Poor Relations Essay

[Latarsha Dorrance]

CharlesLamb's essay "Poor Relations" delves into the subject of impoverished relatives, a common occurrence in early 19th century England due to societal norms that favored wealth concentration in a few hands. The essay humorously yet poignantly describes the awkwardness and embarrassment that arise when these poor relations, who are often ignored or viewed as inconveniences, visit their wealthier family members. Lamb's essay is significant for its honest discussion of an uncomfortable topic, highlighting the stark societal and economic disparities of the time.

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As the title of the essay indicates, the subject is poor relations, by whichCharles Lamb means relatives with very little money. They were common in early19th century England because society favored the accumulation of wealth into afew hands. For example, the laws of primogeniture ensured that great estateswere inherited in their entirety by the eldest son, rather than divided amongthe children. This kept the estates intact and maintained the family prestige.Custom, as Samuel Richardson had outlined a half century earlierin Sir Charles Grandison, also tended to favor leaving evendiscretionary income to one heir, something Richardson deplored as cruel toother relatives. Jane Austen's novels, close to Lamb's period, also dealt withthe issue: the plots of both Sense andSensibility and Pride and Prejudice are put into motionby the real or threatened loss of an estate to a male heir.

What kept wealth concentrated in a few hands (the good fortune of eldestsons) tended to leave other relatives in more precarious situations that couldlead to poverty, especially given the lack of a social safety net in thatperiod. Then, as now, having the poor relation show up for dinner could beembarrassing (if you have seen the movie National Lampoon Vacation,you will remember the comic problems that arise when poor, uneducated relationsshow up), and this becomes the focus of the Lamb essay, though more poignantlythan in National Lampoon: the poor relative who arrives at the housefor a meal.

In the first paragraph, Lamb, in the guise of his narrator, Elia, lists someof the common thoughts or cliches about a poor relation, none of themflattering. A poor relation is "irrelevant" or unimportant, "impertinent" inwriting to you, in other words, a person you don't want to hear from, a drainon your finances, an embarrassment, something that delights your enemies,inconvenient, annoying, a blot on your life. These are blunt words, and whilethere is a comic intent in this piling up of cliche upon cliche to the point ofexaggeration, at the same time, Lamb/Elia doesn't fall into silly pieties orthe hypocrisy of pretending a poor relation is wholly welcome.

In the second paragraph, Elia describes the arrival of the male poorrelation, including the mutual embarrassment: you, the host, really don't wantto see him and he is embarrassed by his poverty, but he needs a free meal. (Weremember that the problem of food scarcity isn't really solved, even in richcountries, until after World War II, well beyond this time period.) The poorrelation never seems to arrive on the days when you don't have other company.He, of course, shows up at dinnertime, then has to be persuaded to eat the foodhe is hungry for, even if there is none too much ("the turbot ... small"). Lamblays out the whole embarrassing scene:

His manners (how he acts) are also excruciating: he is both too "familiar,"in other words, he acts too much like a close friend, and at the same time, heis too "diffident" or shy, too abject and humble. The servants don't know howto treat him and the other guests wonder about him, though his unfortunateknack of being both overly friendly and overly abject betray him as the poorrelation. He brings up old family stories at the wrong moment (is"unseasonable") and his conversation and compliments irritate (they are a"trouble" and "perverse"): his presence, in a word, is awkward, and whenhe's gone, you whisk his chair into a corner and breathe a sigh of relief. He'sthat person who doesn't fit in but who you can't not have over.

Elia then moves to the female poor relation. He finds poor females worsethan poor males because they have an even more difficult time hiding theirstatus and can't be dismissed easily as simply eccentric:

Her clothes are between those of gentlewoman and a beggar, presumablymeaning once well made, stylish clothes of good fabric now worn, outdated andpatched. But even worse are her manners. She is too humble, too self-aware ofbeing a poor relation, too abject, and people hold her in contempt: forinstance, the governess, below her rank, corrects her when she calls the pianoa harpsichord (a humbler, more old-fashioned instrument).

In the next paragraph, Lamb first mentions a Richard Amlet, a poor gamester(or gambler) in a play called "The Confederacy" by Sir John Vanburgh, thenmoves to a friend, who was the son of a house painter. This man went to Oxfordand loved the scholarly life, but was pulled out of it to take up his father'strade, for financial reasons. The difference between "gown and town" oracademics and life in a shop, was too great for this young man, who insteadjoined the army and was killed in Portugal.

