charles lamb essays summary

Poems & Poets

Charles Lamb

Essayist, critic, poet, and playwright Charles Lamb achieved lasting fame as a writer during the years 1820-1825, when he captivated the discerning English reading public with his personal essays in the London Magazine , collected as Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833). Known for their charm, humor, and perception, and laced with idiosyncrasies, these essays appear to be modest in scope, but their soundings are deep, and their ripples extend to embrace much of human life—particularly the life of the imagination. In the 20th century, Lamb was also recognized for his critical writings; Lamb as Critic (1980) gathers his criticism from all sources, including letters.

The son of John and Elizabeth Field Lamb, Charles Lamb, a Londoner who loved and celebrated that city, was born in the Temple, the abode of London lawyers, where his father was factotum for one of these, Samuel Salt. The family was ambitious for its two sons, John and Charles, and successful in entering Charles at Christ's Hospital, a London charity school of merit, on October 9, 1782. Here he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge , a fellow pupil who was Lamb's close friend for the rest of their lives and who helped stir his growing interest in poetry. Lamb left school early, in late 1789. (Because he had a severe stutter, he did not seek a university career, then intended to prepare young men for orders in the Church of England.) In September 1791 he found work as a clerk at the South Sea House, but he left the following February, and in April he became a clerk at the East India Company, where he remained for 33 years, never feeling fitted for the work nor much interested in "business," but managing to survive, though without promotion.

Soon after leaving school, he was sent to Hertfordshire to his ill grandmother, housekeeper in a mansion seldom visited by its owners. Here he fell in love with Ann Simmons, subject of his earliest sonnets (though his first to be published, in the December 29, 1794 issue of the Morning Chronicle , was a joint effort with Coleridge to the actress Sarah Siddons—evidence of his lifelong devotion to the London theater). His "Anna" sonnets, which appeared in the 1796 and 1797 editions of Coleridge's Poems , have a sentimental, nostalgic quality: "Was it some sweet device of Faery / That mocked my steps with many a lonely glade, / And fancied wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid?"; "Methinks how dainty sweet it were, reclin'd"; "When last I roved these winding wood-walks green"; "A timid grace sits trembling in her eye." All were written after the love affair had ended, to Lamb's regret. His early novel, A Tale of Rosamund Gray (1798), is also rooted in the Ann episode.

After the death of Samuel Salt in 1792 the Lambs were in straitened circumstances, mother and father both ill. The elder brother, John, was living independently and was not generous to his family. On Charles (after an unpaid apprenticeship) and his elder sister, Mary, a dressmaker who had already shown signs of mental instability, fell the burden of providing for the family, and Mary took on the nursing as well. Two of Lamb's early sonnets are addressed to her: Mary, who was ten years older than Charles, had mothered him as a child, and their relationship was always a close one. Charles continued to write—a ballad on a Scottish theme, poems to friends and to William Cowper on that poet's recovery from a fit of madness. "A Vision of Repentance" ("I saw a famous fountain, in my dream") treats a truly Romantic theme—the hope of God's forgiveness for the sin of a repentant Psyche.

The tragedy of September 22, 1796—when Mary, exhausted and distraught from overwork, killed their mother with a carving knife—changed both their lives forever. She was judged temporarily insane, and Lamb at 22 took full legal responsibility for her for life, to avoid her permanent hospitalization. Thereafter she was most often lucid, warm, understanding, and much admired by such friends as the essayist William Hazlitt. She also developed skills as a writer. But she was almost annually visited by the depressive illness which led to her confinement for weeks at a time in a private hospital in Hoxton. (Lamb too had been confined briefly at Hoxton for his mental state in 1795, but there was no later recurrence.) Both were known for their capacity for friendship and for their mid-life weekly gatherings of writers, lawyers, actors, and the odd but interesting "characters" for whom Lamb had a weakness.

