Charles Lamb

Lamb, Charles (1775–1834), essayist, was born at 2 Crown Office Row in the Temple, London, on 10 February 1775, the son of John Lamb (c.1725–1799), a servant, and Elizabeth, née Field (d. 1796).

Family and early years

John Lamb was the son of a cobbler, and grew up near Stamford in Lincolnshire before entering domestic service, first in Lincoln and Bath, and then in London, where he had arrived by 1746. He spent the final decades of his working life acting as indispensable and versatile factotum to Samuel Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple, a role in which Lamb commemorates him (as Lovel) in his essay ‘The old benchers of the Inner Temple’. Salt, a widower, had been the whig MP for Liskeard since 1768, and served on the governing board for several hospitals, including Christ's Hospital. He lived in chambers above the Lambs, and owned a fine library, to which the young Charles was given access. John Lamb was the author of Poetical Pieces on Several Occasions (published about 1777), so he may have passed on a literary disposition to his son; less happily, his family was said by some to have a history of the lunacy whose effects so strongly shadowed his son's life.

Lamb's mother's mother, Mary Field, had been in domestic service with William Plumer of Blakesware; after his death she continued in service with Plumer's widow, and then stayed on as caretaker of Blakesware. The young Charles was a visitor there, as he records in his evocative essays ‘Blakesmoor in H—shire’ and ‘Dream-children’.

Of John and Elizabeth Lamb's seven children only three survived infancy. The eldest, John, was born in 1763, and left home to continue his education at Christ's Hospital when he was five. Mary Anne Lamb, to be known as Mary, was born on 3 December 1764. She seems not to have been a favourite with her mother, and freely bestowed her affection on her brother Charles, born ten years later.

The Lamb household, full of strong female influences, also included Sarah Lamb, known as Hetty, the sister of Charles's father. She and Elizabeth hated each other ‘with a bitter hatred’, according to Mary in 1803, though they were somewhat reconciled in their last years. Hetty, who doted on the young Charles, was one of the first eccentrics whom he cherished. Her theological reading, in particular, was ecumenical and unorthodox to the point of impropriety: she appears in the essay ‘My relations’ and in the story of Maria Howe in Mrs Leicester's School.

There are few details of the first years of Charles Lamb's life. From his earliest years he was a chronic stammerer. Some reports suggest he contracted smallpox when five years old. It seems that he took lessons with a Mrs Reynolds, née Chambers, on whom, with characteristic loyalty, he later conferred a pension. About 1781 he passed on to the academy of Mr William Bird off Fetter Lane, London. One early story nicely anticipates his habits of humorous and independent thought: the young Charles, puzzled by the uniformly eulogistic character of graveyard inscriptions, turned to his sister and asked: ‘Mary, where are the naughty people buried?’ (Courtney, 8).

Christ's Hospital

Lamb was formally entered for Christ's Hospital on 7 July 1782, and he was able to begin his education there when a vacancy occurred on 9 October of that year. It was through the patronage of Salt, a governor of the school, that Lamb in spite of the relatively straitened family finances was able to follow his brother John in profiting from the liberal education offered at one of the best schools of the day. The school was at this time located in Newgate Street, opposite the prison, and was presided over in disciplinarian style by the Revd James Boyer, headmaster from 1778 to 1799, though the severity of his influence was balanced by the delinquent laxity of another teacher, the Revd Matthew Field. However, the main influence on the young Charles came not from his teachers, but from his schoolmate Samuel Taylor Coleridge (three years Lamb's senior), with whom he maintained a close friendship. The school in these years was distinguished by remarkable students, including Leigh Hunt and Valentine LeGrice. There was an expectation that the abler boys would proceed from the school to university and then the church; but Lamb's stammer (like Hunt's) was thought to make him unfit for this, and so he left at only fifteen. Lamb has left us a wonderfully vivid record of the school in his two essays ‘Recollections of Christ's Hospital’ (1813) and ‘Christ's Hospital five-and-thirty years ago’ (1820). In the first of these he suggests that the school endowed pupils with a sense of right and wrong, and a strong religious consciousness; but he also emphasizes the possibilities of freedom within its régime, and a turn for romance which it fostered in him. The second essay is written as if in reply to Coleridge's grumbling at the idealism of the first, and it adds some darker notes, including much detailing of punishments, and mention of the constant shortage of food for those pupils who didn't, like Lamb, have a devoted aunt bringing them daily food packages.

