters and coral. So he finds the sea almost imprisoning. When he sees the sea ‘I want to be on it, over it, across it….My thoughts are abroad’. The danger of reading as preparation and replacement I suppose.
The Solitary Reader 