Charles Lamb: Dream Children

Q.) Critically comment on the existence of playful and serious elements in the essays of Lamb with
special reference to ‘Dream Children’. / Write a note on the blending of humour and pathos in
Lamb’s essays with particular reference to ‘Dream Children’. / Show how Lamb blends the trivial
with the seriousness in your prescribed essay.

Ans.) Charles Lamb (1775-1834) is undoubtedly one of the greatest essayists in English literature. He
was a pure artist and had no other aim save the reader’s pleasure and his own. One of the most
charming traits of his essays is their genuine and many-sided humour. Referring to humour and
pathos in Lamb’s essays Hallward and Hill say: “Lamb’s humour was largely the effect of a sane (=
rational) and healthy protest against the overwhelming melancholy induced by the morbid taint in
his mind. He laughed to save himself from weeping, but…….he could not prevent his mind from
passing at times to the sadder aspects of life.” Wordsworth called him “the frolic and the gentle”.
Out of kindness of soul and a feeling of humanity and a capacity for pure intellectual enjoyment
raised his spirit of humour; and Lamb’s humour includes pathos, fun, frolic and wit. About his gentle
humor Albert says: “It is this clashing of humours, like the chiming of sweet bells that affords the
chief delight to Lamb’s readers.”

There is an exquisite blending of humour and pathos in Lamb’s essays. Lamb’s life was so full of
disappointments and miseries that it becomes a tale of sorrows. He grew up with tears and sighs as
his companions. The manifold tragic incidents of his life ---- his early poverty, the insanity of his
sister, the tragic death of his mother, and his own disappointment in love ---- made deep wounds in
his heart and he internally suffered great pain. But he was kind-hearted and generous, and indulged
a little too much in fun and frolic, practical jokes and absurdities to forget his inner sadness and
grief. Though he laughed to save himself from weeping, he could not always control it. The result
was that on such occasions there was an uncontrollable gush of sorrowful feelings. It is for this
reason that we often find humour and pathos mingled in his writings. Ainger in his English Men of
Letters beautifully says: “With him, as with all true humorists, humour was but one side of an
acute and almost painful sympathy.”

Lamb’s humour rests upon a deep fund of gravity. The most remarkable thing in his essays is the
intertwining (= link) of the ludicrous and pathetic elements in human nature. In most of his essays he
begins with laughter and ends with tears. His humour is most striking when it is allied with pathos.
He was a fine imaginative writer. He could easily place himself in the position of others and that is
why he always so full of sympathy for others.

The essay Dream Children is one of the most beautiful, imaginative, pathetic and poetic of all
Lamb’s essays and is most truly a work of genius. In this essay Lamb tells us about his grandmother
Mary Field, his brother John Lamb, and his beloved Ann Simmons. It is written in “and then ---- and
then” style which is very effective in the art of story-telling. It is a vision of Lamb’s frustrated life --- a
vision of “what might have been”, and Lamb describes it with poignancy and genuineness of feeling
which leaves the reader, as Mark Hunter says, “hesitating between two conflicting emotions,
admiration and pity”.

Lamb begins the essay, Dream Children, in a very light and natural mood and tells his ‘imaginary
children’ something about their grandmother Mary Field. There are numerous touches of humour in
the beginning in the amusing reactions of children at several stages of the story ---- John’s smiling at
the foolish behaviour of the rich man, Alice’s little right foot playing an involuntary movement on
hearing that her great-grandmother was esteemed the best dancer in her youth, and John’s
deposition back upon the plate a bunch of grapes on hearing that his father, in his boyhood, had
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more pleasure in “busy-idle diversions” than in the flavour of various kind of fruits. But the writer
becomes somewhat serious and his tone heightens as he goes on to tell the children something
about their uncle John Lamb who in his youth was very spirited and handsome. The writer describes
his brother’s sad story ---- that once in his life he became lame-footed and used to feel great pain.
Then he describes his brother’s death. The sad story of their uncle was too much for the children to
bear and they requested their father not to continue with it.

Then the writer becomes more serious as he proceeds to tell the children “some stories about
their pretty dead mother”. The essay rises to a great height of tragic intensity and, as Ainger says,
“closes with a burst of unutterable anguish”. There is real pathos in the essay when the figures of
the “dream children” begin to recede (= move away) and further away from the writer and, without
speech, they strangely impress upon him the effects of speech: “We are not of Alice, nor of thee,
nor are we children at all. We are nothing; less than nothing and dreams. We are only what might
have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have
existence, and a name”. And “immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor
arm-chair, when I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged in my side ---- but John L.
(or James Elia) was gone forever”.

Thus we see that there is a fine blending of humour and pathos in Lab’s essays and it is one of
the secrets of their charm and appeal. He proves that the springs of human laughter and tears do
not go separately as the life of man itself is a mingled tissue of pleasure and pain. To conclude with
Priestley who observes: “English humour at its deepest and tenderest seems in him (Lamb)
incarnate. He did not merely create it, he lived in it. His humour is not an idle thing but the white
flower plucked from a most dangerous nettle…….A deep tide of feeling is there all the time in
Lamb. His widest pranks are only a delightful splash and glitter on its surface.”

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