From Christ's Hospital to the death of Mrs Lamb

Lamb left Christ's Hospital in 1791, and his first employment thereafter was as a sort of secretary to the kindly businessman Joseph Paice, whose character is commemorated in the essay ‘Modern gallantry’. As Samuel Salt had done, Paice offered Charles access to his fine library, and his taste for Elizabethan literature may have influenced the young Lamb. At some point after this Lamb had a temporary position at the South Sea House, but by February 1792 he was staying at Blakesware with old Mrs Field, who was dying of cancer. It was at this time that he met Ann Simmons, the Anna of his early love sonnets. It is hard to know how far this love was an affair of the imagination only, but at any rate it inspired some of Lamb's early poetry of 1792–5, and is probably also reflected in the love of Allan Clare and Rosamund Gray in the novel Rosamund Gray. Not much is heard of Ann Simmons until 1799, when she married John Thomas Bartram and moved to London. According to Southey, she dined twice with Lamb in May 1799 and was then pronounced by him to be ‘a stupid girl’ (Courtney, 77).

On 15 April 1792 Lamb joined the East India Company, where he served for thirty-three years as clerk in the accountant's department, never seeking promotion, probably to safeguard the time he could devote to looking after his sister in her ill health. De Quincey's Literary Reminiscences includes a vivid account of his first meeting with Lamb (‘positively the most hospitable man I have known in this world’) at work. His job seems at times to have kept him consumingly busy, but at other times left him free to write long letters at work.

Lamb resumed an intense friendship with Coleridge during the latter's time in London in December 1794. His enthusiasm for Unitarianism, especially that of Joseph Priestley, was no doubt influenced by his former schoolfriend, and he looked above all to Coleridge for support, as his correspondence records, during the tribulations of the following years. The earliest of these was the collapse of Lamb's own mental health: he spent six weeks in an asylum in Hoxton in 1795, when he wrote to Coleridge: ‘I am got somewhat rational now, & don't bite any one. But mad I was—& many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume if all told’ (Letters of Charles Lamb, 1.4). The association of lunacy, imagination, and literary output should serve as a reminder of how much Lamb's literary origins borrow from the extremities of English Romanticism, even though he was to temper his later and best-known writings to a quieter style. Lamb never again lost his own sanity, but the fear that he might do must have added a terrible anxiety to his life.

The decisively dreadful incident of madness, however, was not to be Charles's, but that of his sister Mary. In September 1796 Mary Lamb in a fit of mania killed their mother Elizabeth. The jury bringing in a verdict of lunacy, Mary was removed to Hoxton asylum; her sanity recovered, she was to be allowed to return home only on condition that a family member undertook her care. In doing so, Charles made the momentous decision to devote his life to his sister, a resolve he kept to steadily. Whatever his later religious convictions, his letters of this time suggest that he drew on a deep vein of religious feeling in finding strength to deal with the family tragedy. Procter's Memoir suggests that he lived in a state of constant anxiety about his sister's health, which most years required her to spend time in an asylum. The history of Mary's madness was not disclosed to the public until Thomas Noon Talfourd's Final Memorials of Charles Lamb (1848). Charles and Mary lived together until his death, but moved lodging eight times between 1799 and 1823, probably on occasions because Mary's history was known to neighbours. However, in her calmer periods, Mary acted as a stabilizing influence on her brother, and her good sense, kindness, and social competence were attested by many contemporaries.