For the moment Lamb "renounced" poetry altogether, but he soon took it up again and began work on a tragedy in Shakespearean blank verse, John Woodvil (1802), which has autobiographical elements. While there are a few fine lines and the writing in general is competent but unoriginal, plotting and character are weak: it was never produced. "The Wife's Trial," a late play in blank verse, is of minor interest. It was published in the December 1828 issue of Blackwood's Magazine . His only play to reach the stage, Mr. H ——(in prose), was roundly hissed in London when it opened on December 10, 1806, but it was successfully produced in the United States thereafter.

Though soon after his mother's death he announced his intention to leave poetry "to my betters," Lamb continued to write verse of various kinds throughout his life: sonnets, lyrics, blank verse, light verse, prologues and epilogues to the plays of friends, satirical verse, verse translations, verse for children, and finally Album Verses (1830), written to please young ladies who kept books of such tributes. By 1820 he had developed what was to be his "Elia" prose style. He was the first intensely personal, truly Romantic essayist, never rivaled in popularity by his friends Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt. Many of Lamb's essays before those he signed Elia came out in Hunt's publications. While he is better known for his prose E. V. Lucas, Edmund Blunden , George L. Barnett, and William Kean Seymour, have pointed to his verse’s charm, honesty, strength of feeling, and originality. "His poetry," Seymour writes, "makes a pendant to his Essays, and it is a lustrous and significant pendant." The roles of artist and critic, of course, demand very different abilities: Lamb was, in correspondence, an able critic of the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth , who sometimes took his advice. (He met Wordsworth, who became a lifelong friend, through Coleridge in 1797.)"

Of considerable interest are Lamb's blank-verse poems, which reveal his spiritual struggles after his mother’s death as he sought consolation in religion. In one, he doubts whether atheists or deists (such as his friend William Godwin, novelist, philosopher, and publisher of children's books) have adequate answers for the larger questions of life; other poems dwell on the death of the old aunt whose favorite he was (she also appears in his essay "Witches and Other Night-Fears"), on his dead mother with regrets for days gone, on his father's senility, on Mary's fate, and on his growing doubts about institutional religion. Several were published with poems by his Quaker friend Charles Lloyd in their Blank Verse (1798).

Soon after composing this group he contributed a piece on his grandmother (later developed in "Dream-Children") to Lloyd's Poems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer (1796). The culmination of this period was " The Old Familiar Faces " (written in 1798 and published in Blank Verse ), which ends:

                    some they have died and some they have left me,                     And some are taken from me; all are departed;                     All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

This poem is still anthologized; it tells with grace the story of his own youth, touching a universal human chord. Written in 1803 and published in Lamb's 1818 Works , "Hester" takes as its subject a young Quaker whom he had often seen but to whom he had never spoken, though he said he was "in love" with her. She married early and soon died; his poem, a delicate tribute to a charming girl who enhances even Death, ends with lines addressed to her:

                    My sprightly neighbour, gone before                     To that unknown and silent shore,                     Shall we not meet, as heretofore,                     Some summer morning,                     When from thy cheerful eyes a ray                     Hath struck a bliss upon the day,                     A bliss that would not go away,                     A sweet fore-warning?

These are his poetic triumphs. After them came more poems to friends, and also political verses, which are often sharp and clever, even venomous. "The Triumph of the Whale," on the prince regent, whom he sincerely hated, was published in Hunt's Examiner (March 15, 1812) and may have had a part in Hunt's two-year incarceration for libel, though the official charge was based on Hunt's editorial a week later. "The Gipsy's Malison," another harsh poem of Lamb's later years, on the ill-born child who is destined to hang, is sometimes anthologized. Like "The Triumph of the Whale," it reveals a bitter aspect of Lamb's complex nature, which shows rarely but persistently in his work. Among Lamb's humorous light-verse pieces, " A Farewell to Tobacco " is one of the best. He never gave up smoking or lost his taste for drink, though he tried often.

In 1808 he published his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the time of Shakspeare , with commentary that was later admired by the younger generation of Romantics, particularly Keats , and established Lamb as a critic. For needed cash, he and Mary, at Godwin's request, wrote Poetry for Children (1809), in which their fondness for children shines through the moral verses. It did not reach a second edition, but the Lambs were much more successful with Mrs. Leicester's School (1809) and Tales from Shakespear (1807), which has never since been out of print.