Elia goes on to say in the next paragraph that while he started off hisessay half comically, the subject of poor relations is also painful and tragic.He mentions his own childhood and a poor relation, an old gentleman, who wouldcome to dinner every Saturday and one day was offended when Elia's aunt pusheda second helping of food on him saying, Do take another slice, Mr. Billet, foryou do not get pudding every day." He gets revenge later on her calling out hispoverty by labeling her superannuated, which means obsolete or outdated. ButElia allows the poor relation to land on a note of dignity, for this elderlyman dies poor, but with five pounds to his name: "enough to bury him." The veryending, however, is ambiguous, possibly ironic: he had "never been obliged toany man for a six-pence" (if you don't count the weekly meals).

I've been reading Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which, as far as I can tell, is mainly about the varieties of servitude that early 19th century life had to offer women in England. That is to say it's about property, which is maybe why it's named after an estate and not a person. But it's also about rituals of attention, and the implications of servitude contained within them.

The main character, Fanny Price, is a poor relation more or less purchased by her rich relatives, the Bertrams. Brought to the Bertrams' mansion as a child, she is then subject to serial humiliations meant to remind her of her social place while she is made over into an uncompensated servant who performs endless amounts of emotional labor (as well as running around and fetching things for her indolent aunt) without having the wherewithal to complain. In fact, she more often than not professes gratitude for her uprooted condition (rejected by her immediate family and, by and large, demeaned by her adoptive one); she has been carefully programmed to defeat the "servant problem" that even then plagued the country -- no need to wait until Downton Abbey times a century later. (When Fanny returns to her parents' house as an adult, her mother can talk of virtually nothing else but her inadequate servants; that even the "poor relations" had domestic servants is a reminder of how pervasive it was.)

But there are cracks beneath the surface of this convenient arrangement. Though extremely introverted and reflexively self-effacing, Fanny is also a judgmental prig (like most of Austen's heroines, though Lionel Trilling in his essay on the novel singles her out as being impossible to like) sanctimoniously obsessed with other people's expressions of proper piety, though we are given to believe that her love for her cousin Edmund, clergyman-to-be, has led her to adopt his reproving discernment. When she is not being bullied by her aunts, she spends her time silently monitoring her other cousins and their friends for their perceived lapses and eagerly sharing her contempt with Edmund to try to win his approval.

Basically Fanny is a seething cauldron of resentment, but because she is also beautiful, she is expected to be obedient and obliging when men ogle her. Edmund tells her this in unambiguous terms after her rich uncle returns from his Caribbean plantation.

Mansfield Park left me with the impression that Austen dislikes not merely the "claims of conscious beauty" -- fine ladies parading their distinction around -- but the whole social process of people paying attention to other people, especially non-family members. It's a coarseness imposed on women by marriage markets, but it seems to run deeper, into a condemnation of urbanity as a whole. (Trilling sets up a country vs. city interpretation in his essay, though he is a bit obtuse about the related class issues.) There is this weird contempt for the whole idea of making a public show of your attention grants; any time attention is deliberately paid, it's represented as some sort of scheme. (Austen hated social media before there was such a thing.) Of course, that is the upshot of the long section of the book about the young people's plan to put on a play; calling attention to yourself by going on a stage is wrong, even when you are playing a role, because people will see through that to your hidden desires, or worse, will see that you are nothing but a series of roles and have no soul, no core. If you don't seek attention, no one can prove your phoniness to you, so you remain genuine and pure.

This global distrust of attention-seeking possibly explains the bizarre section of the book where Henry Crawford, a wealthy bachelor, announces his intention to make Fanny fall in love with him for sport. It's one of the few sections where we are not limited to Fanny's consciousness, which makes it read as though it is her bizarre fantasy of what sort of cruel games a gregarious person like Crawford would enjoy playing. But when he is captured by his own game and falls in love with her in earnest, Fanny is expected to return his feelings automatically because he can more or less buy and sell the likes of her. Interestingly, with respect to the 18th century attitude toward absorption I wrote about in this previous post, he falls for her when he sees how engrossed she becomes in her brother when he visits:

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