A short life of the author
Charles Lamb was the most lovable writer in the English language — a man whose personal warmth, whose gentle humour, whose devotion to his friends, and whose exquisite prose style made him the favourite companion of the greatest writers of the Romantic age: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and De Quincey all loved him, and their letters and memoirs paint a portrait of a man of extraordinary kindness, courage, and literary grace who bore a burden of private suffering — the lifelong care of his sister Mary, who had killed their mother in a fit of madness — with a quiet heroism that adds immeasurably to the beauty of the essays in which he transformed the materials of his modest, difficult life into literature of enduring charm.
The Inner Temple
Charles Lamb was born in 1775 in the Inner Temple, London, where his father was clerk to a bencher. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital, the famous “Bluecoat School,” where his schoolmate was Samuel Taylor Coleridge — a friendship that lasted until Lamb’s death and that was one of the most important literary friendships of the Romantic period. He spent a brief period at the South Sea House (which provided the setting for his first Elia essay) and then entered the East India House, the London headquarters of the East India Company, where he worked as a clerk for thirty-three years (1792–1825).
In 1796, Mary Lamb, in a fit of insanity, stabbed their mother to death with a carving knife and wounded their father. Charles, who was twenty-one, assumed legal responsibility for Mary’s care rather than allow her to be permanently institutionalised. For the rest of his life, he cared for Mary during her periods of sanity — they were devoted companions who wrote, read, and entertained together — and accompanied her to the asylum during her recurring episodes of madness. This sacrifice defined Lamb’s life and gave his essays their characteristic combination of gaiety and sadness.
The Essays of Elia
The Essays of Elia appeared in the London Magazine between 1820 and 1825, collected as Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833). Written under the pseudonym “Elia” (the name of an Italian clerk Lamb had known at the South Sea House), they are the finest familiar essays in English after Montaigne — personal, digressive, humorous, melancholy, and written in a prose style that combines the cadences of the seventeenth-century essayists (Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton) with a warmth and directness entirely Lamb’s own.
The subjects are apparently trivial — “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” “Dream-Children,” “Old China,” “The Superannuated Man,” “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist” — but the essays transform these small subjects into meditations on memory, loss, friendship, and the pleasures of ordinary life that are among the most moving things in English prose. “Dream-Children,” in which Lamb imagines telling his children (he had none) about their grandmother and their dead uncle, is one of the saddest and most beautiful essays in the language.
Tales from Shakespeare
Tales from Shakespeare (1807), written with Mary Lamb, was their most popular work — prose retellings of twenty of Shakespeare’s plays for young readers, with Charles writing the tragedies and Mary the comedies. The book was an immediate success and remained the standard introduction to Shakespeare for English-speaking children for over a century. It has never gone out of print.
The Letters
Lamb’s letters — to Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Manning, and others — are among the finest in the English language, full of wit, tenderness, puns (he was an incurable punster), and the same conversational warmth that characterises the essays. They provide the fullest portrait of Lamb’s personality and of the literary circle in which he moved.
The Critic
Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare (1808) was Lamb’s most important critical work — an anthology with commentary that rescued the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists (Webster, Tourneur, Heywood, Middleton) from neglect and inaugurated the modern appreciation of the drama of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.
Collecting Lamb
Tales from Shakespeare (Godwin, 1807, 2 volumes) in first edition is the primary target and a major Romantic-period children’s book. Essays of Elia (Taylor and Hessey, 1823) is the essay classic. The Last Essays of Elia (Moxon, 1833) is the companion volume. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (Longman, 1808) is the critical work. Lamb’s letters, when they appear on the market, are valuable. The standard modern edition is the Lucas edition (Methuen, 1903–1905, 7 volumes).