Jonathan Mulrooney

Reading the Romantic-period Daily News

On 17 June 1830, Charles Lamb wrote from Enfield, where he was living in a rented house with his sister Mary, to William Hone, “Coffee and Hotel Man” at Gracechurch Street, London, “I hereby impower Matilda Hone to superintend daily the putting into the twopenny post the Times newspaper of the day before, directed ‘Mr. Lamb, Enfield,’ which shall be held a full and sufficient direction: the said insertion to commence on Monday morning next.” After promising to pay Hone the not inconsiderable “quarterly sum of £1” for delivery, Lamb closed the letter with an affectionate postscript, “Vivant Coffee! Coffee-pot-que!” (282). Neither Lamb’s exuberance regarding so mundane a matter as newspaper delivery nor his association of the newspaper with the joys of the coffeehouse is surprising; he was, to say the least, an inveterate Londoner away from home. Information about what he might be missing in his favored environs was vital to him. Tellingly, Lamb’s finances at the time of this promissory writing were anything but secure, as he had confessed in a letter to Wordsworth some months before: “if we ever do move, we have encumbrances the less to impede us: all our furniture has faded under the auctioneer’s hammer. . . and we have only a spoon or two left to bless us. Clothed we came into Enfield, and naked we must go out of it” (244). Naked, it would seem, except for The Times. Lamb’s attachment to The Times marks him as one of the growing number of nineteenth-century British readers who imagined a relation to public life through the medium of newspapers. His request that the daily be sent through the post neatly collates two institutional frameworks around which the British social imaginary was forming: the newspaper and its primary means of rapid geographical dissemination. We discover in the letter to Wordsworth why the paper was so important to Lamb. He writes:

Introduction: Romantic Movements

This brief introduction contextualizes the essays in the collection with respect to the 2013 NASSR conference in Boston, at which they were first presented. It considers various conceptual manifestations of “Romantic movement” as occasioned by the conference and gathered in the collection, speculating on how the conference theme might inform the scholarship and teaching of Romanticism now and in the future.