Charles Lamb (
London, 10 February 1775 –
Edmonton, 27 December 1834) was an
English essayist with Welsh heritage, best known for his
Essays of Elia and for the children's book
Tales from Shakespeare, which he produced along with his sister,
Mary Lamb (1764–1847).
Lamb was the youngest child of John Lamb, a lawyer's clerk. He was born in
Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, London, and spent his youth there, later going away to school at
Christ's Hospital. There he formed a close friendship with
Samuel Taylor Coleridge which would last for many years. After leaving school in 1789 at age 14, "an inconquerable impediment" in his speech disqualified him for a clerical career. For a short time he worked in the office of
Joseph Paice, a London merchant, and then for twenty-three weeks, until
8 February 1792, he held a small post in the Examiner's Office of the
South Sea House. Its subsequent downfall in a
pyramid scheme after Lamb left would be contrasted to the company's prosperity in the first Elia essay. On
April 5, 1792 he went to work in the Accountant's Office for
British East India Company, the death of his father's employer having ruined the family's fortunes.
Charles and his sister Mary both suffered periods of mental illness, and Charles spent six weeks in a
psychiatric hospital during 1795. He was, however, already making his name as a
poet. On
September 22, 1796, a terrible event occurred: Mary, "worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother at night," was seized with acute mania and stabbed her mother to the heart with a table knife. With the help of friends Lamb succeeded in obtaining his sister's release from what would otherwise have been lifelong imprisonment, on the condition that he take personal responsibility for her safekeeping. In 1799, John Lamb died, leaving Charles, aged 24, to carry on as best he could. Mary came to live again with him in Pentonville, and in 1800 they set up a shared home at Mitre Court Buildings in the Temple, where they lived until 1809.
Despite Lamb's bouts of
melancholia, both he and his sister enjoyed an active and rich social life. Their London quarters became a kind of weekly salon for many of the most outstanding theatrical and literary figures of the day. Charles Lamb, having been to school with Samuel Coleridge, counted Coleridge as perhaps his closest, and certainly his oldest, friend. On his deathbed, Coleridge had a mourning ring sent to Lamb and his sister. Fortuitously, Lamb's first publication was in 1796, when four sonnets by "Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House" appeared in Coleridge's
Poems on Various Subjects. In 1797 he contributed additional blank verse to the second edition, and met the Wordsworths,
William and
Dorothy, on his short summer holiday with Coleridge at
Nether Stowey, thereby also striking up a lifelong friendship with William. In London, Lamb became familiar with a group of young writers who favored political reform, including
Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt, and
Leigh Hunt.
Lamb continued to clerk for the East India Company and doubled as a writer in various genres, his
tragedy, John Woodvil, being published in 1802. His
farce, Mr H, was performed at
Drury Lane in 1807, where it was roundly booed. In the same year,
Tales from Shakespeare (Charles handled the tragedies; his sister Mary, the comedies) was published, and became a best seller for
William Godwin's "Children's Library."
In 1819, at age 44, Lamb, who, because of family commitments, had never married, fell in love with an actress, Fanny Kelly, of
Covent Garden, and proposed marriage. She refused him, and he died a bachelor. His collected essays, under the title
Essays of Elia, were published in 1823 ("Elia" being the pen name Lamb used as a contributor to the
London Magazine. A further collection was published ten years or so later, shortly before Lamb's death. He died of an infection,
erysipelas, contracted from a cut on his face, on
December 27, 1834, just a few months after Coleridge. From about 1828 Charles and Mary lived in Church Street, Edmonton, north of London (now in the borough of
Enfield. Lamb is buried in All Saints' Churchyard, Edmonton. His sister, who was ten years his senior, survived him for more than a dozen years. She is buried beside him.
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