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Unit 8: Charles Lamb-A Bachelors Complaint on the Behaviour of Married ...

Innumerable are the ways which they take to insult and worm you out of their husband’s confidence. Notes
Laughing at all you say with a kind of wonder, as if you were a queer kind of fellow that said
good things, but an oddity, is one of the ways — they have a particular kind of stare for the
purpose — till at last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over
some excrescences of understanding and manner for the sake of a general vein of observation (not
quite vulgar) which he perceived in you, begins to suspect whether you are not altogether a
humorist, — a fellow well enough to have consorted with in his bachelor days, but not quite so
proper to be introduced to ladies. This may be called the staring way; and is that which has
oftenest been put in practice against me.
Then there is the exaggerating way, or the way of irony: that is, where they find you an object of
especial regard with their husband, who is not so easily to be shaken from the lasting attachment
founded on esteem which he has conceived towards you; by never-qualified exaggerations to cry
up all that you say or do, till the good man, who understands well enough that it is all done in
compliment to him, grows weary of the debt of gratitude which is due to so much candor, and by
relaxing a little on his part, and taking down a peg or two in his enthusiasm, sinks at length to that
kindly level of moderate esteem, — that “decent affection and complacent kindness” towards you,
where she herself can join in sympathy with him without much stretch and violence to her sincerity.
Another way (for the ways they have to accomplish so desirable a purpose are infinite) is, with a
kind of innocent simplicity, continually to mistake what it was which first made their husband
fond of you. If an esteem for something excellent in your moral character was that which riveted
the chain which she is to break, upon any imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your
conversation, she will cry, “I thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr. — as a great wit.”
If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed charm in your conversation that he first grew to
like you, and was content for this to overlook some trifling irregularities in your moral deportment,
upon the first notice of any of these she as readily exclaims, “This, my dear, is your good Mr. —
—.” One good lady whom I took the liberty of expostulating with for not showing me quite so
much respect as I thought due to her husband’s old friend, had the candour to confess to me that
she had often heard Mr. — speak of me before marriage, and that she had conceived a great desire
to be acquainted with me, but that the sight of me had very much disappointed her expectations;
for from her husband’s representations of me, she had formed a notion that she was to see a fine,
tall, officer-like looking man (I use her very words); the very reverse of which proved to be the
truth. This was candid; and I had the civility not to ask her in return, how she came to pitch upon
a standard of personal accomplishments for her husband’s friends which differed so much from
his own; for my friend’s dimensions as near as possible approximate to mine; he standing five feet
five in his shoes, in which I have the advantage of him by about half an inch; and he no more than
myself exhibiting any indications of a martial character in his air or countenance.
These are some of the mortifications which I have encountered in the absurd attempt to visit at
their houses. To enumerate them all would be a vain endeavour: I shall therefore just glance at the
very common impropriety of which married ladies are guilty, of treating us as if we were their
husbands, and vice versa —I mean, when they use us with familiarity, and their husbands with
ceremony. Testacea, for instance, kept me the other night two or three hours beyond my usual
time of supping, while she was fretting because Mr. — did not come home, till the oysters were all
spoiled, rather than she would he guilty of the impoliteness of touching one in his absence. This
was reversing the point of good manners: for ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy
feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a
fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavors to make up by superior attentions in little
points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. Had Testacea kept
the oysters back for me, and withstood her husband’s importunities to go to supper, she would
have acted according to the strict rules of propriety. I know no ceremony that ladies are bound to
observe to their husbands, beyond the point of a modest behaviour and decorum: therefore I must

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