I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. But organically I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising God Save the King all my life, whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary corners, and am not yet arrived, so they tell me, within many quavers of it. from A Chapter on Ears

Charles Lamb (1775-1834), essayist, poet, humorist, critic, letterwriter and friend, has an enduring literary reputation. His early Tales from Shakespeare (1807), written in collaboration with his sister Mary, and Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808) were followed in 1820 by the first of his sixty-seven Essays of Elia published in the London Magazine, which have been at the heart of his literary reputation ever since. Reading these essays draws one into Lamb's circle of friends, sitting by his fireside and enjoying the company of the most personal of English essayists.

This book contains a representative selection from his writings-essays, dramatic criticism, verse and letters-which demonstrates his literary achievements, and is at the same time his autobiography.

Jack Morpurgo was Professor in the School of English at the University of Leeds from 1969 to 1983. Author of histories, biographies and travel books, he has studied Charles Lamb and his contemporaries for many years, and has edited works by Leigh Hunt, Keats, Trelawny, Cobbett and Fenimore Cooper. The present volume, based on his much earlier book with the same title, has a larger selection of Lamb's writings, more extensive linking passages and a new introduction.

Table of Contents

Introduction

I MR CHARLES LAMB

In the Days of My Childhood

The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple

Blakesmoor in H-shire



And in My Joyful Schooldays

Christ's Hospital Five-and Thirty Years Ago



Strange Face of Calamity

Letter to Coleridge, 27 September 1796

Letter to Coleridge, 12 May 1800



Paragraph Spinner

Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago



The Phantom Ghost of Elia

A Character of the Late Elia, by a Friend



By Duty Chained

Work

Letter to Wordsworth, 7 April 1815

Letter to Wordsworth, 6 April 1825

The Superannuated Man

Popular Fallacies: That We Should Rise With the Lark

Another Popular Fallacy: That We Should Lie Down With the Lamb

Letter to Barton, 25 July 1829



A Glass Too Much

Letter to Cary, October 1834

Confessions of a Drunkard

Elia on his Confessions of a Drunkard



Merits and Demerits

An Autobiographical Sketch

The Blank Filled



II HE SERVES UP HIS FRIENDS

The Old Familiar Faces



Double Singleness

Letter to Sarah Hutchinson, 19 October 1815

Letter to Wordsworth, May 1833



God Almighty's Gentleman

Letter to Manning, 28 August 1800

Letter to Manning, Autumn 1800

Letter to Mrs Hazlitt, November 1823

Amicus Redivivus

Letter to Dyer, 22 February 1831



Logician, Metaphysician, Bard

Letter to Manning, 17 March 1800

Letter to Coleridge, Autumn 1820

The Two Races of Men

Letter to Collier, 10 December 1829

The Death of Coleridge



Three Yound Maids in Friendship Met

Hester

Letter to Asbury, April 1830

Letter to Moxon, 24 July 1833

Letter to Fanny Kelly, 20 July 1819

Letter from Fanny Kelly, 20 July 1819

Letter to Fanny Kelly, 20 July 1819



Charles Lamb & Co

Letter to Mrs Wordsworth

Many Friends



III THE IRATE ST CHARLES

The Irate St Charles

Letter to Coleridge, May 1798

Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esquire

On the Literary Gazette

Sonnet. St Crispin to Mr Gifford

The Triumph of the Whale



IV MORE HOUSE LAMB THAN GRASS LAMB

Letter to Manning, 28 November 1800

Letter to Wordsworth, 30 January 1801

The Londoner

Letter to Manning, 24 September 1802

Letter to Wordsworth, 9 August 1814

Written at Cambridge, 15 August 1819

Oxford in the Vacation

The Old Margate Hoy

Letter to Barron Field, 22 September 1822



V JUICES OF MEATS, INNOCENT VANTITIES AND JESTS

Grace before Meat

Letter to Coleridge, 9 March 1822

A Dissertation upon Roast Pig

Letter to Mr and Mrs Collier, 12 January 1823

Thoughts on Presents of Game, Etc.

Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age

Dream Children; A Reverie



VI CRITICAL AND ANTI-CRITICAL

The Front Row of the Pit

My First Play

Letter to Wordsworth, 11 December 1806

On the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres

Stage Illusion

On the Artifical Comedy of the Last Century

On the Tragedies of Shakespeare



C.L. is not Musical

To Clara Novello

A Chapter on Ears

Free Thoughts on Several Eminent Composers



A Good Judge of Prints and Picture

Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art



Notes of Some Contemporaries