Anxiety and Romantic Metropolitanism

The manifold irony of the essayistic figure confirms Riehl's assessment of Lamb as the ‘ultimate eiron’. Condemned as a primary cause of superficial, extensive reading, as a sign of creeping metropolitanism, the metropolitan periodical text is appropriated to a cultural ideal of intensive or ‘deep’ reading; emancipation is espoused not through the open spaces coveted by the flâneur, but the domestic enclosure cherished by the hypochondriac; altruism is enacted through detachment; theatricality opposes the superficiality of spectacle. But implementing all the above is the irony of Lamb's melodramatic self-belittlement and its critical implications. This key characteristic of Elia amounts to a contrived marginality, an art of the peripheral which – ironically – situates Lamb at the centre of a Romantic metropolitan genre. Lamb curiously comes into being as the definitive metropolitan author not through outright opposition, as suggested by Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age portrayal, but through instances of appropriation and adaptation which represent subtle ontological expressions of the marginal Elian figure. Hunt induces anxiety from within periodical writing, an anxiety to which Hazlitt ambivalently responds, but it is Lamb's unique exploitation of that crucial distance between himself and his persona which diffuses that anxiety. De Quincey's opium-eater initiates the nineteenth-century phenomenon of the flâneur, but in Elia's converse domesticity Lamb removes from such detachment the tendency to isolation and alienation. Egan's amoral swells typify city-as-theatre hedonism, whilst Elia assimilates this aesthetic to a notion of social responsibility.

The grist to the mill of Lamb's eiron, however, lies not in the simple arrogance of the alazon but more complexly in the anxiety inherent in the concept of the metropolis in the Romantic period. If anxiety is defined as a crisis of identity ensuing from an indeterminate or transitory position, then Lamb forges his own identity out of the anxiety of the Romantic metropolis. This is a growing and changing city caught between the conflicting ideologies of a residual paternalism and an emergent utilitarianism, between the interests of commerce and community as a consequence of the general urbanization of society, and between the claims of escapism and conscience in its art.