Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb (February 10, 1775 –- December 27, 1834) was an English poet, fiction writer, literary critic, and essayist of the Romantic era. A close contemporary and personal friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb was considered a critical member of the Lake Poets, but unlike with Wordsworth and Coleridge his poetry never achieved lasting fame. Eventually, Lamb redirected his energies away from verse to prose, and in doing so he became one of the most valuable and enduring essayists of the Romantic period.

Lamb, while a minor poet of the Romantic period, is one of its most invaluable authors. His essays read like the finest journalism, and provide readers with a panoramic view of the life and literary currents of one of the most dramatic periods in English literary history.

Youth and schooling


Lamb was born in London, the son of Elizabeth Field and John Lamb. Lamb was the youngest child, with an 11 year older sister Mary, an even older brother John, and 4 other siblings who did not survive their infancy. John Lamb (father), who was a lawyer's clerk, spent most of his professional life as the assistant and servant to a barrister by the name of Samuel Salt who lived in the Inner Temple in London. It was there in the Inner Temple in Crown Office Row that Charles Lamb was born and spent his youth. Lamb created a portrait of his father in his "Elia on the Old Benchers" under the name Lovel. Lamb's older brother was too much his senior to be a youthful companion to the boy but his sister Mary, being born eleven years before him, was probably his closest playmate. Lamb was also cared for by his paternal aunt Hetty, who seems to have had a particular fondness for him. A number of writings by both Charles and Mary suggest that the conflict between Aunt Hetty and her sister-in-law created a certain degree of tension in the Lamb household. However, Charles speaks fondly of her and her presence in the house seems to have brought a great deal of comfort to him.

Some of Lamb's fondest childhood memories were of time spent with Mrs. Field, his maternal grandmother, who was for many years a servant to the Plummer family, who owned a large country house called Blakesware, near Widford, Hertfordshire. After the death of Mrs. Plummer, Lamb's grandmother was in sole charge of the large home and, as Mr. Plummer was often absent, Charles had free rein of the place during his visits. A picture of these visits can be glimpsed in the Elia essay Blakesmoor in H—shire.

"'Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had magic in it. The tapestried bed-rooms – tapestry so much better than painting – not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots – at which childhood ever and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally – all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions.'"

Little is known about Charles's life before the age of seven. We know that Mary taught him to read at a very early age and he read voraciously. It is believed that he suffered from smallpox during his early years which forced him into a long period of convalescence. After this period of recovery Lamb began to take lessons from Mrs. Reynolds, a woman who lived in the Temple and is believed to have been the former wife of a lawyer. Mrs. Reynolds must have been a sympathetic schoolmistress because Lamb maintained a relationship with her throughout his life and she is known to have attended dinner parties held by Mary and Charles in the 1820s. E.V. Lucas suggests that sometime in 1781 Charles left Mrs. Reynolds and began to study at the Academy of William Bird.

His time with William Bird did not last long, however, because by October 1782 Lamb was enrolled in Christ's Hospital, a charity boarding school chartered by King Edward VI in 1552. Christ's Hospital was a traditional English boarding school; bleak and full of violence. The headmaster, Mr. Boyer, has become famous for his teaching in Latin and Greek, but also for his brutality. A thorough record of Christ's Hospital in Several essays by Lamb as well as the Autobiography of Leigh Hunt and the Biographia Literaria of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom Charles developed a friendship that would last for their entire lives. Despite the brutality Lamb got along well at Christ's Hospital, due in part, perhaps, to the fact that his home was not far distant thus enabling him, unlike many other boys, to return often to the safety of home. Years later, in his essay "Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," Lamb described these events, speaking of himself in the third person as "L."

"I remember L. at school; and can well recollect that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and other of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived in town, and were near at hand; and he had the privilege of going to see them, almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction, which was denied to us."

Christ's Hospital was a typical English boarding school and many students later wrote of the terrible violence they suffered there. The upper master of the school from 1778 to 1799 was Reverend James Boyer, a man renowned for his unpredictable and capricious temper. In one famous story Boyer was said to have knocked one of Leigh Hunt's teeth out by throwing a copy of Homer at him from across the room. Lamb seemed to have escaped much of this brutality, in part because of his amiable personality and in part because Samuel Salt, his father's employer and Lamb's sponsor at the school was one of the institute's Governors.