In 1818 Lamb published his early Works , and in 1819 he proposed to Fanny Kelly, a popular comic actress who was later a friend of Dickens and founder of the first dramatic school for girls. She refused him, confiding to a friend that she could not carry Mary's problems too. Charles and Mary did know a sort of parenthood in their 1823 "adoption" of a teenage orphan, Emma Isola, who regarded their home as hers until she married Lamb's new young publisher, Edward Moxon, in 1833.

In the years 1820-1825 Lamb made his reputation as Elia in the London Magazine . By 1825, though he was still a clerk, Lamb's salary had risen after long service, and he was able to retire at 50 with a good pension and provision for Mary. He occupied his new leisure for several years at the British Museum, compiling more dramatic excerpts, which appeared in William Hone's Table Book throughout 1827, and contributing other writings to periodicals. When Album Verses appeared in 1830, followed by the humorous ballad Satan in Search of a Wife (1831), they were poorly received by critics; Last Essays of Elia (1833), from the London Magazine , made amore favorable impression.

Brother and sister had had to move many times as the reason for Mary's increasing absences from home became known. Their last move was to a sort of sanitarium at Edmonton, near London, in 1833. Here, while out walking one day in 1834, Lamb fell. He died of a bacterial infection a few days later. Mary lived on, with a paid companion, till 1847.

Lamb's essays were taught in schools until World War II, when critics such as F.R. Leavis contributed to a shift in critical approaches. Yet in the 1970s serious scholars increasingly discovered new virtues in Lamb’s letters. criticism, and essays. Since the 1980s, Lamb’s prose has enjoyed a renewed appreciation among scholars, marked by the publication of insightful biographies and critical studies. The Charles Lamb Society of London flourishes, and publishes a bulletin which has become impressively scholarly since its new series began in the 1970s.  

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Charles Lamb

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• Official Site of The Charles Lamb Society
• Poetry Foundation - Biography of Charles Lamb
• Charles Lamb - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Charles Lamb (born Feb. 10, 1775, London, Eng.—died Dec. 27, 1834, Edmonton, Middlesex) was an English essayist and critic, best known for his Essays of Elia (1823–33).

Lamb went to school at Christ’s Hospital, where he studied until 1789. He was a near contemporary there of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and of Leigh Hunt . In 1792 Lamb found employment as a clerk at East India House (the headquarters of the East India Company), remaining there until retirement in 1825. In 1796 Lamb’s sister, Mary , in a fit of madness (which was to prove recurrent) killed their mother. Lamb reacted with courage and loyalty, taking on himself the burden of looking after Mary.

Lamb’s first appearances in print were as a poet, with contributions to collections by Coleridge (1796) and by Charles Lloyd (1798). A Tale of Rosamund Gray, a prose romance, appeared in 1798, and in 1802 he published John Woodvil, a poetic tragedy . “The Old Familiar Faces” (1789) remains his best-known poem, although “On an Infant Dying As Soon As It Was Born” (1828) is his finest poetic achievement.

In 1807 Lamb and his sister published Tales from Shakespear , a retelling of the plays for children, and in 1809 they published Mrs. Leicester’s School, a collection of stories supposedly told by pupils of a school in Hertfordshire . In 1808 Charles published a children’s version of the Odyssey, called The Adventures of Ulysses.

In 1808 Lamb also published Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespear, a selection of scenes from Elizabethan dramas; it had a considerable influence on the style of 19th-century English verse. Lamb also contributed critical papers on Shakespeare and on William Hogarth to Hunt’s Reflector. Lamb’s criticism often appears in the form of marginalia, reactions, and responses: brief comments, delicately phrased, but hardly ever argued through.

Lamb’s greatest achievements were his remarkable letters and the essays that he wrote under the pseudonym Elia for London Magazine , which was founded in 1820. His style is highly personal and mannered, its function being to “create” and delineate the persona of Elia, and the writing , though sometimes simple, is never plain. The essays conjure up, with humour and sometimes with pathos , old acquaintances; they also recall scenes from childhood and from later life, and they indulge the author’s sense of playfulness and fancy. Beneath their whimsical surface, Lamb’s essays are as much an expression of the Romantic movement as the verse of Coleridge and William Wordsworth . Elia’s love of urban and suburban subject matter, however, points ahead, toward the work of Charles Dickens . The essay “On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century” (1822) both helped to revive interest in Restoration comedy and anticipated the assumptions of the Aesthetic movement of the late 19th century. Lamb’s first Elia essays were published separately in 1823; a second series appeared, as The Last Essays of Elia, in 1833.