Early writings, literary associations, 1796–1802

The late 1790s saw Lamb commencing a quietly promising literary career. At Coleridge's instigation, he contributed fifteen poems to Poems, second edition, by S. T. Coleridge, to which are now added poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd, published in June 1797. Lamb and Lloyd appeared again together in May 1798 as co-authors of Blank Verse: Lamb's friendship with the Quaker Lloyd family fed into his essay ‘A Quaker's meeting’. The brilliant but perverse Charles Lloyd also dedicated his novel Edmund Oliver (1798) to Lamb, which prompted a brief falling-out with Coleridge, the thinly disguised prototype of the title figure. Blank Verse included the poem which was to become Lamb's most enduringly popular, ‘The Old Familiar Faces’—a strikingly elegiac work from its young author. Edmund Blunden comments on Lamb's early poems that:

These sonnets of lost or fancied love, these soliloquies on altered fortune, on family history, on friendship and on loneliness, on the mystery of things and the eternal foundations of man in the divine, form altogether quite an individual ‘progress’ of poetry. (Blunden, 19)

Lamb continued to compose poetry throughout his life, but he turned increasingly to prose, like his contemporaries Scott and Coleridge. His early versatility is suggested by the appearance in the summer of 1798 of his novel Rosamund Gray, one of whose admirers was Percy Shelley.

In July 1797 Lamb had been able to accept Coleridge's invitation to visit him and his young family in Nether Stowey in Somerset—a visit which required leave of absence from East India House, and arrangements to be made for the care of Lamb's increasingly senile father (Aunt Hetty had died in February 1797). There he met (among others) Thomas Poole, John Cruikshank, Gilbert Burnett, and above all William and Dorothy Wordsworth, who remained lifelong friends. The visit has also become famous for Coleridge's poem ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’, with its warm tribute to Lamb as ‘my gentle-hearted Charles’—whose gratitude was tempered by exasperation at ‘gentle’: it ‘almost always means poor-spirited’ (Letters of Charles Lamb, 1.218), he wrote in one letter to Coleridge, and in another ‘substitute drunken dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd-ey'd, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the Gentleman in question’ (ibid., 1.224).

In 1799 Lamb's father died, and Mary moved in with Charles at 36 Chapel Street in Pentonville. In 1799–1800 he was on close and friendly terms with William Godwin, through whom he met Richard Porson, Horne Tooke, and James Perry, among others who remained friends. (Lamb's biographers tend to find themselves dealing with this period of his life in terms of his friendships; in both his life and writings friendship is of central importance.) Both Lamb and Godwin were working on plays at this time, Lamb on John Woodvil and Godwin on Antonio, staged at Drury Lane Theatre. Lamb provided the prologue and epilogue for the disastrous Antonio, and had some stagestruck but doomed hopes for its success. Lamb kept belief in John Woodvil, which has some fine passages, and shows how deeply he had been influenced by Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, notably the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher and of Massinger.

Theatre and children's literature, 1802–1815

During the 1800s Lamb tried his hand at journalistic writing, theatre, and children's literature. Daniel Stuart employed him for the Morning Post to write joky poems and prose, first for five or six weeks in early 1802, then for a longer period from September 1803 until probably April or May 1804. He later feelingly reminisced on the drudgery of producing drollery on demand, partly a relief from the routines of office work at the East India Company, but partly a supplementary routine of its own. When this work ended, he—and soon Mary as well—began writing for children, at the instigation of the Godwins, who published books for children (albeit not under Godwin's own controversial name). Their first effort was the children's verses of The King and Queen of Hearts (1805), and the more enduring Tales from Shakespear, re-casting the plays as prose narratives suitable for children. The tales were published under Charles's name in January 1807, Charles having written half of the preface and adapted some of the tragedies, while Mary had completed the substantial rest of the collection. Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses came out in 1808, as did the collaboration with Mary on Mrs Leicester's School (though it is dated 1809), of which Charles wrote three of the ten stories. Brother and sister collaborated again on Poetry for Children, published in two volumes in 1809 by Mrs Godwin. The two unmarried siblings write engagingly for children, emphasizing the virtues of ‘charity, tolerance, thoughtfulness’ (Lucas, 1.296), as Lamb's biographer E. V. Lucas says.

