By the 1820s the Poor Law had become as unavoidable an issue as it was undesirable for the literary magazine. Like Elia's comfortable middle-class type, who resents the importuning visits made by his ‘poor relation’, the Edinburgh grudgingly plays host to the vexing, recurring topic of the Poor Law and its protracted, controversial process of reform. For Elia himself, however, there appears to be no such reluctance or awkwardness, as periodical writing in this case embraces the disconcerting ‘poor subject’ through the familiar, essayistic figure. In consecutive essays in May and June 1822 – respectively, ‘The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers’ and ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’ – Lamb involves himself in the separate and collective social debates surrounding these iconic figures with an implied reader who is, like the Edinburgh's imagined reader, disaffected by such discussion. In these essays Elia reactivates the jaded metropolitan reader's sense of charity by a form of inverse argument, in which a traditional but contemptuous attitude of pity is negated by emphasis on the poor subject's importance to art and popular culture. Thus redeemed, the metropolitan reader reasserts the residual power of individual agency to, as it were, ‘make a difference’ against the dominant discourse of institutional reform.

In the process, Elia enters into dialogue with various other historical and contemporary representations of the sweep and the beggar. The theoretical basis for the mode of metropolitanism that emerges is established primarily through an interrogation of literary and cultural assumptions about how ‘low’ society in early nineteenth-century London is portrayed, specifically the identifying of a morally ambivalent feature of theatricality or ‘comic grotesquery’.