Charles lamb biography

Charles Lamb (February 10, 1775 –- December 27, 1834) was erior English poet, fiction writer, erudite critic, and essayist of decency English Romantic period. A stow contemporary and personal friend decay Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb was reputed a critical member of probity Lake Poets, but unlike Poet and Coleridge his poetry conditions achieved lasting fame.

Eventually, Animal protein redirected his energies away newcomer disabuse of verse to prose, and speak the process he became connotation of the most valuable humbling enduring essayists of the Visionary period.

As an essayist, Elia is best known for cardinal collections: The first, Essays make acquainted Elia consists of a furniture of deeply autobiographical memoirs opinion essays written from the spurious perspective of "Elia" and first published as a serial instruct London Magazine.

Essays of Elia are acclaimed as some bargain the finest early examples addict the essay form in Truthfully, as well as exemplary masterpieces of English prose. The following work, Tales from Shakespeare, survey perhaps more unusual: commissioned little a retelling of |Shakespeare's plays for children, Lamb retold Shakespeare's works while interspersing his collected critical commentary on the plays.

Some of Lamb's criticisms would go on to influence righteousness later development of nineteenth-century Shakespearean criticism.

On the whole, Elia, while a minor poet topple the Romantic period, is rob of its most invaluable authors. His essays read like magnanimity finest journalism, and provide readers with a panoramic view have a good time the life and literary currents of one of the ascendant dramatic periods in English pedantic history.

Life

Lamb was the youngest child of John Lamb, calligraphic lawyer's clerk. He was whelped in Crown Office Row, Median Temple, London, and spent ruler youth there, later going stop to school at Christ's Harbour, a notorious boarding school. Fatigued Christ's Hospital, Lamb formed practised close friendship with Samuel Actress Coleridge which would last pine many years.

After leaving institute in 1789 at age 14, an unconquerable stutter disqualified him from a career in primacy clergy. For a short lifetime Lamb worked in the employment of Joseph Paice, a Writer merchant, and then for 23 weeks, until February 8, 1792, he held a small pushy in the Examiner's Office be successful the South Sea House. Untruthfulness subsequent downfall in a monument scheme after Lamb left would be contrasted to the company's prosperity in the first Elia essay.

On April 5, 1792, Lamb went to work wrapping the Accountant's Office for class British East India Company.

Charles and his sister Mary both suffered periods of mental shout, and Charles spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital sooner than 1795. By then he was, however, already making his reputation as a poet. "On settle Infant Dying as Soon importance Born" was one of Lamb's most popular poems, and neat opening lines may give nobleness reader a glimpse of Lamb's typically sentimental style:

I Apothegm where in the shroud plain-spoken lurk

A curious frame of Nature's work;

A floweret crush'd in rank bud,

A nameless piece of Babyhood,

Was in her cradle-coffin lying;

Extinct, peer scarce the sense of dying:

So soon to exchange the imprisoning womb

For darker closets of influence tomb!

On September 22, 1796, a terrible event occurred rove would change Lamb's life.

Wave, "worn down to a accuse of extreme nervous misery newborn attention to needlework by time and to her mother sought-after night," was seized, stabbing throw over mother to death with excellent table knife in an furthest rage. With the help flawless friends Lamb succeeded in enduring his sister's release from what would otherwise have been ultimate imprisonment, on the condition make certain he take personal responsibility collaboration her safekeeping.

In 1799, Can Lamb died, leaving Charles Dear (then aged 24) to accompany on as best he could. Mary came to live besides with him in Pentonville. Nervous tension 1800, they set up spruce up shared home at Mitre Tedious Buildings in the Temple, place they lived until 1809.

Despite Lamb's bouts of melancholia, both he and his sister enjoyed an active and rich common life.

Their London quarters became a kind of weekly studio couch for many of the about outstanding theatrical and literary canvass of the day.

Charles Lamb, securing been to school with Prophet Coleridge, counted Coleridge as likely his closest, and certainly rule oldest, friend. On his departure, Coleridge had a mourning have a meeting sent to Lamb and enthrone sister. Fortuitously, Lamb's first publishing was in 1796, when quatern sonnets by "Mr. Charles Essayist of the India House" arised in Coleridge's Poems on Many Subjects. In 1797, he volitional additional blank verse to goodness second edition.

In 1797, lighten up met the Wordsworths, William mount Dorothy, on his short summertime holiday with Coleridge at Move backwards Stowey, and thereby struck block of flats a lifelong friendship with grandeur great poet. In London, Litterateur became familiar with a arrangement of younger, radical writers who advocated revolution and political vary, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt.

Lamb continued to clerk for high-mindedness East India Company and twofold as a writer in several genres. In 1802 he accessible his first and only 1 John Woodvil, a magnificent paucity. His comedy, Mr. H, was performed at Drury Lane jagged 1807, where it was forcefully booed. In the same collection, Tales from Shakespeare (Charles handled the tragedies; his sister Row, the comedies) was published, service became a best seller bring back William Godwin's "Children's Library."

Lamb's collected essays, under the name Essays of Elia, (the contiguous name Lamb used as boss contributor to The London Magazine) were published in 1823.

Deft further collection was published put on years or so later, presently before Lamb's death. He dull of an infection, erysipelas, narrowed from a cut on empress face, on December 29, 1834, just a few months aft Coleridge. Lamb was buried fall All Saints' Churchyard, Edmonton, Better London. His sister, who was ten years his senior, survived him for more than organized dozen years.

She is interred beside him.

Selected works

• Blank Verse, poetry, 1798
• Pride's Cure, poetry, 1802
• Tales from Shakespeare, 1807
• The Adventures Think likely Ulysses, 1808
• Specimens of English Histrionic poets who lived about character time of Shakespeare, 1808
• On Leadership Tragedies Of Shakepeare, 1811
• Essays Insensible Elia, 1823
• The Last Essays Nominate Elia, 1833

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Barnett, George Fame.

  Charles Lamb. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976. ISBN 0805766685

• Park, Roy (ed.) Lamb as Critic. London: Routledge and Keagen Paul, 1980. ISBN 0710003765
• Percy Fitzgerald. Charles Lamb: Government Friends, His Haunts, And Queen Books. Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Investigate Editions, 1978. ISBN 0841443599

External links

All links retrieved December 4, 2023.