Charles was also actively engaged in drama during the decade, both theatrical criticism and writing for the theatre. In June 1806 his farce Mr. H was accepted for playing at Drury Lane Theatre. It opened on 10 December, disastrously, with Lamb, according to Crabb Robinson, joining in the audience's hissing. In America, by an odd quirk of cultural history, it did rather well. Charles was not so far deterred that he failed to undertake a further farce, The Pawnbroker's Daughter, drawing on the lessons learned, but still weak: Lamb had a genius for comedy, but not for the theatre. He spent his summer holidays in 1807 working in the British Museum on the Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, a project to which he had given desultory attention over many years, and which was published by Longmans in 1808. The work was at once recognized for its critical insight and originality, and Lamb himself remained proud of the book, which Edmund Blunden has called ‘the most striking anthology perhaps ever made from English literature’ (Blunden, 22).

These were years in which Lamb became well known to many of the most interesting and influential figures in the London literary world. Among them was the other great essayist of the generation, William Hazlitt, who painted his portrait of Lamb as a Venetian senator in 1804, and with whom Lamb shared a critical enthusiasm for painting. Lamb was a collector of both prints (especially of the Renaissance masters) and books. Crabb Robinson brings out the spirit of Lamb's bibliophilia charmingly, describing ‘the finest collection of shabby books I ever saw; such a number of first-rate works of genius, but filthy copies, which a delicate man would really hesitate touching’ (Lucas, 2.121). Charles and Mary started giving weekly soirées in 1806, at first on Wednesday evenings and later Thursdays; accounts of these convivial and eclectic occasions are among the main biographical sources we have. Lamb's drinking was often a social help and sometimes a social problem; Mary was already writing to Dorothy Wordsworth in 1803: ‘Charles is very well and very good I mean very sober but he is very good in every sense of the word’ (Letters of Charles Lamb, 2.118). Drink seems to have been important to Lamb, partly because it helped him overcome his stammer and partly in more general terms as a way of releasing inhibitions; but at times he got disgracefully drunk, as can be read between the lines of the loyal reminiscences of his friends. These were after all Regency times, though Lamb tends not to be thought of as a Regency author; and Lamb's drinking did not at any rate prevent him from holding down his job and meeting his other onerous responsibilities. Probably it helped him. Lamb's own ‘Confessions of a drunkard’ was published in 1813; there has been some dispute about how far the piece is autobiographical—Crabb Robinson for one thought it pretty accurate. He sometimes tried to give up alcohol, but not so frequently as tobacco, his other ruling vice as he tended to see it.

In 1809 Charles and Mary moved from Mitre Court Buildings, where they had lived since 1801, to 4 Inner Temple Lane. Lamb's literary output slowed down after the publication of the Dramatic Specimens, but he contributed four essays to Leigh Hunt's The Reflector (1810–11), an important foretaste of his major literary efforts to follow. That he was friends with Hunt during this period, visiting him in gaol and contributing to The Examiner risky verses hostile to the prince regent, indicates how far his political allegiances were and remained on what would now be regarded as the liberal left.

London life and the essays of Elia, 1815–1825

During the next decade Lamb became well known among the main figures on London's cultural scene. Not only was he as a writer rich in reminiscences, but he was the frequent occasion of reminiscences in the essays and correspondence of his contemporaries—notably Hazlitt, De Quincey, Procter, Haydon, and Crabb Robinson. One of the most memorable of these accounts is Haydon's description of the ‘immortal dinner’ Lamb hosted in December 1817, with a gathering including Keats, Wordsworth, and a Mr Kingston, Wordsworth's superior in his office as distributor of stamps. The occasion was described by Haydon as a genial battle of Bohemia versus bureacracy, with Lamb featuring as by some way the unruliest of the poets.

