Volume 30, Number 10 · June 16, 1983
The Wise and Gentle Lamb
By John Gross
Young Charles Lamb 1775-1802
by Winifred F. Courtney
New York University Press, 411 pp., $30.00
A Portrait of Charles Lamb
by David Cecil
Constable (London), 192 pp., £9.95
Companion to Charles Lamb: A Guide to People and Places 1750-1847
by Claude A. Prance
Mansell (distributed by H.W. Wilson Co.), 392 pp., $30.00
In one of Stephen Potter's manuals of Lifemanship there are some useful hints on the art of reviewing ('Newstatesmanship,' in those days), notable among them the Hope-Tipping gambit. Hope-Tipping's formula for getting on top of the books he reviewed was simple but effective: he would find out the quality for which the author in question was most renowned, and then blame him for not having enough of it. He first created a stir in 1930 by complaining about the neglect of 'the male and female element in life' in the work of D.H. Lawrence, but this was a relatively crude beginning, and subsequently he perfected his technique. One of his finest strokes was a reference in a review to 'the almost open sadism of Charles Lamb.'
Review, 5010 words
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