Charles Lamb suffered from a stutter and this "an inconquerable impediment" in his speech deprived him of Grecian status at Christ's Hospital and thus disqualifying him for a clerical career. While Coleridge and other scholarly boys were able to go on to Cambridge, Lamb left school at fourteen and was forced to find a more prosaic career. For a short time he worked in the office of Joseph Paice, a London merchant and then, for 23 weeks, until 8 February 1792, held a small post in the Examiner's Office of the South Sea House. Its subsequent downfall in a pyramid scheme after Lamb left would be contrasted to the company's prosperity in the first Elia essay. On 5 April 1792 he went to work in the Accountant's Office for British East India Company, the death of his father's employer having ruined the family's fortunes.Charles would continue to work there for 25 years, until his retirement with pension.

In 1792 while tending to his grandmother, Mary Field, in Hertfordshire, Charles Lamb fell in love with a young woman named Ann Simmons. Although no epistolary record exists of the relationship between the two, Lamb seems to have spent years wooing Miss Simmons. The record of the love exists in several accounts of Lamb's writing. Rosamund Gray is a story of a young man named Allen Clare who loves Rosamund Gray but their relationship comes to nothing because of the sudden death of Miss Gray. Miss Simmons also appears in several Elia essays under the name "Alice M." The essays "Dream Children," "New Year's Eve," and several others, speak of the many years that Lamb spent pursuing his love that ultimately failed. Miss Simmons eventually went on to marry a silversmith by the name of Bartram and Lamb called the failure of the affair his 'great disappointment.'

Family tragedy
Charles and his sister Mary both suffered periods of mental illness. Charles spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital during 1795. He was, however, already making his name as a poet.

On 22 September 1796, a terrible event occurred: Mary, "worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother at night," was seized with acute mania and stabbed her mother to the heart with a table knife.

Although there was no legal status of 'insanity' at the time, a jury returned a verdict of 'Lunacy' and therefore freed her from guilt of willful murder. With the help of friends Lamb succeeded in obtaining his sister's release from what would otherwise have been lifelong imprisonment, on the condition that he take personal responsibility for her safekeeping. Lamb used a large part of his relatively meagre income to keep his beloved sister in a private 'madhouse' in Islington called Fisher House.

The 1799 death of John Lamb was something of a relief to Charles because his father had been mentally incapacitated for a number of years since suffering a stroke. The death of his father also meant that Mary could come to live again with him in Pentonville, and in 1800 they set up a shared home at Mitre Court Buildings in the Temple, where they lived until 1809.

Literary life


Despite Lamb's bouts of melancholia and alcoholism, both he and his sister enjoyed an active and rich social life. Their London quarters became a kind of weekly salon for many of the most outstanding theatrical and literary figures of the day. Charles Lamb, having been to school with Samuel Coleridge, counted Coleridge as perhaps his closest, and certainly his oldest, friend. On his deathbed, Coleridge had a mourning ring sent to Lamb and his sister. Fortuitously, Lamb's first publication was in 1796, when four sonnets by "Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House" appeared in Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects. In 1797 he contributed additional blank verse to the second edition, and met the Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, on his short summer holiday with Coleridge at Nether Stowey, thereby also striking up a lifelong friendship with William. In London, Lamb became familiar with a group of young writers who favoured political reform, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt.

Lamb continued to clerk for the East India Company and doubled as a writer in various genres, his tragedy, John Woodvil, being published in 1802. His farce,  Mr H, was performed at Drury Lane in 1807, where it was roundly booed. In the same year, Tales from Shakespeare (Charles handled the tragedies; his sister Mary, the comedies) was published, and became a best seller for William Godwin's "Children's Library."

In 1819, at age 44, Lamb, who, because of family commitments, had never married, fell in love with an actress, Fanny Kelly, of Covent Garden, and proposed marriage. She refused him, and he died a bachelor.

In 1820 Lamb began contributing essays to the London Magazine under the pen name of "Elia". 'His collected London Magazine essays, under the title Essays of Elia, were published in 1823. A second collection, Last Essays of Elia, was published roughly ten years later, shortly before Lamb's death.

Later life
From 1833 till their deaths Charles and Mary Lamb lived at Bay Cottage, Church Street, Edmonton north of London (now part of the London Borough of Enfield.

Charles Lamb died on 27 December 1834 (just a few months after Coleridge), of a streptococcal infection, erysipelas, contracted from a minor graze on his face sustained after slipping in the street. He was 59.

Lamb is buried in All Saints' Churchyard, Edmonton. His sister, who was ten years his senior, survived him for more than a dozen years. She is buried beside him.