Life at the East India Company seems to have become easier for Lamb in the middle of the decade. In 1816 his salary went up, and his duties diminished (though these always fluctuated with the contingencies of trade). The Olliers published his Works in two volumes in 1818, partly through the friendly influence of Leigh Hunt. Lamb's literary output had fallen away in the preceding years, so he may in 1818 have thought this edition likely to be his main literary monument. He complained in a letter of this year (to Mary Wordsworth) that he was plagued by visitors (as often, disguising a real unhappiness with a jocular tone), and the joint demands of his job and his companionableness made it difficult for him to find time for writing.

In 1818 Lamb proposed marriage, evidently with Mary's blessing, to the actress Fanny Kelly. He had praised her in print, but was very little acquainted with her. She declined the offer, but they became firm friends. She died unmarried at ninety-two.

In 1820 Lamb began writing essays under the pseudonym Elia for John Scott's London Magazine. Elia was, to those who knew him, recognizably Lamb himself, and he drew freely on his memories and his own correspondence for the essays, but Elia was somewhat more unworldly, whimsical, and elegiac than his author; and the contrivance of the dramatic persona released an easy eloquence and emotional fluency seldom seen in Lamb's previous writings. Over the next few years Lamb wrote most of the essays for which he is best remembered, collected as Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833).

Among Lamb's publications of 1823 is the remarkable ‘Letter to Southey’, written in response to an incidental remark of Southey's in the Quarterly Review calling Elia ‘a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling, to be as delightful as it is original’. Lamb responded with unusual anger, in his self-defence impugning both Southey's judgement and his character. The nature of Lamb's religious beliefs puzzled some of his friends. Crabb Robinson reported that his ‘impressions against religion are unaccountably strong, and yet he is by nature pious’, concluding: ‘It is the dogmatism of theology which has disgusted him, and which alone he opposes’ (Lucas, 2.122). His conversation was at times daringly and provocatively anti-religious, at times more playfully unsolemn. ‘I am determined’, he said, ‘that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion if they can find out what it is’ (Letters of Charles Lamb, 3.247). The ‘Letter to Southey’ espouses an ecumenically tolerant sense of the varieties of religious experience: ‘the shapings of our heavens are the modifications of our constitution’ (Lucas, 2.109), he wrote, in a fine phrase unlikely to please either party of contemporary zealots, the atheistical or the orthodox Anglican. A magnanimous exchange of letters soon reconciled Lamb and Southey; Lamb's part in the brief controversy also impressed Hazlitt enough to prompt him to seek a reconciliation of the falling-out he had had with Lamb. In 1824 Hazlitt included as many as eighteen of Lamb's poems and two excerpts from John Woodvil in his Select British Poets, and in the following year wrote a fine appreciation of him in The Spirit of the Age.

The year 1821 was darkened by the death of Lamb's elder brother John, recalled as Cousin James Elia in ‘My relations’, and remembered also in the essay ‘Dream-children’ published in the following year. In 1823 Charles and Mary moved to Colebrooke Row in Islington, at this time a semi-rural setting. Their house stood next to the New River. In this year they adopted Emma Isola, the daughter of Charles Isola, who had served in the position of esquire bedell at Cambridge University. The Lambs first met Emma in Cambridge in the summer of 1820 when she was nine; after that she frequently visited them for holidays, and they adopted her when Charles Isola, her only surviving parent, died.

Years of retirement, 1825–1834

In 1825, after thirty-three years' work, Lamb was able to retire from the East India Company on the grounds of his declining health. His salary at this time was £730 per annum, leaving him with a comfortable pension of £450. At first delighted by the new freedoms, Lamb came to miss the companionship at work, and the anchoring regularity it brought to his life, as he wrote in the essay ‘The superannuated man’.

Despite his new leisure, Lamb wrote less in the last decade of his life. There were some contributions to William Hone's Table Book, and Hone became one of many friends for whom Lamb effectively petitioned in times of financial hardship; and he also wrote for other periodicals including the New Monthly Magazine, Blackwood's, the Englishman's Magazine, and The Athenaeum. Lamb also published two books: Album Verses and other Poems (1830), a volume whose modest title did not prevent it being roughly reviewed; and, more important, The Last Essays of Elia (1833), issued at the expensive price of 9s. Lamb continued in these years to meet many authors, and to be sought out by younger writers. Carlyle visited in 1831, and found Lamb deplorably wanting in earnestness, amid other sins which he denounced with even more than his usual violence in his journal. On the other hand, Landor, also noted for his stringency, expressed great affection and esteem for both Charles and Mary.

