Charles Lamb as a Romantic Essayist

Charles Lamb as a Romantic Essayist

Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb, an English writer is best known for his essays.  Although he wrote poems and books, he is mainly known as an essayist. E.V.Lucas, his principal biographer, has called him the most loved figure in English Literature.

Charles Lamb in his Essays of Elia, uses the pseudonym of Elia. Dream Children: A Reverie, is an essay from this collection which was published in the form of a book, this was later followed by the second volume titled Last Essays of Elia. Lamb’s writing style by nature is very romantic.

The Essays are very personal, as they are somewhat fictionalized stories of himself. It tells us of what his life would have been had he made different decisions in his life. In his essays, he mentions his family members often with different names. In Dream Children: A Reverie, he fantasizes his life, had he married his beloved Ann Simmons, who he calls Alice W. in the Elia essays.

Lamb is chiefly remembered for his “Elia” essays, which are celebrated for their witty and ironic treatment of everyday subjects. The “Elia” essays are characterized by Lamb’s personal tone, narrative ease, and wealth of literary allusions. Never didactic, the essays treat ordinary subjects in a nostalgic, fanciful way by combining humour, pathos, and a sophisticated irony ranging from gentle to scathing.

Lamb conjures up humour and pathos in his ‘Elian’ essays. Although Dream Children begins on a merry note, the dark side of life soon forces itself upon Lamb’s attention and the comic attitude gives way to melancholy at the end of the essay. Throughout the essay Lamb presents his children in such a way that we never guess that they are merely fragments of his imagination – their movements, their reactions, and their expressions are all realistic. It is only at the end of the essay that we realize that the entire episode with his children is a merely a daydream. We are awakened by a painful realization of the facts.

Babes in the Woods

The essay, Dreams Children in itself is quite melancholy as most romantic essays are. In it, Lamb reminisces his childhood by telling his children stories of when he was younger. The subject of death is mentioned very often. The fictionalized Charles Lamb, the father, tells his children stories of their deceased great- grand mother Field. He mentions that they recently had heard of the horrifying ballad of the Babes in the Wood. He also tells them stories of his deceased older brother John L. and how he misses him.

His essays are allusive, which is peculiar to romantic essays. Lamb, rambles throughout the narratives with ease and is able to return to the point. He often does it in his writings. This allusive quality is seen in Dream Children when he begins talking about his grandmother Field, he then rambles to talk of the house she worked in, and later to talk about the mantel piece carving of the Babes in the Wood. He also makes use of parentheses, which gives us an insight to the characters stream of consciousness. The parentheses in, Dream Children, mostly show us the observations of the father, which tell us more about the children’s expressions for dramatic emphasis.

Lambs essays are highly evocative, and the reader feels empathy towards the characters. This is a characteristic quality of the Romantic Essayists.  In Dream Children, the narrator comments on how similar the daughter’s face is to the mother and he can’t tell which of the two is in front of him, but only in the end do we realize that the entire story was just a fragment of his imagination.

“the most loved writer in English literature”
– E.V.Lucas on Lamb in his biography

His essays have a reflective quality; he talks about his schooling days in Christ’s Hospital in the essay, Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago wherein he speaks of himself in the third person as “L”. Rosamund Gray is another essay in which he reflects upon his feelings for Ann Simmons as the titular character and how their relationship doesn’t go too far due to Miss Gray passing away.

To conclude we can see that Lambs essays are very personal. They possess humour and pathos like most romantic works of literature. Lamb is also praised for his allusive quality which is noted by many literary critics. And above all he is highly evocative, a quality possessed by all Romantic writers.