According to Lamb’s Key the name Alice W——­n was “feigned.”  If by Alice W——­n Lamb, as has been suggested, means Ann Simmons, of Blenheims, near Blakesware, he was romancing when he said that he had courted her for seven long years, although the same statement is made in the essay on “New Year’s Eve.”  We know that in 1796 he abandoned all ideas of marriage.  Writing to Coleridge in November of that year, in reference to his love sonnets, he says:  “It is a passion of which I retain nothing....  Thank God, the folly has left me for ever.  Not even a review of my love verses renews one wayward wish in me.”  This was 1796.  Therefore, as he was born in 1775, he must have begun the wooing of Alice W——­n when he was fourteen in order to complete the seven long years of courtship.  My own feeling, as I have stated in the notes to the love sonnets in Vol.  IV., is that Lamb was never a very serious wooer, and that Alice W——­n was more an abstraction around which now and then to group tender imaginings of what might have been than any tangible figure.

A proof that Ann Simmons and Alice W——­n are one has been found in the circumstance that Miss Simmons did marry a Mr. Bartrum, or Bartram, mentioned by Lamb in this essay as being the father of Alice’s real children.  Bartrum was a pawnbroker in Princes Street, Coventry Street.  Mr. W.C.  Hazlitt says that Hazlitt had seen Lamb wandering up and down before the shop trying to get a glimpse of his old friend.

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Page 118.  DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS.

London Magazine, March, 1822.

The germ of this essay will be found in a letter to Barron Field, to whom the essay is addressed, of August 31, 1817.  Barron Field was a son of Henry Field, apothecary to Christ’s Hospital.  His brother, Francis John Field, through whom Lamb probably came to know Barron, was a clerk in the India House.

Barron Field was associated with Lamb on Leigh Hunt’s Reflector in 1810-1812.  He also was dramatic critic for The Times for a while.  In 1816 he was appointed judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, where he remained until 1824.  For other information see the note, in Vol.  I., to his First-Fruits of Australian Poetry, reviewed by Lamb.  In the same number of the London Magazine which included the present essay was Field’s account of his outward voyage to New South Wales.

Page 119, line 24. Our mutual friend P. Not identifiable:  probably no one in particular.  The Bench would be the King’s Bench Prison.  A little later one of Lamb’s friends, William Hone, was confined there for three years.

Page 121, line 8. The late Lord C. This was Thomas Pitt, second Baron Camelford (1775-1804), who after a quarrelsome life, first in the navy and afterwards as a man about town, was killed in a duel at Kensington, just where Melbury Road now is.  The spot chosen by him for his grave was on the borders of the Lake of Lampierre, near three trees; but there is a doubt if his body ever rested there, for it lay for years in the crypt of St. Anne’s, Soho.  Its ultimate fate was the subject of a story by Charles Reade.