In 1827 the Lambs moved to Enfield, Middlesex. Lamb became a great walker in these latter years, often fuelled by beer—though it was when he went to London that his drinking became less controlled. Mary's illnesses increased in severity and length as the 1820s continued, and this in turn took a toll on Charles's health, though the loving co-dependence of the two never wavered. However, as Lamb's biographer E. V. Lucas wrote in 1905 (in what is—remarkably—the most recent full-length biography), ‘the history of his life between 1825–1834 makes sad reading’ (Lucas, 2.146). Accounts often suggest he was in a bad way, through depression, or nervous exhaustion, or just drinking too much. It seems clear that Lamb in his later years had become what would now be called an alcoholic. Crabb Robinson in 1834 referred to ‘the destruction he is rapidly bringing on himself’ (ibid., 2.262). The great joy of these later years, to Charles and Mary, was Emma Isola, whom they had raised amid their own vicissitudes with devoted care. She became engaged to Edward Moxon (the young publisher of Lamb's last two works) in 1833, and married him that summer. The death of Coleridge in July 1834 was a grief which hastened Lamb's own end: ‘His great and dear spirit haunts me ... He was the proof and touchstone of all my cognitions.’ (ibid., 2.266) Lamb died on 27 December 1834 following a fall at his home, Walden's Cottage, Church Street, Edmonton, Middlesex, where he and Mary had moved in 1833, and was buried in the churchyard at Edmonton. Mary, his elder by ten years, survived him by thirteen years, only intermittently in her right mind, and was buried alongside him in 1847.

Assessment

There is a pivotal moment in the responses to Lamb's writings in Dorothy Richardson's novel Pilgrimage (c.1915), when Richardson's heroine Miriam reads ‘The superannuated man’ and says it ‘looks charming on the surface and is beautifully written and is really perfectly horrible and disgusting’ (Aaron, 85). It would be too simple to suggest that the nineteenth century found the charm and beauty in Lamb, leaving the twentieth to discover the horror and disgust; but there is an element of truth in the simple scheme. Victorian critics in particular made of Lamb a figure exemplary for fine feeling in his writing and self-sacrifice in his life. At one extreme, Thackeray is reported to have exclaimed, on reading one of Lamb's letters, ‘Saint Charles!’ (Lucas, 2.133) A generation later Swinburne waxed rhapsodic about Lamb's lovable merits as man and writer. Lamb's contemporaries preserved a sharper sense of the darker undercurrents in his work, the thwartings of impulse and experience of defeat which his comedy could at once contain and express. Lamb's friend P. G. Patmore, for instance, called him ‘a gentle, amiable and tender-hearted misanthrope. He hated and despised men with his mind and judgment’ (Courtney, 77–8); while William Hazlitt, who remains probably Lamb's best critic, noted that ‘His jokes would be the sharpest things in the world, but that they are blunted by his good-nature’. Hazlitt continued: ‘he wants malice, which is a pity’ (Lucas, 2.139), which brings out the difference in temperament between the two great essayists. Lamb's combination of levity and seriousness has been, and remains, a challenge to the flexibility and sense of nuance in his readers, as it was to his hearers; John Stoddart, for instance, noted of Lamb in conversation that his ‘bantering way with strangers was often employed by him as a mode of trying their powers of mind’ (Courtney, 289), and he could also at times use his stutter as a weapon in comic timing.

