Charles Lamb - Selected works

Essayist and poet, born in London, UK. He studied at Christ's Hospital, and worked as a clerk for the East India Company (1792–1825). He achieved success through joint publication with his sister, Mary (1764–1847), of Tales from Shakespear (1807), and they followed this by other works for children. In 1796 his mother was killed by his sister Mary in a fit of insanity. He himself was for a short time mentally deranged (1795–6), but continued to look after his sister at his house in Islington until his death. In 1818 he published his collected verse and prose, and was invited to join the staff of the new London Magazine. This led to his best-known works, the series of essays under his pseudonym, the Essays of Elia (1823–33).

Charles Lamb (10 February 1775 –- 27 December 1834) was an English essayist, 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. 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.

Charles and his sister Mary both suffered periods of mental illness, and Charles spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital during 1795. In 1799, John Lamb died, leaving Charles Lamb (age 24) to carry on as best he could.

Despite Lamb's bouts of melancholia, both he and his sister enjoyed an active and rich social life. 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. In 1797 he met the Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, on his short summer holiday with Coleridge at Nether Stowey, and thereby also struck 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. 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. 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. Lamb is buried in All Saints' Churchyard, Edmonton, Greater London. His sister, who was ten years his senior, survived him for more than a dozen years.

Selected works

Blank Verse, poetry, 1798 Pride's Cure, poetry, 1802 Tales from Shakespeare, 1807 The Adventures Of Ulysses, 1808 Specimens of English Dramatic poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare, 1808 On The Tragedies Of Shakepeare, 1811 Essays Of Elia, 1823 The Last Essays Of Elia, 1833