Roger Lamb's Note of Explanation
I cannot readily convey to paper the vexations and disappointments which attended the publication of the autobiographical book on which I had for so many years laboured, after school hours, and during the whole of my holidays, while master of the crowded Free School of White Friars Lane in this city of Dublin. I had written it as a faithful memoir of interesting events, not shrinking from any confession of error or boast of success, so long as I should keep to the truth.
In the year 1808, when it was concluded, I showed the manuscript to one or two of my old military comrades who resided in Dublin. They considered it pretty well as story, and had little fault to find with its exactness as historical writing. But with the booksellers it was an altogether different matter. Few of these would deign so much as to look into the work, which they said was clearly of tedious and inordinate length as the life-story of so obscure an individual as I was; others read a page or two and then asked me, affecting to like it fairly, whether I would pay them a hundred guineas for the risk of publication. But I was a poor man, with a parcel of debts, indifferent health, and a numerous family to support; and had expected the tide of money rather to flow in the opposite direction.
The chief subject treated of was my campaigning experiences in the American War of 1775–83, which these booksellers professed to regard as 'a Lazarus'-their trade term for a subject that was not only dead but stinking. They refused to listen to me when I argued that the present hostilities with France would greatly favour the book, as calling attention to the thankless heroism once displayed in America by the same regiments then triumphantly engaged under Lord Wellington in the Spanish Peninsula.
This American war had, admittedly, been a war lost, and so was in general not a pleasant subject for the British people to dwell upon; and a shameful war, too, as fought against men of our own blood, the American colonists; and still more shameful in that these had been leagued after a time with our natural enemies the French, against whose aggressions we had so recently defended them. Yet in spite of all this, we (if I may speak for the survivors of the British expeditionary forces in America) had nothing with which to reproach ourselves, nor could we hold ourselves the inferiors in either skill or courage to Lord Wellington's troops. Our common conviction was that it was not we who had lost the war-indeed there was hardly a skirmish or battle in which we had not been left in victorious possession of the field-but that it was lost by a supine and ignorant Ministry seconded by an unpatriotic and malignant Opposition. Nor could our view be readily disputed.
I put all this, perhaps almost too hotly, to Messrs. Wilkinson and Courtney, two enterprising booksellers of Wood Street to whom finally I brought the manuscript of my book. And I asked this question of old Mr. Courtney: 'When is it, sir, that old campaigners speak most earnestly and warmly about the hazards, fatigues, triumphs, and frolics that they have lived through together?' 'It is' (I informed him in the same breath) 'when a new war is in progress and when the regiments whose badges and facings they once wore with pride are again hotly engaged, as now. Can such a subject as the American War be therefore called "a Lazarus," except in the sense that Lazarus was by a miracle raised from the dead and acclaimed by the crowds?'
Mr. Courtney admitted the justice of my observations, and agreed that a great many retired officers could perhaps be found in Ireland and elsewhere to subscribe to a book which gave an account of campaigns in which they had themselves sometime fought.
Young Mr. Wilkinson then undertook to read the book through, which he did; and a few days later proposed to come to an agreement with me, as follows. Mr. Wilkinson should have authority to solicit subscriptions in my name for a work entitled A True and Authentic Journal of Occurrences in the Late American War, in which he would include the more general and striking parts of my story and fat it up with extracts drawn from dependable works of travel and biography. He would excite the compassionate interest of the nobility, clergy, and gentry in me as a worn-out old soldier now surprisingly turned writer, and he would expunge from my work all judgments and incidents not consonant with that humble character. He fully expected an edition of fifteen hundred copies to be taken up; and undertook to pay me five pounds down and sixpence for each copy subscribed, which he represented to be very handsome payment indeed. If matters turned out as he hoped, he would publish the remainder of my writings, a more particular Memoir of His Own Life: by R. Lamb, as a separate work of a highly moral tone; he would not handle this himself but turn it over to a hackney writer, some hedge-parson or other, who could strike the note of contrition that the middling public would heed. For this work I should receive nothing but the glory of being the author of a second book, until after one thousand copies had been sold, when my reward should be at three-pence a copy.
