Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Charles Lamb, by Walter Jerrold This
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Title: Charles Lamb
Author: Walter Jerrold
Release Date: March 13, 2006 [EBook #17977]
Language: English
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[Illustration: CHARLES LAMB AT THE AGE OF FIFTY-ONE. BY
HENRY MEYER. From the original painting at the India Office,
reproduced by permission of the Secretary of State for India in
Council.]
Bell's Miniature Series of Great Writers

CHARLES LAMB
BY
WALTER JERROLD

LONDON GEORGE BELL & SONS 1905

TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE STORY OF HIS LIFE
HIS PRINCIPAL WRITINGS:
Poetry The Drama Stories Verses Criticism Essays Letters
THE ESSAYS OF ELIA
HIS STYLE
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS
POSTHUMOUS WORKS AND COLLECTED EDITION
BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
CHARLES LAMB AT THE AGE OF 51. By Henry Meyer
Frontispiece
CHRIST'S HOSPITAL
THE DINING HALL, CHRIST'S HOSPITAL

SKETCH OF CHARLES LAMB AT THE AGE OF 44 By G. F.
Joseph, A.R.A.
HOLOGRAPH LETTER TO JOHN CLARE THE PEASANT POET,
31 August, 1822

CHARLES LAMB
THE STORY OF HIS LIFE
Charles Lamb's biography should be read at length in his essays and his
letters--from them we get to know not only the facts of his life but
almost insensibly we get a knowledge of the man himself such as
cannot be conveyed in any brief summary. He is as a friend, a loved
friend, whom it seems almost sacrilegious to summarize in the compact
sentences of a biographical dictionary, of whom it would be a wrong to
write if the writing were to be used instead of, rather than as an
introduction to, a literary self-portrait, more striking it may be believed
than any of the canvases in the Uffizi Gallery. When he was
six-and-twenty Charles Lamb wrote thus in reply to an invitation from
Wordsworth to visit him in Cumberland:
I have passed all my days in London ... the lighted shops of the Strand
and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers,
coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round
about Covent Garden; the very women of the town; the watchmen,
drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the
night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the
very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the
print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee
houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes--London itself
a pantomime and a masquerade--all these things work themselves into
my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of
these sights impels me into night walks about her crowded streets, and I
often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life.
All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions

to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to
have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?
In whimsical exaggeration Lamb sometimes wrote of his aversion from
country sights and sounds, adopting that method partly perhaps for the
purpose of rallying his correspondents, and partly for the purpose of
accentuating his own "unrural notions." He was a Londoner of
Londoners. In London he was born and educated, and in London--with
a few of his later years in what is now but an outer suburb--he passed
the fifty-nine years of his life. Beyond some childish holidays in
pleasant Hertfordshire, a few brief trips into the country--to Coleridge
at Stowey and at Keswick, to Oxford and Cambridge, and one short
journey to Paris--he had no personal contact with the outer world. He
delighted in his devotion to London, and stands pre-eminent as the
Londoner in literature.
Charles Lamb was the son of John Lamb, who had left his native
Lincolnshire--probably from the neighbourhood of Stamford--as a child,
and who finally found himself attached to one Samuel Salt, a Bencher
of the Inner Temple, in the capacity of "his clerk, his good servant, his
dresser, his friend, his 'flapper,' his guide, stop-watch, auditor,
treasurer." Salt's chambers were at 2, Crown Office Row, and there
John Lamb lived with a family consisting of himself, his wife, an
unmarried sister, Sarah Lamb ("Aunt Hetty"), a son John, aged twelve,
and a daughter Mary, aged eleven, when on 10th February, 1775, there
was born to him another son to whom