Writing
Lamb's first publication was the inclusion of four sonnets in Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects, published in 1796 by Joseph Cottle. The sonnets were significantly influenced by the poems of Burns and the sonnets of William Bowles, a largely forgotten poet of the late 18th century. Lamb's poems garnered little attention and are seldom read today. As he himself came to realize, he was a much more talented prose stylist than poet. Indeed, one of the most celebrated poets of the day—William Wordsworth—wrote to John Scott as early as 1815 that Lamb "writes prose exquisitely"—and this was five years before Lamb began The Essays of Elia for which he is now most famous.

Notwithstanding, Lamb's contributions to Coleridge's second edition of the Poems on Various Subjects showed significant growth as a poet. These poems included The Tomb of Douglas and A Vision of Repentance. Because of a temporary fall-out with Coleridge, Lamb's poems were to be excluded in the third edition of the Poems. As it turned out, a third edition never emerged. Instead, Coleridge's next publication was the monumentally influential Lyrical Ballads co-published with Wordsworth. Lamb, on the other hand, published a book entitled Blank Verse with Charles Lloyd, the mentally unstable son of the founder of Lloyd's Bank. Lamb's most famous poem was written at this time and entitled The Old Familiar Faces. Like most of Lamb's poems, it is unabashedly sentimental, and perhaps for this reason it is still remembered and widely read today, being often included in anthologies of British and Romantic period poetry. Of particular interest to Lambarians is the opening verse of the original version of The Old Familiar Faces, which is concerned with Lamb's mother, who Mary Lamb killed. It was a verse that Lamb chose to remove from the edition of his Collected Work published in 1818:

I had a mother, but she died, and left me,

Died prematurely in a day of horrors -

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

In the final years of the 18th century, Lamb began to work on prose, first in a novella entitled Rosamund Gray, which tells the story of a young girl whose character is thought to be based on Ann Simmonds, an early love interest. Although the story is not particularly successful as a narrative because of Lamb's poor sense of plot, it was well thought of by Lamb's contemporaries and led Shelley to observe, "what a lovely thing is Rosamund Gray! How much knowledge of the sweetest part of our nature in it!" (Quoted in Barnett, page 50)



In the first years of the 19th century, Lamb began a fruitful literary cooperation with his sister Mary. Together they wrote at least three books for William Godwin’s Juvenile Library. The most successful of these was Tales From Shakespeare, which ran through two editions for Godwin and has been published dozens of times in countless editions ever since. The book contains artful prose summaries of some of Shakespeare's most well-loved works. According to Lamb, he worked primarily on Shakespeare's tragedies, while Mary focused mainly on the comedies.

Lamb also contributed a footnote to Shakespearean studies at this time with his essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare," in which he argues that Shakespeare should be read rather than performed in order to protect the subtlety of Shakespeare's character development from butchering by mass commercial performances. Besides contributing to Shakespeare's reception with his book Tales From Shakespeare, Lamb also contributed to the recovery of Shakespeare's contemporaries with his book Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare.

Although he did not write his first Elia essay until 1820, Lamb’s gradual perfection of the essay form for which he eventually became famous began as early 1802 in a series of open letters to Leigh Hunt’s Reflector. The most famous of these early essays is "The Londoner," in which Lamb famously derides the contemporary fascination with nature and the countryside. He would continue to fine-tune his craft, experimenting with different essayistic voices and personae, for the better part of the next quarter-century.

As an essayist, Lamb is best known for two collections: The first, Essays of Elia, consists of a series of deeply autobiographical memoirs and essays written from the pseudonymous perspective of "Elia" and originally published as a serial for London Magazine. Essays of Elia are acclaimed as some of the finest early examples of the essay form in English, as well as exemplary masterpieces of English prose.

The second work, Tales from Shakespeare, is perhaps more unusual: commissioned as a retelling of Shakespeare's plays for children, Charles and his sister Mary Lamb retold Shakespeare's works while interspersing critical commentary on the plays. Some of Charles Lamb's criticisms would go on to influence the later development of nineteenth-century Shakespearian criticism.

Recognition
Three of his poems ("The Old Familiar Faces," "Hester," and "On an Infant dying as soon as born") were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900.

Poetry

 * Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems on Various Subjects (includes four poems by Lamb). London: C.G. & J. Robinson; Bristol: J. Cottle, 1796
 * enlarged as Poems, Second Edition, to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd (includes ten poems by Lamb). Bristol: Printed by N. Biggs for J. Cottle and Robinsons, London, 1797.
 * Blank Verse (by Lamb and Charles Lloyd). London: Printed by T. Bensley for J. & A. Arch, 1798.
 * Album Verses, with a Few Others. London: Moxon, 1830.
 * Satan in Search of a Wife. London: Moxon, 1831.
 * The Poetical Works of Charles Lamb. Philadelphia: E.H. Butler & Co., 1858.

