Mobility

I think of this as a subject

for Charles Lamb, to whose es-

says from the 1820s I was com-

mended by my father, so that

as I encountered them under

scholastic compulsion, I was

ready to be unresisting. As

Elia, Lamb describes an uncle

who could have been a father,

and such men one knows, too.

.. and how he used to carry me on his back when I was a lame-footed boy - many a mile when I could not walk for pain; and how in after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not always (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he was impatient, and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate he had been to me when I was lame-footed; and how when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago  .. yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed his kindness and I missed his crossness, and wished him to be alive again, and was as uneasy without him, as he must have been when the doctor took off his limb ..

Charles Lamb

Elia and The Last

  Essays of Elia

  Dream-Children

    A Reverie

Jonathan Bate

  editor

Oxford University Press, 1987©

op. cit.