Lamb's writings were held in highest esteem, probably, in the fifty years from about 1870 to 1920. The qualities in him that could be seen as whimsy and sentimentality meant that his reputation fared less well during the professionalization of English literary studies, especially in its Leavisite phase. Later writers wishing to act as Lamb's advocates have looked to the more unsettling and darker notes of his writing, detecting in him another artist of Romantic anxiety (if not agony), and like Thomas McFarland finding in his charm ‘a politics of survival’ (McFarland, 26). On the other hand, Lamb has never been short of readers who respond to the forgiving friendliness of his manner, the novelistic vitality of his portraits, and the odd combination of the colloquial and the erudite in his prose style.

Early biographers and critics of Lamb tended to isolate his domestic circumstances from other contexts, but recent work of a historicist turn has given a fuller account of his involvement in historically turbulent times. After Lamb's death the editor Daniel Stuart said: ‘Of politics he knew nothing; they were out of his line of reading and thought’ (Courtney, 323). This view has been convincingly challenged, especially in relation to the years 1795–1802, when Lamb's literary associations (especially with Coleridge and Lloyd) were enough to have him categorized as a radical. Politically minded critics have also linked Lamb's partiality to drink, to theatre, and to conversational rudeness with late eighteenth-century expressions of socio-political discontent from Londoners oppositional to the governments of the day. In the mingling in his works of acquiescence with hints of protest, recent criticism has concentrated more on the latter strain. He continued to maintain boldly public associations with such provocatively dissident liberals as Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, and (in his later years) William Hone. However, partly because of the lack of a recent biography, a convincing account of Lamb's political allegiances in the 1820s and 1830s is still lacking.

Peter Swaab

Sources E. V. Lucas, The life of Charles Lamb, 2 vols. (1905); rev. edn (1907) · The works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 7 vols. (1903–5) · W. F. Courtney, Young Charles Lamb, 1775–1802 (1982) · The letters of Charles Lamb: to which are added those of his sister, Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols. (1935) · The letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. W. Marrs, 3 vols. (Ithaca, NY, 1975–8) [3 vols. of 6 so far pubd] · J. Aaron, A double singleness: gender and the writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (1991) · D. Cecil, A portrait of Charles Lamb (1983) · E. Blunden, Charles Lamb (1954) · Charles Lamb: selected prose, ed. A. Phillips (1985) · C. A. Prance, A companion to Charles Lamb (1980) · Charles Lamb Bulletin (1973–) · T. McFarland, Romantic cruxes: the English essayists and the spirit of the age (1987)

Archives Brown University, Providence, John Carter Brown Library, papers · Harvard U., Houghton L., papers · Hunt. L., letters and literary MSS · Morgan L., papers · NYPL, papers · Princeton University Library, letters and MSS from and about Lamb · Ransom HRC, papers · Rosenbach Museum and Library, papers · University of Kentucky Library, papers · V&A NAL, corresp. and literary MSS · Victoria University, Toronto, papers · Yale U., Beinecke L., papers :: BL, letters to Bernard Barton, Add. MS 35256 · CAC Cam., letters and notes to Charles Wentworth Dilke · DWL, letters to Henry Crabb Robinson · U. Leeds, Brotherton L., letters, mainly to Charles Cowden Clarke

Likenesses R. Hancock, pencil and chalk drawing, 1798, NPG · W. Hazlitt, oils, 1804, NPG [see illus.] · G. F. Joseph, watercolour stipple, 1819, BM · T. Wageman, portrait, 1824/5, repro. in T. N. Talfourd, Letters of Charles Lamb (1837) · H. Meyer, oils, 1826, BL OIOC; copy, NPG · F. S. Carey, double portrait, oils, 1834 (with his sister), NPG; see illus. in Lamb, Mary Anne (1764–1847) · W. Finden, stipple, pubd 1836 (after T. Wageman), NPG · H. Furniss, pen-and-ink, NPG · D. Maclise, etching, NPG · D. Maclise, sketch, V&A; repro. in Fraser's Magazine · B. Pulman, caricature, etching, BM · print (after B. Pulman), BM

Wealth at death £2000; plus £120 p.a. pension for Mary Lamb: Lucas, Life, 2.282, rev. edn, 682

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