Charles Lamb
Document Actions
Charles Lamb: Essayist
Charles Lamb was a great Romantic writer who is best known for his work Essays of Elia. He made many contributions to Romanticism including the personal essay genre, his distinct style, and his network of friends that linked many of the great Romantic writers. Charles’s personal life was immensely intertwined with that of his sister Mary in a relationship that was the most important of his life, for both of their lives were affected by the Lamb family’s inherited insanity. Charles Lamb was born to John and Elizabeth Lamb on February 10, 1775 in London. His father John Lamb was clever and animated with a love of the arts and a family history of madness. Elizabeth Lamb was a contrast to her husband, for she was tall and stately with formal manners. Charles himself was a contemplative, tenderhearted, and skinny boy with dark eyes and a stutter. Charles found an affinity of spirit in his older sister Mary who was short, plain, and full of heart, and she nurtured Charles with all of her affection. The two both physically and emotionally resembled each other, for they had similar coloring, interests, and nervous temperament. Charles was sponsored by his father’s employer Samuel Salt to attend Christ’s Hospital school for seven years. His physical weakness made him unable to play sports with the other boys, but his wild sense of fun and friendly disposition allowed him to make friends very easily. Because of his stutter, Charles’s professors deemed him unfit to become a priest, so he went to work as a city clerk for the South Sea House after finishing his schooling. He then became an apprentice clerk for the East India Company, a job in which he remained for the rest of his working days. |
Charles Lamb: 1775-1834 Frontspiece to The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb, 1897. |
|||
|
It was at Christ’s Hospital that Charles made his first friends. Here, he befriended Samuel Taylor Coleridge who would become, apart from Mary, his closest friend. Throughout his life, friendship was the main source of Charles’s happiness, and he always liked to be in large groups. Charles took pleasure both in the sheer number and the great variety of his friends. His large group of friends included almost all of the great Romantic literary figures including Thomas Manning, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, John Keats, William Hazlitt, and William Godwin. Charles was even influential in the education of Godwin’s stepdaughter Mary Shelley, for he brought with him a world of ideas and conversation when he visited the Godwin household that Mary was able to experience at a very young age. Mary Shelley even became a close friend and correspondent of Charles’s after she was widowed. Charles’s friendships, while immensely important to him, were also very important to Romanticism because these bonds of friendship linked together many of the Romantic era thinkers. The independence that made Charles so interesting to his friends was the very trait that hinted at his imbalance and tendency toward madness. The Lamb family was plagued with a history of insanity that certainly manifested itself in Charles and Mary. Charles’s high strung temperament coupled with his vivid imagination made him more susceptible to irrational terrors and fits of melancholy than other people. As a young child, Charles would often have frightful delusions and nightmares, some of which involved his eccentric Aunt Hetty as a witch. Charles did not marry, in part, because he was advised by his grandmother not to pass on the family madness, so he poured all of his affection onto his family and friends instead. At one point, troubled by disappointment in love, frustration at home, and the departure of Coleridge, Charles voluntarily entered a private asylum in Hoxton for delusions, but he returned six weeks later and never suffered a severe breakdown again. His sister Mary, who inherited the same predisposition to madness, was not so lucky, for she suffered recurrent bouts of madness throughout her life. On September 22, 1796, Mary’s anxieties, which had been heightened by her needle working job and the care of her invalid parents, caused her to kill her mother by stabbing her in the chest with a knife. Mary was going to have to live in a public asylum, but Charles offered to take complete and lifelong responsibility for her. This incredible display of affection demonstrated Charles’s compassion, but it also committed him to a bachelor life. Charles began writing both for pleasure and as a means of increasing his income which was now supporting both himself and Mary. He found that writing allowed him to escape his life of anxiety and come back to it refreshed and strengthened. Charles wrote in many genres including drama, fiction, and poetry. He also wrote literary criticism which was penetrating, interpretive, and imaginative. It was his unique personality and his lack of concern for conventional order that made Charles well suited for the personal essay, the genre for which he is best remembered. Charles was more interested in portraying a character and expressing his or her emotions than in following character development and conflict in a story; and through the personal essay, he was able to write numerous character sketches based solely on one character. It is also through the personal essay genre that Charles could express artistic themes that were most important to him: the past, theater, and fantasy. As a true Romantic era writer, Charles truthfully and unapologetically expressed his thoughts and feelings in his writing. Charles did indeed possess many of the traits of a Romantic era thinker including imagination, interest in the quaint, sympathy, and wonder at the mysteries of life. However, Charles also brought many of his own unique characteristics to Romanticism including careful selection of words that convey a potent meaning, brevity of structure, and a nostalgic tone interlaced with humor. Charles’s most well-known work is Essays of Elia which is a collection of short essays inspired by his time as clerk for the South Sea House that he contributed to The London Magazine under the pseudonym Elia. His work Tales of Shakespeare, a collaboration with Mary aimed at introducing Shakespeare to youth, is also well known and displays the Romantic era quality of interest in children and their education. Later in Charles’s life, Mary’s bouts of madness got progressively longer and more frequent. He continued to move with her all over London for her comfort. Eventually Charles entered Mary into a mental home in London, but he moved in with her so that she would not be alone. Adding to Charles’s depression regarding his sister’s mental state and his new home in a mental institution was the news in July 1843 that Coleridge had died. It is suspected that the shock of Coleridge’s death hastened Charles’s own death. On December 22, 1843, Charles tripped, fell, and cut his face while he was taking a walk, and he died of a subsequent facial infection five days later. Charles Lamb’s life was all about balance.
He struggled to balance his high spirits and morbid mood swings, his
fanciful imagination and horrifying delusions, his independence and
friendships, and his romance and irony. Charles brought individuality
to his literature and the ability to elevate ordinary events and
objects from their common-place status to the realm of complexity and
imagination. |
||||
