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Unit 3: Charles Lamb-Dream Children : A Reverie-A Detailed Study

Family tragedy Charles and his sister Mary both suffered periods of mental illness. Charles Notes
spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital in 1795. He was, however, already making his name
as a poet.
On 22 September 1796, a terrible event occurred: Mary, “worn down to a state of extreme
nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother at night,” was seized
with acute mania and stabbed her mother to the heart with a table knife.
Although there was no legal status of ‘insanity’ at the time, a jury returned a verdict of
‘Lunacy’ and therefore freed her from guilt of willful murder. With the help of friends Lamb
succeeded in obtaining his sister’s release from what would otherwise have been lifelong
imprisonment, on the condition that he took personal responsibility for her safekeeping. Lamb
used a large part of his relatively meagre income to keep his beloved sister in a private
‘madhouse’ in Islington called Fisher House.
The 1799 death of John Lamb was something of a relief to Charles because his father had been
mentally incapacitated for a number of years since suffering a stroke. The death of his father
also meant that Mary could come to live again with him in Pentonville, and in 1800 they set
up a shared home at Mitre Court Buildings in the Temple, where they lived until 1809.
Despite Lamb’s bouts of melancholia and alcoholism, both he and his sister enjoyed an active
and rich social life. Their London quarters became a kind of weekly salon for many of the most
outstanding theatrical and literary figures of the day. Charles Lamb, having been to school
with Samuel Coleridge, counted Coleridge as perhaps his closest, and certainly his oldest,
friend. On his deathbed, Coleridge had a mourning ring sent to Lamb and his sister. Fortuitously,
Lamb’s first publication was in 1796, when four sonnets by “Mr. Charles Lamb of the India
House” appeared in Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects. In 1797 he contributed additional
blank verse to the second edition, and met the Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, on his
short summer holiday with Coleridge at Nether Stowey, thereby also striking up a lifelong
friendship with William. In London, Lamb became familiar with a group of young writers
who favoured political reform, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt, and Leigh
Hunt.
Lamb continued to clerk for the East India Company and doubled as a writer in various
genres, his tragedy, John Woodvil, being published in 1802. His farce, Mr H, was performed
at Drury Lane in 1807, where it was roundly booed. In the same year, Tales from Shakespeare
(Charles handled the tragedies; his sister Mary, the comedies) was published, and became a
best seller for William Godwin’s “Children’s Library.”
In 1819, at age 44, Lamb, who, because of family commitments, had never married, fell in love
with an actress, Fanny Kelly, of Covent Garden, and proposed marriage. She refused him, and
he died a bachelor. His collected essays, under the title Essays of Elia, were published in 1823
(“Elia” being the pen name Lamb used as a contributor to the London Magazine). A further
collection was published ten years or so later, shortly before Lamb’s death. He died of a
streptococcal infection, erysipelas, contracted from a minor graze on his face sustained after
slipping in the street, on 27 December 1834, just a few months after Coleridge. He was 59.
From 1833 till their deaths Charles and Mary lived at Bay Cottage, Church Street, Edmonton
north of London (now part of the London Borough of Enfield). Lamb is buried in All Saints’
Churchyard, Edmonton. His sister, who was ten years his senior, survived him for more than
a dozen years. She is buried beside him.
Lamb’s first publication was the inclusion of four sonnets in Coleridge’s Poems on Various
Subjects published in 1796 by Joseph Cottle. The sonnets were significantly influenced by the
poems of Burns and the sonnets of William Bowles, a largely forgotten poet of the late 18th
century. His poems garnered little attention and are seldom read today. Lamb’s contributions

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