ABSTRACT
Charles Lamb occasionally introduces a sketch into some of his writings; the main purpose of ‘South Sea House’ and ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ is to limn a scene in the memory. Eighteenth-century periodical writers, too, had produced sketch-like pieces when depicting fictitious personages without involving them in any chain of substantial events. An elaborated anecdote or series of anecdotes, the yarn is narrated in colloquial and the casual tones appropriate to a raconteur working in oral tradition. The word derives from sailors’ slang in which rope-making became a metaphor for story-spinning, and ‘yarn’ still usually implies the atmosphere of the foc’s’le. In addition to the yarn and the sketch, other narrative types are involved too. The strange figure of Cousin Lymon gives the story a fairy-tale dimension: he is like some Rumpelstiltskin in physical appearance, he has an uncanny hypnotic power over the townsfolk, and he makes a magical leap to end the fight.