Poor Relations

Poor relations by charles lamb summary.

Lamb opens the essay in a humorous way by listing some of his views and thoughts regarding a poor relation, without any praises and compliments. According to him, a poor relation is the most “irrelevant” thing in the world that is extremely unpleasant and is the one you don’t want to listen from; they are groove on your purse, an absurd shadow that always follows you, the one you don’t want to remember, an embarrassment, something one’s enemy can enjoy, an apology for friends, inconvenient, imperfection on the life, and annoying. Indeed, these are the blunt comment upon a poor relation, however, it poses a comic intent that exaggerates the writer’s thoughts.

Poor Relations by Charles Lamb Literary Analysis

About the author:.

Charles Lamb, one of the most prominent and shining figures in the essay writing, was born on February 10, 1775. He is a well-known English poet and dominating essayist and antiquarian. Among the prose work, his essays are regarded are most premium and best work in English Literature. Wisdom, humor, humanity, pathos are best reflected in his word and make readers appreciate his work from the core of their hearts. The two collections of his essays: The Essays of Elia and The Last Essays of Elia were published in 1828 and 1833 respectively. A unique combination of wit, anecdote, fancy and reflection is present in his essays. He died on 27 December 1834.

Critical Appreciation:

The tone of the essay shifts from comic to tragic when the speaker mentions his friend who killed make himself killed in the Portugal war because he was unable to endure his father’s poverty.

More From Charles Lamb

New Year's Eve, by Charles Lamb

'I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived'

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• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
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An accountant in India House in London for more than 30 years and caregiver for his sister Mary (who, in a fit of mania, had stabbed their mother to death), Charles Lamb was one of the great masters of the English essay .

The most intimate of the early-19th-century essayists, Lamb relied on stylistic artifice ("whim-whams," as he referred to his antique diction and far-fetched comparisons ) and a contrived persona known as "Elia." As George L. Barnett has observed, "Lamb's egoism suggests more than Lamb's person: it awakens in the reader reflections of kindred feelings and affections" ( Charles Lamb: The Evolution of Elia , 1964).

In the essay "New Year's Eve," which first appeared in the January 1821 issue of The London Magazine , Lamb reflects wistfully on the passage of time. You may find it interesting to compare Lamb's essay with three others in our collection:

• "At the Turn of the Year," by Fiona Macleod (William Sharp)
• "Last Year," by Horace Smith
• " The New Year," by George William Curtis
• "January in the Sussex Woods," by Richard Jefferies

New Year's Eve

by Charles Lamb

1 Every man hath two birth-days: two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his . In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper birth-day hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand any thing in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

2 Of all sounds of all bells--(bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven)--most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected--in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal colour; nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary, when he exclaimed

I saw the skirts of the departing Year.

It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to be conscious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night; though some of my companions affected rather to manifest an exhilaration at the birth of the coming year, than any very tender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I am none of those who--

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, new faces, new years, from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past disappointments. I am armour-proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again for love , as the gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks, it is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W----n, than that so passionate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco , and be without the idea of that specious old rogue.

3 In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox , when I say, that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love himself , without the imputation of self-love?

4 If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective--and mine is painfully so--can have a less respect for his present identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome; a notorious ***; addicted to ****: averse from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it;--*** besides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not; I subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou canst be willing to lay at his door--but for the child Elia--that "other me," there, in the back-ground--I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master--with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher medicaments. I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ's, and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood. God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated. I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was--how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful! From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself, and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being!

5 That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader (a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly-conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia.

6 The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. But now, shall I confess a truth? I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like miser's farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away "like a weaver's shuttle." Those  metaphors  solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me.

