SEMESTER IV

Paper: CC 9

TOPIC – CHARLES LAMB AS AN ESSAYIST OF THE ROMANTIC AGE

(Tutorial Exam, 2024)

CU Roll No: 2222224-21-0016

CU Reg. No: 224-1111-0255-22

Name: Rohan Mojumder

College Roll: 2330
Date of Submission: 20.06.2024
The romantic period is a term applied to the literature of approximately the first third of the
nineteenth century. During this time, literature began to move in channels that were not
entirely new but were in strong contrast to the standard literary practice of the eighteenth
century. Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic
dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics
argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of
expressive art for the individual and society.

In the Romantic literary period, the works of many of the well-known authors and poets are
usually classified by genre based on not only the time in which they were produced, but their
essential form and the subject matters. Charles Lamb chronologically falls within the same
category as these authors and poets, but his works differ from the other well-known works
both thematically and in form. While his works in some cases have similarities to the works
of the Victorians who followed, his use of different literary tools helped him to create an
individual Romantic style, but still similar enough to situate him into the genre. After
understanding the qualities of both the Romantic and Victorian periods, it is easy to see that
his works fall into the category of Romantic, and after looking into the essay form’s history,
Lamb’s choice in this form be better understood.

Charles Lamb’s most popular and successful works took the form of the essay. As an essayist
whose works were being produced during the period of British Romanticism, Charles Lamb’s
works differed in form from the works of other Romantic writers of that time who often
chose poetry as their mode of expression, but in subject and artistic ability, his body of work
was similar to his many well-known contemporaries. Some aspects of his writings, such as
certain subjects and his stylistic choices, make his work difficult to categorize as Romantic or
Victorian era. Although Lamb was writing in a form that many of the Victorians who
followed him chose to use as well, his work has many characteristics that situate his work as
an essayist and poet among the English Romantics. While his extensive use of the essay
seems to make his work fall outside of the typical works from the romantic period, Lamb’s
use of the essay was strategic and purposeful to help him achieve a Romantic effect; Lamb’s
ability to create works that are situated in with the Romantics while using a form and subjects
that are unusual to what is generally thought of when discussing the Romantic period shows
his impressive and artistic abilities as an essays and as a writer during this time period.

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. The essays are personal in nature, and are
somewhat fictionalised stories of himself. It tells us about his deepest regrets and the life he
would have had if he made certain different decisions. 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 characterised 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.

Like many fellow Romantics, he often employs purple prose and shows off his sharp wit, but
the essays themselves remain accessible and often fun. Other Elia essays include – “Old China”
,“A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig”, “ The South-Sea House”, “ Ellistoniana”, “Grace before
Meat” and “ The Praise of Chimney Sweepers”. “The Superannuated Man” is a personal essay
in which the writer vents his feelings after he gave up his job prematurely. The essay begins
with an address to the reader wherein he painfully utters that he has wasted the golden years of
his life– the shining youth– in the irksome confinement of an office. Another of Lamb’s famous
collection was Tales from Shakespeare which did appeal to the children. He would actually
write it in collaboration with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764 - 1847). Charles Lamb also had an
older brother, John, named after their father, as well as four other brothers and sisters who
would not survive their infancy. Lamb would come to be described by his main biographer,
E.V. Lucas, as the most touching character in English literature.

Lamb’s 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 daughters face is to the mother and he cannot 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. 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. In the essay "New Year's Eve," which first appeared in the
January 1821 issue of The London Magazine, Lamb reflects wistfully on the passage of time.

To conclude we can see that Lambs essays are very personal. They possess humor 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.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

TEXTS:

• Daishes, David. Critical Approaches to Literature. Prentice-Hall, 1956.

• Greenblatt, Stephen. Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th ed., vol. 2,

W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2012.

• Lamb, Charles. The Portable Charles Lamb. Edited by John Mason. Brown,
Viking, 1965.

• Lazar, David and Madden, Patrick. After Montaigne : Contemporary Essayists

Cover the Essays. University of Georgia Press, 2015.

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• https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/s/shelleys-poems/critical-
essay/understanding-the-romantic-period