Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. VI-VII. Letters
Charles Lamb to Thomas Allsop, [9 January 1828]
DEAR Allsop—I
have been very poorly and nervous lately, but am recovering sleep, &c. I do
not invite or make engagements for particular days; but I need not say how
pleasant your dropping in any Sunday morng would be.
Perhaps Jameson would accompany you.
Pray beg him to keep an accurate record of the warning I sent by him to old
Pan, for I dread lest he should at the 12
months’ end deny the warning. The house is his daughter’s, but we
took it through him, and have paid the rent to his receipts for his
daughter’s. Consult J. if he thinks the warning
sufficient. I am very nervous, or have been, about the house; lost my sleep,
& expected to be ill; but slumbered gloriously last night golden slumbers.
I shall not relapse. You fright me with your inserted slips in the most welcome
Atlas. They begin to charge
double for it, & call it two sheets. How can I confute them by opening it,
when a note of yours might slip out, & we get in a hobble? When you write,
write real letters. Mary’s best
love & mine to Mrs. A. Yours ever,
Ann Allsop [née Dean] (d. 1877 c.)
The wife of Thomas Allsop, biographer of Coleridge, whom she married in 1824; she was a
society hostess, not the actress Fanny Alsop, daughter of Dorothy Jordan.
Thomas Allsop (1795-1880)
English silk merchant and stockbroker who was the friend and biographer of Coleridge
(1836) and a member of Charles Lamb's circle.
Robert Jameson (1774-1854)
Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University and author of
System of Mineralogy, 3 vols (1804-08).
Robert Sympson Jameson (1796-1854)
A childhood friend of Derwent Coleridge, he was educated at the Middle Temple and pursued
a career as a jurist in Canada; in 1825 he was unhappily married to the writer Anna
Brownell Jameson.
Mary Anne Lamb (1764-1847)
Sister of Charles Lamb with whom she wrote Tales from Shakespeare (1807). She lived with
her brother, having killed their mother in a temporary fit of insanity.
The Atlas. (1826-1869). A weekly literary newspaper with a Benthamite bent edited by Robert Stephen Rintoul.
