Charles Lamb – A Literary Figure known for his essays and Literary Criticism

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Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was an English essayist, poet, and critic, best known for his essays of Elia and his contributions to the Romantic literary movement. While studying at Christ’s Hospital, he was near contemporary of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he began what was to be lifelong friendship, and a Leigh Hunt.

Lamb’s first appearance in print were as a poet, with contributions to collections by Coleridge (1796) and Charles Lloyd (1798). A Tales of Rosamund Gray, a prose romance, appeared in 1798, and in 1802 he published John Woodvil, a poetic tragedy. None of these publications brought him much of fame or fortune. “The Old Familiar Faces” (1789) remains his best-known poem, although “On an Infant Dying As Soon As It Was Born” is his finest poetic achievement.

Concurrently with these works, Lamb published Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare, a selection of scenes, much edited, from Elizabethan dramas. The book included some passages of implicit criticism. Lamb also contributed critical papers on Shakespeare and on Hogarth to Leigh Hunt’s Reflector. The only lengthy piece of criticism that he undertook, on William Wordsworth’s Excursion. Lamb’s letters, however, contain much of his most perspective criticism and reveal his personal tastes. The criticism often appears in the form of marginalia, reactions and responses; brief comments, delicately phrased, but hardly ever argued through.

One of Charles Lamb's most well-known and productive genres was the essay. Charles Lamb was an essayist during the British Romantic movement. His works were different from those of other Romantic writers of the era, who frequently used poetry as a form of expression. However, in terms of subject matter and creative skill, his body of work was comparable to that of his numerous well-known contemporaries.

Lamb wrote under the pseudonym Elia for London Magazine, which was founded in 1820. The essays are almost wholly autobiographical. Many of the best deal with things half a century past; vistas revealed by an imagination looking back down the experiences of a lifetime. The subject of his essay was the South Sea house, where his elder brother, John was clerk. In order to spare his brother’s feelings. Lamb called himself Elia (the name another clerk at the South Sea house). The persona of Elia predominates in nearly all of the essays. Lamb’s style, therefore, is highly personal and mannered, it’s function being to ‘create’ and delineate this persona, and the writing, though sometimes simple, is never plain. The essays conjure up, with humor and sometimes with pathos, old acquaintances such as Samuel Salt; they recall scenes from childhood and from later life, indulge the author’s sense of playfulness and fancy, and avoid only whatever in urgent or disturbing - politics, suffering, sex, religion. The first essays were published separately in 1823; a second series appeared as The Essays of Elia, in 1833.