Lamb, CHARLES, essayist, critic, and humorist, was born on the 10th of February 1775, in Crown Office Row, in the Temple, London, where his father was clerk and confidential servant to Samuel Salt, a wealthy bencher of the Inner Temple. For this, as for many other details of Lamb's private and domestic life, we are indebted to his essays, which form the best of all commentaries on his biography. (His father, John Lamb, is the Lovel of the essay on the 'Old Benchers of the Inner Temple.') There were seven children born to John Lamb and his wife in the Temple, of whom three only survived their early childhood—Charles Lamb, his sister Mary, ten years older than himself, and a yet older brother, John. Charles received his first schooling at a humble academy, out of Fetter Lane, but at seven years of age he obtained, through Samuel Salt, a presentation to Christ's Hospital, where he remained for the next seven years. His school experiences, and the friendships he formed, notably that with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, three years his senior, are again familiar to all readers of the Essays of Elia. At the age of fourteen he left school with a fair amount of scholarship, and an intensified love of reading. He might have stayed and become a Grecian—as the highest-class boys were denominated—and so proceeded to the university. But the exhibitions were given on the understanding that the holder was to take holy orders, and Lamb's unsurmountable stammer barred him from that profession.
Lamb left Christ's Hospital in November 1789.
At that time his brother John held a post in the South Sea House, of which Samuel Salt was a deputy-governor, and Charles was soon presented through the kind offices of this friend to a humble situation in the same company; but early in 1792 he obtained promotion in the shape of a clerkship in the accountant's office of the India House, where he remained for more than thirty years. In this same year Samuel Salt died. The occupation of his old clerk and servant was at an end; and with his legacies from his employer, Charles's salary, and whatever Mary Lamb could earn by needlework, in which she was proficient, the family of four (for John Lamb was living a comfortable bachelor life elsewhere) retired to humble lodgings. In 1796 we find them in Little Queen Street, Holborn, and it was there that the terrible disaster occurred, destined to mould the career and character of Charles Lamb for the whole of his future life. There was a strain of insanity in the children inherited from the mother. The father, who had married late in life, was growing old and childish; the mother was an invalid, and the stress and anxiety of the many duties devolving on Mary Lamb began to tell upon her reason. In an attack of mania, induced by a slight altercation with a little apprentice girl at work in the room, Mary Lamb snatched up a knife from the dinner-table, and stabbed her mother, who had interposed in the girl's behalf. Charles was himself present, and wrested the knife from his sister's hand. It was a critical moment in the young man's history. The father was all but imbecile; the mother was no more; and the whole direction of affairs for the sister's future remained with Charles. The inquest resulted in a verdict of temporary insanity. Mary would in the natural course have been transferred for life to a public asylum; but, by the intervention of friends, the brother's guardianship was accepted by the authorities as an alternative. To carry out this trust Charles Lamb from that moment devoted his life, sacrificing to it all other ties and ambitions, and never flagging in duty and tenderness for thirty-eight years. It was inevitable that the family should leave the scene of this 'day of horrors'; the old father with his son Charles removed to Pentonville, where at successive lodgings they remained until the father's death. The house in Little Queen Street no longer stands. With two or three other houses adjoining, it has been pulled down, and a church now stands upon its site—a not unfitting memorial of the spot where Lamb consecrated his future life by an act of devotion as remarkable as any recorded in the annals of literature. Mary Lamb remained subject to attacks of temporary aberration for the rest of her life. The attacks were usually foreseen, and at such seasons she was removed to some suitable asylum. The length and frequency of these periods of absence increased, until the closing years of her brother's life, when she was exiled from him during the greater part of each year. In the meantime Charles Lamb had fallen in love, but renounced all hope of marriage when the duty of tending his otherwise homeless sister had appeared to him paramount. The history of his brief attachment, to which there is frequent pathetic allusion in his writings, is obscure. The girl, who appears in his earliest sonnets as Anna, and in his essays as Alice W., was in fact named Anne Simmons, and resided with her mother in the village of Widford, in Hertfordshire—the scene of Lamb's early romance of Rosamund Gray. Lamb's grandmother, Mrs Field, was housekeeper at Blakesware, a lower-house of the Plumer family, closely adjoining Widford; and during Lamb's frequent visits to Blakesware (immortalised in one of the loveliest of his essays as 'Blakesmoor, in Hertfordshire') he had made the girl's acquaintance. She afterwards married a Mr Bartram, a London silversmith, and is referred to under that name in the essay Dream Children.