7  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 candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and  irony itself --do these things go out with life?

8  Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?

9  And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?

10  Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here,--the recognisable face--the "sweet assurance of a look"--?

11  In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying--to give it its mildest name--does more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. Then are we as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral appearances,--that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the Canticles:--I am none of her minions--I hold with the Persian.

12  Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind. All partial evils, like humours, run into that capital plague-sore. I have heard some profess an indifference to life. Such hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed death--but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six-score thousand devils, as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of! In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy  Privation , or more frightful and confounding  Positive!

13  Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are altogether frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satisfaction hath a man, that he shall "lie down with kings and emperors in death," who in his life-time never greatly coveted the society of such bed-fellows?--or, forsooth, that "so shall the fairest face appear?"--why, to comfort me, must Alice W----n be a goblin? More than all, I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters! Thy New Years' Days are past. I survive, a jolly candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine--and while that turn-coat bell, that just now mournfully chanted the obsequies of 1820 departed, with changed notes lustily rings in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton.--

"Hark, the cock crows, and yon bright star Tells us, the day himself's not far; And see where, breaking from the night, He gilds the western hills with light. With him old Janus doth appear, Peeping into the future year, With such a look as seems to say, The prospect is not good that way. Thus do we rise ill sights to see, And 'gainst ourselves to prophesy; When the prophetic fear of things A more tormenting mischief brings, More full of soul-tormenting gall, Than direst mischiefs can befall. But stay! but stay! methinks my sight, Better inform'd by clearer light, Discerns sereneness in that brow, That all contracted seem'd but now. His revers'd face may show distaste, And frown upon the ills are past; But that which this way looks is clear, And smiles upon the New-born Year. He looks too from a place so high, The Year lies open to his eye; And all the moments open are To the exact discoverer. Yet more and more he smiles upon The happy revolution. Why should we then suspect or fear The influences of a year, So smiles upon us the first morn, And speaks us good so soon as born? Plague on't! the last was ill enough, This cannot but make better proof; Or, at the worst, as we brush'd through The last, why so we may this too; And then the next in reason shou'd Be superexcellently good: For the worst ills (we daily see) Have no more perpetuity, Than the best fortunes that do fall; Which also bring us wherewithal Longer their being to support, Than those do of the other sort: And who has one good year in three, And yet repines at destiny, Appears ungrateful in the case, And merits not the good he has. Then let us welcome the New Guest With lusty brimmers of the best; Mirth always should Good Fortune meet, And renders e'en Disaster sweet: And though the Princess turn her back, Let us but line ourselves with sack, We better shall by far hold out, Till the next Year she face about."

14  How say you, reader--do not these verses smack of the rough magnanimity of the old English  vein? Do they not fortify like a cordial ; enlarging the heart, and productive of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the concoction? Where be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected? Passed like a cloud--absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear poetry--clean washed away by a wave of genuine Helicon, your only Spa for these hypochondries--And now another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year , and many of them, to you all, my masters!

"New Year's Eve," by Charles Lamb, was first published in the January 1821 issue of  The London Magazine  and was included in  Essays of Elia , 1823 (reprinted by Pomona Press in 2006).

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• The essays of Elia,
• Lamb, Charles, 1775-1834

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• Boston, New York, [etc.] Houghton, Mifflin and company [c1907]
• -  Also available in digital form.
• xx p., 1 l., 226 p., 1 l. front. (port.) 19 cm.

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• PR4861 .A1 1907a

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• online text

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• https://lccn.loc.gov/07018564

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• Lamb, Charles

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Chicago citation style:

Lamb, Charles. The essays of Elia . [Boston, New York, etc. Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1907] Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/07018564/.

APA citation style:

Lamb, C. (1907) The essays of Elia . [Boston, New York, etc. Houghton, Mifflin and company] [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/07018564/.

MLA citation style:

Lamb, Charles. The essays of Elia . [Boston, New York, etc. Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1907] Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/07018564/>.

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Charles Lamb's essays

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Charles Lamb: Essays

By charles lamb, charles lamb: essays summary and analysis of "detached thoughts on books and reading".

