Logan Pearsall Smith, in an essay on the sermons of John Donne, asserts that the seventeenth-century divines, “with all the lumber they inherited from the past, inherited much also that gives an enduring splendour to their works.” Michael Sadleir, in his The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane Austen (1927), writes: “There are probably no items in the lumber-rooms of forgotten literature more difficult to trace than the minor novels of the late eighteenth century.” One of those minor novels was Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal (1760–65), in which a bookseller named Mr. Vellum stores surplus copies of books by a dead self-published author for seven years in the “lumber garret” so that he can pass them off as new creations. Laurence Sterne mentions “the lumber-rooms of learning” in Book IV of Tristram Shandy (1761).
Goethe revered Sterne, and he might have read Chrysal (which was translated into German in 1775); and Goethe’s learned yearner, Faust, calls the spirit of the past, as it is reflected in the minds who study it, a Kehrichtfaβ and a Rumpelkammer, in a line that has been variously Englished as a “mouldy dustbin, or a lumber attic” (Philip Wayne), “a junk heap,/A lumber room” (Randall Jarrell), “Mere scraps of odds and ends, old crazy lumber, / In dust-bins only fit to rot and slumber” (Theodore Martin, revised by W. H. Bruford), “A very lumber-room, a rubbish-hole” (Anna Swanwick), “A heap of rubbish, and a lumber room” (John Stuart Blackie), “A rubbish-bin, a lumber-garret” (George Madison Priest), “A trash bin and a lumber-garret” (Stuart Atkins), “An offal-barrel and a lumber-garret” (Bayard Taylor), “a trash barrel and a junk room” (Bayard Quincy Morgan), “A lumber-room and a rubbish heap” (Louis MacNeice and E. L. Stahl), and “A mass of things confusedly heaped together;/A lumber-room of dusty documents” (John Anster). Lord Francis Leveson Gower’s early translation (John Murray, 1823) may be, for this particular passage, the best:
Read but a paragraph, and you shall find
The litter and the lumber of the mind.
1
Master Humphrey has lumber dreams in the first chapter of Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop:
But all that night, waking or in my sleep, the same thoughts recurred and the same images retained possession of my brain. I had ever before me the old dark murky rooms — the gaunt suits of mail with their ghostly silent air — the faces all awry, grinning from wood and stone — the dust and rust, the worm that lives in wood — and alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay, and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber, smiling through her light and sunny dreams.
Hazlitt does not refer to the lumber of scholarship where you would expect him to, in his Montaignesque “On the Ignorance of the Learned,” but he does so, affectionately, in “On Pedantry,” an essay that also contains his helpful circular definition of learning as “the knowledge of that which is not generally known.” Of a character named Keith in South Wind, Norman Douglas writes, “He had an encyclopaedic turn of mind; his head, as somebody once remarked, was a lumber-room of useless information.”
Norman Douglas’s “somebody” was probably Lord Chesterfield, who in 1748 advised his son that “Many great readers load their memories without exercising their judgments, and make lumber-rooms of their heads, instead of furnishing them usefully.” Sir Thomas Browne, though he was one of the greatest of readers, and of indexers, claimed to have avoided this pitfalclass="underline" “I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasure, of knowledge,” he writes, in Religio Medici (1642), finding no use here for the word “lumber,”2 but getting some mileage instead out of the Greek root of thesaurus—“treasure-house”—a word associated with dictionaries long before Roget,3 and employed in passing in an eighteenth-century Latin oration written by Johann Mencke (and edited by a collateral descendant, H. L. Mencken) called The Charlatanry of the Learned:
The bookshops are full of Thesauruses of Latin Antiquities which, when examined, turned out to be far less treasuries than fuel for the fire.
Mencken himself, in his autobiographical “Larval Stage of a Bookworm,” said that
At eight or nine, I suppose, intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
This is Mencken’s elegantly spare version of John Locke’s dark room, from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which is illuminated by shafts of external and internal sensation:
These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this
dark room
For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without.… [Locke’s italics.]
And Locke’s unlit closet may be an irreligious revision of the room of despair, “a very dark room, where there sat a man in an iron cage,” in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).4 Practicing architects had tired, by the 1890s, of dark seventeenth-century rooms of the soul, and had developed as a result an antipathy to the closet. Russell Sturgis, in an article on “The Equipment of the Modern City House,” appearing in Harper’s Magazine in April 1899, mentions one architect who wanted to rid domestic life of closets altogether, arguing that they were
extremely wasteful of space, and in every way to be shunned; that they were places where old lumber was stored and forgotten, dust-catchers, nests for vermin, fire-traps.
But one has to store things somewhere; and Sherlock Holmes in 1887 compared the brain in its untutored state to a “little empty attic,” which should be properly stocked:
A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.
(A Study in Scarlet.
)
Holmes warns Watson that “it is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.” Montaigne, however, disagrees: when considering the question whether (in Florio’s translation, “Of Pedantisme”) “a mans owne wit, force, droope, and as it were diminish it selfe, to make roome for others,” he at first appears to hold that it does, and then he decides that, no, on the contrary, “our mind stretcheth the more by how much more it is replenished.”
These preliminary examples and semirelevant corollaries, having stretched the elastic walls of the preceding paragraphs nearly to the point of tissue damage, must now draw back to reveal, in a kind of establishing quotational shot, the one really famous piece of lumber we have. It was published in 1711, the work of the twenty-three-year-old Alexander Pope. (Youth is often a time of lumber: “An ever increasing volume of dimensional lumber is juvenile wood,” as Timothy D. Larson pointed out in 1992, in his “The Mechano-Sorptive Response of Juvenile Wood to Hygrothermal Gradients,” indexed in the Dissertation Abstracts CD-ROM.5) Pope’s An Essay on Criticism describes a bad critic:
The Bookful Blockhead, ignorantly read