Lamb's earliest poems, written in 1795, were prompted by this deep attachment. Two sonnets on this theme, with two others on different topics, were included in S. T. Coleridge's earliest volume of poems, issued at Bristol in 1796. In the following year a second edition of Coleridge's poems appeared, 'to which are now added poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd.' The latter was a young man of kindred poetic tastes, whose acquaintance Lamb had made through Coleridge. Here, as before, the poetic influence under which Lamb wrote was the same that had so strangely moved Coleridge, while still at Christ's Hospital—the graceful and melancholy sonnets of W. L. Bowles. In the following year Lamb and Lloyd made a second venture in a slight volume of their own (Blank Verse, by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, 1798); and here for the first time Lamb's individuality made itself felt in the touching and now famous verses on the 'Old Familiar Faces'—like so many of his memorable utterances in prose and verse, full of autobiographical allusion, and yet gaining rather than losing in permanence of charm through the circumstance. It was, however, in prose, not in verse, that he was to find his true strength.
In the same year as the Blank Verse just mentioned he published his little prose romance, The Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret; and four years later his John Woodvil—the fruit of that study of the dramatic poetry of the Elizabethan period, in the revived study of which he was to bear so large a part. Lamb had little or no dramatic faculty. The little play was crude and valueless as a drama, but with detached passages reflecting much of the music and quaintness of Fletcher and Jonson. Meantime, Lamb and his sister were wandering from lodging to lodging, too often forced to leave through the rumour of Mary Lamb's malady which followed them wherever they went. They had lived at more than one house in Pentonville—they were in Southampton Buildings in 1800 and 1801—and then removed to Lamb's old familiar neighbourhood, where they continued for sixteen years. The early years of their residence in the Temple were among the hardest and saddest of their lives. They were very poor; Charles's experiments in literature had as yet brought him neither money nor reputation; and the gradual accession of new friends that might have brightened their path had the drawback of bringing Charles face to face with social temptations which he could not resist. A very moderate indulgence in wine or spirits seems to have speedily affected him, and his shyness and his impediment of speech made him eagerly resort to what for the moment made him forget both. 'We are very poor,' writes Mary Lamb in 1804; and again in 1805, 'It has been sad and heavy times with us lately.' In Lamb's anxiety to raise a few pounds, rather than from any confidence in his dramatic faculty, he began to write a farce, which the proprietors of Drury Lane accepted, and produced in December 1806. It was the now famous farce Mr H.—famous, however, not for its success, but for its failure. His love for things dramatic soon found a more profitable outlet in a commission from William Godwin to contribute to his 'Juvenile Library,' then in course of publication. For this series Charles and Mary wrote in 1807 their well-known Tales from Shakespeare—Mary Lamb making the version of the comedies, Charles that of the tragedies. This was Lamb's first success. It brought him sixty guineas, and what was more valuable, hope for the future, and the increased confidence and recognition of his growing circle of friends. As one consequence of the success, the brother and sister composed jointly two other children's books—Mrs Leicester's School (1807) and the Poetry for Children (1809). Charles also made, single-handed, a prose version of the Adventures of Ulysses. Another more important consequence was a commission from the Longmans to edit a volume of selections from the Elizabethan dramatists. The volume at once exhibited Lamb, to those who had eyes to see, as one of the most profound, subtle, and original of English poetical critics. Three years later a conviction of the same fact would be deepened in those who knew that the unsigned articles in Leigh Hunt's Reflector, on Hogarth and the tragedies of Shakespeare, were from the same hand, and that a prose writer of new and unique quality was showing above the dull level of the conventional essayist.