An epigraph by Lord Foppington opens the essay, saying that reading a book is effectively entertaining oneself in another man's mind. With a touch of irony, Elia that confesses that that he dedicates a sizable portion of his time to other people's thoughts. He says he can not sit and think, but that books think for him. He doesn't have aversions to any author, and will occupy himself with all sorts of texts, be they directories, almanacs, court calendars, and so on.

He says that a book's ideal state is to be well-constructed, and that its magnificence as a text is secondary. Not every book should be dressed magnificently, not even the works of Shakespeare and Milton, unless they are first editions. He goes on to extol books that are a little beat up, talking about how books look best when they are well-read and dog-eared. If a book looks a little worn out, that's because it has been well-read, and what more could someone desire of a book?

The better a book is, says Elia, the less it demands binding. Good and rare books are the ones to perish exactly because they are read so much that they begin to wear away. He talks of authors whose books only exist as reprints, such as Milton and Fuller, whose original works have long sing disappeared thanks to prolific readership. The decay of old texts ensures the decaying posterity of their writers, which Elia posits is a good thing, since it reminds us of imperfection.

The one type of text that Elia has disdain for, though, is the newspaper. He says that it's impossible to put down a newspaper without feeling disappointed by the sensation of reading it, and reviles the habit in banks and barbershops of people reading newspaper articles out loud for others to hear. Elia closes on a different note, bemoaning books that are kept from the poor when people can't afford to buy them. He recounts a poem by an author he doesn't name, lamenting a boy who wants to read but is shooed away by a shop owner who complains that the boy never actually buys anything.

While Lamb opens the essay talking about how he's constantly preoccupying himself with other people's thoughts, "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," stands as one the more inventive essays in the Elia oeuvre. There are a series of clever techniques that Lamb employs which wouldn't seem out of place in post-modernist literature. For example, the essay opens with Lamb quoting another man's thoughts on reading being an act of getting lost in another man's thoughts. Similarly, the essay ends with an "anonymous" essay, which talks about a boy effectively stealing reading time just as Lamb himself pretends to steal a poem.

Of course, the poem Lamb is quoting is one of his own writing, not one written by a female contemporary of his as he suggests. This, in itself, is another clever move, as it helps create the very kind of well-read and slightly degraded text that he praises earlier in the essay. Lamb elevates this very essay to the echelon of the well-loved books he mentions earlier as if winking at the reader, saying, "Don't you love my work too?"

What do we make of Lamb talking about gladly reading any old text he finds sitting around by taking issue with newspapers? It seems that what Lamb values in reading is the solitary experience of taking time with oneself to enter another person's mind. The newspaper reading that he describes is a social act, with articles being read aloud, eliciting responses from others. Perhaps this is Lamb's issue with newspapers writ large, that they are intended first and foremost as public-minded texts, meant to spark some common conversation. What Lamb values is the independence of the reader, reflecting an infatuation with solitude similar to that of fellow Romantics such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Charles Lamb: Essays Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Charles Lamb: Essays is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Which quality Charles Lamb a romantic writer?

As a Romantic, Lamb brought a key innovation to the somewhat new form, inserting his own personally to give the essays a conversational tone. His essays showcase his passions and anxieties, imbuing the non-fiction form with a personal and literary...

What is the major theme of "Poor Relation" by Charles Lamb?

The major theme is that of the "poor relation"... their irrelevance and unpleasant place in one's life.

Explain the theme of the essay ''A Dissertation upon Roast Pig''.

The essay describes the discovery of the exquisite flavour of roast pig in China in a time when all food was eaten raw. This is really a light hearted theme speaking to how odd it is that humans eat cooked animals at all.

Study Guide for Charles Lamb: Essays

Charles Lamb: Essays study guide contains a biography of Charles Lamb, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Charles Lamb: Essays
• Charles Lamb: Essays Summary
• Character List

Essays for Charles Lamb: Essays

Charles Lamb: Essays essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Charles Lamb: Essays by Charles Lamb.

• Charles Lamb and Spaces Separate from Rationality

Wikipedia Entries for Charles Lamb: Essays

• Introduction