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Elective English–I

Notes His time with William Bird did not last long, however, because by October 1782 Lamb was
enrolled in Christ’s Hospital, a charity boarding school chartered by King Edward VI in 1552.
Christ’s Hospital was a traditional English boarding school; bleak and full of violence. The
headmaster, Mr. Boyer, became famous for his teaching in Latin and Greek, but also for his
brutality. A thorough record of Christ’s Hospital in Several essays by Lamb as well as the
Autobiography of Leigh Hunt and the Biographia Literaria of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with
whom Charles developed a friendship that would last for their entire lives, can be found.
Despite the brutality Lamb got along well at Christ’s Hospital, due in part, perhaps, to the fact
that his home was not far distant thus enabling him, unlike many other boys, to return often
to the safety of home. Years later, in his essay “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,”
Lamb described these events, speaking of himself in the third person as “L.”
“I remember L. at school; and can well recollect that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and
other of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived in town, and were near at hand; and he
had the privilege of going to see them, almost as often as he wished, through some invidious
distinction, which was denied to us.”

Christ’s Hospital was a typical English boarding school and many students later wrote of the
terrible violence they suffered there. The upper master of the school from 1778 to 1799 was
Reverend James Boyer, a man renowned for his unpredictable and capricious temper. In one
famous story Boyer was said to have knocked one of Lee Hunt’s teeth out by throwing a copy
of Homer at him from across the room. Lamb seemed to have escaped much of this brutality,
in part because of his amiable personality and in part because Samuel Salt, his father’s employer
and Lamb’s sponsor at the school was one of the institute’s Governors.
Charles Lamb suffered from a stutter and this “an inconquerable impediment” in his speech
deprived him of Grecian status at Christ’s Hospital and thus disqualifying him for a clerical
career. While Coleridge and other scholarly boys were able to go on to Cambridge, Lamb left
school at fourteen and was forced to find a more prosaic career. For a short time he worked
in the office of Joseph Paice, a London merchant and then, for 23 weeks, until 8 February 1792,
held a small post in the Examiner’s Office of the South Sea House. Its subsequent downfall in
a pyramid scheme after Lamb left would be contrasted to the company’s prosperity in the first
Elia essay. On 5 April 1792 he went to work in the Accountant’s Office for British East India
Company, the death of his father’s employer having ruined the family’s fortunes. Charles
would continue to work there for 25 years, until his retirement with pension.

LAMB is the heir to the eighteenth-century essayists, but with a richer imagination and
a more delicate sensibility. He is an essayist rather than a story-teller,—an essayist of an
intense individuality. But he could dream as the other poets could; and here is one of
them, contained in the “Essays of Elia,” published in 1822.

In 1792 while tending to his grandmother, Mary Field, in Hertfordshire, Charles Lamb fell in
love with a young woman named Ann Simmons. Although no epistolary record exists of the
relationship between the two, Lamb seems to have spent years wooing Miss Simmons. The
record of the love exists in several accounts of Lamb’s writing. Rosamund Gray is a story of
a young man named Allen Clare who loves Rosamund Gray but their relationship comes to
nothing because of the sudden death of Miss Gray. Miss Simmons also appears in several Elia
essays under the name “Alice M.” The essays “Dream Children,” “New Year’s Eve,” and
several others, speak of the many years that Lamb spent pursuing his love that ultimately
failed. Miss Simmons eventually went on to marry a silversmith by the name of Bartram and
Lamb called the failure of the affair his ‘great disappointment.’

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