In 1817 Lamb and his sister left the Temple for rooms in Great Russell Street, Covent Garden. Next year an enterprising young publisher induced him to collect his scattered verse and prose in two neat volumes, as the Works of Charles Lamb, and this publication naturally paved the way for his being invited to join the staff of the London Magazine, then newly started. Lamb was required to contribute light prose essays, and was wisely allowed a free hand. His first essay appeared in August 1820, 'Recollections of the old South Sea House,' the public office in which his first small salary was earned, and where his elder brother had remained a high-placed and prosperous clerk. Lamb signed his first paper Elia, borrowing for a joke the name of a foreigner who had been fellow-clerk with him in the office. The signature was continued through Lamb's successive contributions to the magazine; and as he placed it on the title-page (without his own) of the first collected edition of the essays in 1823, it became indissolubly connected with the work. The series came to an end, as far as the London Magazine was concerned, in 1825. The Last Essays of Elia were collected in a second volume in 1833.
In August 1823 Charles and Mary quitted their rooms over the brazier's in Russell Street, and made their first experiment as householders in a cottage in Colebrooke Row, Islington, with the New River (into which George Dyer walked in broad daylight) flowing within a few feet of their front door. Moreover, they were now on the eve of making a pleasant addition to their household in the form of a young friend, the orphan daughter of an Italian teacher of languages at Cambridge. Charles and Mary Lamb virtually adopted Emma Isola, and she was treated as a member of their family until her marriage with Edward Moxon the publisher, in 1833.
Early in 1825 Lamb, who had been for some time failing in health, was allowed to resign his post in the India House, the directors liberally granting him as pension two-thirds of his then salary. Having now no tie to any particular neighbourhood, the brother and sister were free to wander. They took lodgings—and subsequently a house—at Enfield; but Mary Lamb's health becoming gradually worse and necessitating constant supervision, they parted with their furniture and gave up housekeeping. They finally removed to the neighbouring village of Edmonton, where in a small cottage, hard by the church, they spent the last year of their joint lives. It was a melancholy year. Lamb's own health was suffering. They had lost their young friend Emma Isola. The absence of settled occupation had not brought Lamb all the comfort he had looked for: the separation from his London friends, and the now almost continuous mental alienation of his sister, left him companionless, and with the death of Coleridge in the summer of 1834 the chief attractions of his life were gone. In December of the same year, while taking one day his usual walk on the London Road, he stumbled and fell, slightly injuring his face. The wound was in itself trifling, but erysipelas ensued, under which he rapidly sank, and he passed quietly away, without pain, on the 29th of December. He was buried in Edmonton churchyard. His sister survived him nearly thirteen years, and was buried by his side in May 1847.
Lamb's place in literature is unique and unchallengeable. As a personality he is more intimately known to us than any other figure in literature, unless it be Samuel Johnson. He is familiar to us through his works, which throughout are composed in the form of personal confidences; through his many friends who have loved to make known his every mood and trait; and through his letters, the most fascinating body of correspondence in our language. It is a dangerous thing to say, but it may be doubted whether, outside a necessarily limited circle, his works are read so much for their own sakes as for the light they throw upon the character of their author. It is the harmonious concord of dissonances in Lamb that is the secret of his attraction. The profound and imaginative character of his criticism, which at its best is unerring, and with it the reckless humour of the Bohemian and the furgeur; the presence of one lamentable weakness serving to throw into stronger relief the patient strength of his life-struggle; his loyalty and generosity to his friends, even when they abused it most; and all this flowing from one of the most beautiful acts of devotion in the records of self-sacrifice: the wild fun of Trinculo and Stephano, alternating with the tenderness of Miranda and Ferdinand, or the profound philosophic musings of Prospero—and all these, like Ariel, now 'flaming distinctly,' now 'meeting and joining'—it is this wondrous blending of opposites that has made Lamb, save to the 'sour-complexioned' and matter of fact, one of the most dearly loved among English men of letters, and with every sign that this love is one which no changes of taste are likely to diminish.
Our chief authorities for Lamb are his own writings, and the Life and Letters, and Final Memorials, by the late Mr Justice Talfourd. Later editions of these works have appeared, enlarged by Percy Fitzgerald and W. C. Hazlitt. There is a quite separate memoir of Lamb, of considerable interest, by the late B. W. Procter ('Barry Cornwall'). Another memoir, and a complete edition of Lamb's works and correspondence, by the writer of the present article, are published by Messrs Macmillan. E. V. Lucas's Lamb and the Lloyds (1898) should also be cited as an interesting work.