Now we are in the presence of sublime imagination; now rambling through one of the finest lumber rooms in the world — a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns, and magic glasses full of emerald lights and blue mystery.
Browne may be responsible for one of the finest lumber-rooms in the world, but I have yet to find one lumber in Browne’s own prose — not even in Urne Buriall, where I was certain it was waiting for me; nor any lumber for that matter in Donne’s sermons or meditations, which were important wells of metaphor for Browne. And, though I badly wanted to come across some learned lumber in Orlando, I only spotted (besides the irrelevant “lurching and lumbering traffic”) lumber-substitutes: “plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other movables,” “a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us,” “old iron,” a starling “on the brink of the dust bin,” a mind like a traveler’s suitcase containing “something contraband for which she would have had to pay the full fine,”2 the mind “a meeting-place for dissemblables,” and a modern bookshop in which “the works of every writer she had known or heard of and many more stretched from end to end of the long shelves” or were “piled and tumbled” on tables and chairs. I wasn’t too disappointed, though: Orlando as a whole is Woolf’s lumber-Room of One’s Own: in it she imagines an anthropomorphized anthology of the literary tradition that leads up to her. With touching, almost American naivete, her preface to the novel politely thanks Defoe, Browne, Emily Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater for their help,3 as well as nearer-and-dearers like Roger Fry and Julian Bell. It doesn’t mention the Rev. George Croly (1780–1860) — author of a two-hundred-some page Byronesquerie called The Modern Orlando, published in 1846, which one wants to imagine the young Virginia Stephen reading in her father’s library, and even copying bits of into one of her early commonplace books — a poem I found on Disk 3 of the English Poetry Database.4 In it you will find the story of Isidore, a count who runs out of money and who applies for relief to a pawnbroker of sorts in the Roman ghetto. He and his companion enter the “Hebrew’s ancient Store,” a chamber rather like Woolf’s Elizabethan lumber-room:
The room was piled with all strange kinds of lumber;
………………………
Huge folios, by the world long sent to slumber;
Arms on the walls, and pictures on the ground;
Cracked china; lutes, long guiltless of a sound;
Furred mantles, missals, tarnished antique plate;
………………………
A sepulchre of
things
— dim reliques of the great.
But, speaking of dim relics of the great, the greatest of Orlando’s “favourite heroes” never used the word “lumber.” He came close. In Henry IV, Part II, Shakespeare has Mistress Quickly say that Falstaff is “indited to dinner to the Lubber’s Head in Lumbert Street, to Master Smooth’s the silkman.” Who Master Smooth is, and what is the precise social tone of the “Lubber’s Head,” or “Leopard’s Head,” no glossator will divulge, but financial transactions are not far off, since moments later Mistress Quickly laments that she has loaned so much money to Falstaff that she may be forced to pawn her plate and even her gown.
Shylock’s pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice is probably not an equivoque on lumber, though. Never mind that one of the word’s submeanings, aside from “money loaned,” is, in the words of Webster’s Second, “sometimes, specif., superfluous flesh”—the phrase “pound of flesh” predates Shakespeare in English, and Shakespeare, a punculsive, probably wouldn’t have passed up the chance of making some sort of outright Lombard-lumber-lump-of-lard association if he had seen it.5 The first example in the OED of this sense is from 1806–7, in Beresford’s Miseries of Human Life (“With all my fleshy lumber about me”); Thomas Traherne contributes an apposite seventeenth-century line found in the English Poetry Database:
A Body like a Mountain is but Cumber.
An Endless Body is but idle Lumber.
6
William Trevor’s Reading Turgenev (1991) has another example: “It seemed to her that her own flesh and bones were so much lumber, real but without real interest.” (My wife is the source of this quotation.) Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang has “live lumber,” meaning “soldiers or passengers on board ship … ca. 1780–1910.” But later fleshy meanings seem most often to refer to horses and dogs, not people, as in this instance from the OED:
1891 H. S. C
ONSTABLE
Horses, Sport & War
15 Good thoroughbred horses have also lost what goes by the name of ‘lumber’—such as lumps of flesh and fat … on the top of the neck.
And this from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia:
A fine slashing dog, of good size, possessing plenty of bone without
lumber
, and excellent legs and feet.
Dogs of Great Britain and America, p. 104.
Despite Shakespeare’s disappointingly low keyword turnout, we shouldn’t forget that his folios were themselves esteemed as pawnable lumber. In T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose, the underfed and word-hungry Professor, having misplaced his copy of Du Cange’s Glossary, wonders for a salivary moment whether he should trade in one of his first-folio Shakespeares so he can buy a fishhook and snag some perch in one of the lakes of Malplaquet. Happily, Cook brings a packet of bloaters and the Professor can keep his Shakespeare. At the end of the novel, he receives The Medieval Latin Word-List, a gift that the Lilliputians have financed by “pawning their sprugs” (their gold coins), and he can finally look up the word that has been troubling his thoughts, the ambiguous Tripharium. (Though learned, T. H. White’s book lacks lumber.)7 Isaac D’Israeli, in his essay on the recovery of manuscripts in Curiosities of Literature, tells how a lawyer in the papal court gave Petrarch two books by Cicero on Glory. Petrarch in turn
lent them to a poor aged man of letters, formerly his preceptor. Urged by extreme want, the old man pawned them, and returning home died suddenly without having revealed where he had left them. They have never been recovered.
“Usurers,” D’Israeli recounts, considered manuscripts
as precious objects for pawn. A student of Pavia, who was reduced, raised a new fortune by leaving in pawn a manuscript of a body of law; and a grammarian, who was ruined by a fire, rebuilt his house with two small volumes of Cicero.
Medieval monastic libraries frequently demanded the deposit of a pledge before they loaned out books, and booksellers, or stationers, in university towns “had transcripts made, bought, sold and hired out books and received them in pawn.”8So Pope’s unmannerly crack about Theobald’s plagiarizable library, “Where yet unpawn’d, much learned lumber lay,” had an important literal meaning, too: Pope made a small fortune from his Homeric translations (jobbing out pieces of The Odyssey to junior poets and selling it all under his name), but Lewis Theobald was poor, clerkish, “supper-less” (so Pope cruelly calls him in The Dunciad), and in a pinch he would have relied on the possibility of pledging some of his sizable book collection as his bond. As late as 1731 Theobald was in serious financial distress: he wrote Warburton (who would later edit Pope) that “at present, when I should set down with a Mind & Head at ease & dis-embarrass’d, the Severity of a rich Creditor (& therefore the more unmercifull) has strip’d me so bare, that I never was acquainted with such Wants, since I knew the Use of Money.”9