Charles Lamb, Roast Pork, and Willow Crockery

Abstract

Charles Lamb’s work communicates both his frustrated wish to study classics and the Orientalist atmosphere of his employment at East India House. ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’ envisions the discovery of cooking in China but—although it has correspondences with Thomas Manning’s travels—the source is Porphyry’s treatise on vegetarianism. ‘Old China’ is an ekphrastic treatment of an imaginary crockery set in the chinoiserie aesthetic, but the primary influence is Keats’s ‘Grecian Urn’. Lamb’s and Joanna Baillie’s responses to chinoiserie chart fluctuations in British opinion on China, and interrogate whether crockery was a gendered interest. Via Mark Lemon, Lamb’s writing on China has had lasting influence on narratives that arose about the Willow pattern popularized by Wedgwood and Spode. The Willow pattern imitated Chinese aesthetics, but the Willow narrative is Ovidian rather than Chinese.