Plays

 * John Woodvil: A tragedy. (London: Printed by T. Plummer for G. & J. Robinson, 1802.
 * Mr. H., or beware a bad name. A farce in two acts [pirated edition]. Philadelphia: Published by M. Carey, printed by A. Fagan, 1813..

Fiction

 * A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret. Birmingham, UK: Printed by Thomas Pearson, 1798; London: Printed for Lee & Hurst, 1798.

Non-fiction

 * Elia: Essays which have appeared under that signature in the London Magazine. London: Printed for Taylor & Hessey, 1823; [pirated edition] Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, printed by Mifflin & Parry, 1828; Menston: Scholar Press, 1969
 * Elia: Essays which have appeared under that name in the London Magazine Second Series. [pirated edition] Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, printed by J.R.A. Skerret, 1828. (includes three essays not written by Lamb).
 * The Last Essays Of Elia. London: Edward Moxon, 1833; Philadelphia: T.K. Greenbank, 1833.
 * [http://archive.org/details/essayseliafollo00lambgoog The Essays of Elia: The only complete edition. London: Edward Moxon, 1869.
 * Lamb as Critic (edited by Roy Park). London & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Juvenile

 * The King and Queen of Hearts. London: Printed for Thos. Hodgkins, 1805.
 * Tales from Shakespeare. Designed for the Use of Young Persons (2 volumes; by Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb, attributed to Charles Lamb). London: Printed for Thomas Hodgkins at the Juvenile Library, 1807; Philadelphia: Published by Bradford & Inskeep, and New York: Inskeep & Bradford, printed by J. Maxwell, 1813).
 * Mrs. Leicester's School (by Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb). London: Printed for M.J. Godwin at the Juvenile Library, 1809; George Town: J. Milligan, 1811.
 * The Adventures Of Ulysses. London: Printed by T. Davison for the Juvenile Library, 1808; New York: Harper, 1879.
 * Poetry for Children, Entirely Original (2 volumes, by Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb). London: Printed for M.J. Godwin at the Juvenile Library, 1809; Boston: West & Richardson, and E. Cotton, 1812.
 * one volume (edited by Richard Herne Shepherd). London: [[Chatto & Windus, 1878.
 * Prince Dorus: Or, Flattery Put Out of Countenance. A Poetical Version of an Ancient Tale. London: Printed for M.J. Godwin at the Juvenile Library, 1811.

Edited

 * Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the Time of Shakspeare (edited, with commentary, by Lamb). London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1808; New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1845. Volume I, Volume II.

Collected editions

 * The Works of Charles Lamb (2 volumes). London: Ollier, 1818.
 * Literary Sketches and Letters. New York: D. Appleton, 1848.
 * Eliana: Being the hitherto uncollected writings of Charles Lamb. New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1864.
 * Mary and Charles Lamb: Poems, letters and remains (collected by W. Carew Hazlitt). London: Chatto & Windus, 1874.
 * The Complete Works of Charles Lamb. Philadelphia: W.T. Amies, 1879.
 * The Dramatic Essays of Charles Lamb (edited by Brander Matthews). London; Chatto & Windus, 1891.
 * Charles Lamb: Selections from his letters, essays, and verses. New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1901.
 * Poems, Plays and Miscellaneous Essays (edited by William MacDonald). London: J.M. Dent, 1903; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1903.
 * The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (7 volumes; edited by E.V. Lucas). London: Methuen, 1903-1905; New York: Putnam's, 1903-1905.
 * Essays and Sketches. London: J.M. Dent, 1904. 
 * Charles Lamb on Shakespeare (edited by Joan Coldwell). Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1978.

Letters

 * The Letters of Charles Lamb: Newly arranged with additions. London & New York: Macmillan, 1888.
 * The Letters of Charles Lamb. London: J.M. Dent / New York: E.P. Dutton, 1909. Volume I, Volume II.
 * The Letters of Charles Lamb: To which are added those of his sister, Mary Lamb (edited by E.V. Lucas). (3 volumes), London: Dent / Methuen, 1935; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1935.
 * The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb (3 volumes to date, edited by Edwin W. Marrs, Jr.). (3 volumes to date), Ithaca, NY, & London: Cornell University Press, 1975-.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Plays

 * Mr. H, London, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 10 December 1806.