This was a wretched offer and at first I refused it with indignation. But presently I swallowed my pride and signified my acceptance, because of my great want of money and the wretched importunities of the tradesmen who were my creditors, small men almost as impoverished as myself.
Mr. Wilkinson allowed me to assist him in the editing of my book. It was excessively painful for me to sit and watch him run his lead-pencil through its choicest passages with a reiterated groan of 'No, no, Mr. Lamb, this will never do.' This was trifling, that was vulgar, the other would not only cause pain and offence but dry up subscriptions like a styptic. However, I now had somewhat less urgent need of money than before, since my recent application for an out-pension from the Chelsea Hospital had been immediately and unexpectedly granted-through the good offices of General H. Calvert (by whose side I had once fought) with His Royal Highness the Duke of York. I therefore wished to tear up the signed agreement made in an evil hour with these cognoscenti of literature, repay them the five pounds and have my book back. But they held me to my signature and I had no legal remedy against them.
Not once did Mr. Wilkinson respect my plea to allow some particular or other to stand in his version. I therefore soon left him to finish his butcherly work alone; and I confess that I was sick at heart when the True and Authentic Journal was finally presented to me bound in calf, handsomely printed and with hardly a sentence left as I had penned it. That I received my twenty guineas was poor consolation, or that the list of subscribers to the work included such great names as Major-General W. H. Clinton, M.P., the Quartermaster-General of Ireland; Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Asgill, Bt., then commanding the Eastern District; and the Earl of Harrington himself, Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty's Forces in Ireland-it was no longer my book, no longer the truth as I had wished to tell it. The second volume was yet worse, a sad hotch-potch of religious sentiment and irrelevant anecdote; but it was at least gratifying for me to know that if I got nothing from it, the publishers got less than nothing (though they had shared their risks with a Welsh printer named J. Jones of South Great George's Street), for hardly a copy sold.
Much mortified, I prevailed upon an underling of Mr. Wilkinson's (paying him a guinea) to find and restore to me the pencil-scarred manuscript; which Mr. Wilkinson continually pretended, when I applied directly to him, that he could not lay his hand upon. Then I set myself, as a sort of penitential task, to rewrite the original story again, and in a manner that displayed even less regard than before for the susceptibilities of the nobility, clergy, and gentry; at the same time correcting numerous errors of detail that I had committed, or that had been fathered on me by the ingenious but unhistorical Mr. Wilkinson. I trust that I have now done my duty by the jealous nymph Clio, whom the ancients figured in their legends as the Muse of authentic history.
R. LAMB
(December 1814)
The Free School,
White Friars Lane,
Dublin.
The British Regiments of the Line which are here mentioned as serving in America now bear the following names:
4TH FOOT: The King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment
7TH FOOT: The Royal Fusiliers, City of London Regiment
8TH FOOT: The King's Liverpool Regiment
9TH FOOT: The Royal Norfolk Regiment
10TH FOOT: The Lincolnshire Regiment
14TH FOOT: The Prince of Wales' Own West Yorkshire Regiment
20TH FOOT: The Lancashire Fusiliers
21ST FOOT: The Royal Scots Fusiliers
23RD FOOT: The Royal Welch Fusiliers
24TH FOOT: The South Wales Borderers
26TH FOOT: The Cameronians, Scottish Rifles
29TH FOOT: The Worcestershire Regiment
31ST FOOT: The East Surrey Regiment
33RD FOOT: The Duke of Wellington's West Riding Regiment
34TH FOOT: The Border Regiment
43RD FOOT: The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, First Battalion
47TH FOOT: The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment
52ND FOOT: The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, Second Battalion
53RD FOOT: The King's Shropshire Light Infantry
57TH FOOT: The Duke of Cambridge's Own Middlesex Regiment, the Diehards
60TH FOOT: The King's Royal Rifle Corps
62ND FOOT: The Duke of Edinburgh's Wiltshire Regiment
64TH FOOT: The Prince of Wales' North Staffordshire Regiment
65TH FOOT: The York and Lancaster Regiment
Sergeant Lamb's AMERICA
