Lamb, Charles (1775-1834), was an English author. He became famous for his informal, personal essays and his highly individual and penetrating literary criticism. Lamb used the pen name Elia for many of his essays.
His life.
Lamb was born on Feb. 10, 1775, in London. His only formal education was at a London school called Christ’s Hospital. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was also a student there, and he and Lamb became close friends. In 1792, Lamb went to work as a clerk for the East India Company. He worked for the firm until his retirement on a pension at the age of 50. Lamb never married. He lived with his sister Mary, and he took loving care of her even during periods when she was mentally unbalanced. He died on Dec. 27, 1834.
His essays.
Lamb’s reputation rests on his essays and his literary criticism. But he also wrote a few undistinguished poems and two unsuccessful plays. His farce Mr. H. failed miserably at its first performance in 1806, and Lamb joined the audience in hissing his own play. Lamb’s best and most popular essays appeared from 1820 to 1825 in The London Magazine. They were collected in two volumes known as Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833). Lamb’s literary and dramatic criticism appears in his essays and in his notes to a collection of excerpts from Elizabethan plays. The notes and excerpts were published as Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare (1808). In one of his essays, Lamb argued that the English playwright William Shakespeare’s tragedies should be read, not seen, to appreciate their true greatness.
Lamb’s writing reveals much about him—his gentle and whimsical nature, his great capacity for friendship, and his warm humanity. Some of his essays recall his youth. Others are character sketches of eccentric people in whom Lamb found something to like. Many of his essays discuss books and the theater, both of which he loved.
The titles of some of Lamb’s essays show the range of his interests—”A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People” (1811); “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist” and “My First Play” (both 1821), “Dream-Children” and “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” (both 1822) ; and “Poor Relations” (1823). Even subjects that seemed ordinary came to life through his original, sympathetic point of view. In his essays, Lamb stayed close to common realities—”sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candlelight, and fireside conversations.” Behind Lamb’s warmth and humor lay robust common sense. He scorned what he called “the nambypamby.”
Close friendships with such writers as Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, and William Hazlitt made Lamb part of the romantic movement of the early 1800’s. Yet Lamb loved city life, which his close friends among the Romantic poets generally shunned. He could also make fun of the solemnity of much of Wordsworth’s poetry. When he called Coleridge “an archangel, a little damaged,” and said that “he had a hunger for eternity,” Lamb expressed what other critics might have taken a page to say. In his criticism of William Shakespeare and other dramatists, Lamb tried to get at the deepest realities of life and art.
Mary Ann Lamb
(1764-1847), Charles’s sister, fatally stabbed their mother in 1796 during a fit of temporary insanity. She was placed under Charles’s guardianship, even though he was only 21.
When Mary was well, she was affectionate and intelligent. She worked with Charles in writing three books for children. The most famous is Tales from Shakespeare (1807). In retelling the stories of Shakespeare’s plays, Charles wrote the tragedies and Mary wrote the comedies. Their other books for children include a collection of stories called Mrs. Leicester’s School (1807), The Adventures of Ulysses (1808), and Poetry for Children (1809). Mary was born in London on Dec. 3, 1764, and died on May 20, 1847.
