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Unit 4: Charles Lamb-Dream Children : A Reverie-A Critical Analysis

bodily or physically he was totally off and lazy. He was lame and helped by John in every Notes
possible way who used to carry him in his back. Unfortunately, John also became lame but
Elia never helped him and after his death he realized missing him. At the end of the essay,
Alice and John are crying after hearing all this. Elia is looking his wife, whose name also Alia,
in Alices face. The childern start to become faint and say to Elia or Lamb that we are not your
real children and Alice is not your wife and our mother. Lamb wakes up and finds himself
in armed chair and James Elia was vanished. The whole story is based on life of Lamb, he was
never able to get married and childless died. He is also regretting and remembering moments
like, about his brother, about grandmother, his childhood etc. So, whole of essay is full of
melancholy and sad tone of Lamb’s life. (One should better study about Lamb’s short biography
in order to understand his essays).
A Stylistic Analysis on Lamb’s Dream Children

Charles Lamb was a famous English prose-writer and the best representative of the new form
of English literature early in the nineteenth century. He did not adhere to the old rules and
classic models but made the informal essay a pliable vehicle for expressing the writer’s own
personality, thus bringing into English literature the personal or familiar essay.
The style of Lamb is gentle, old-fashioned and irresistibly attractive, for which I can think of
no better illustration than Dream Children: A Reverie. From the stylistic analysis of this essay
we can find Lamb’s characteristic way of expression.
Dream Children records the pathetic joys in the author’s unfortunate domestic life. We can see
in this essay, primarily, a supreme expression of the increasing loneliness of his life. He
constructed all that preliminary tableau of paternal pleasure in order to bring home to us in
the most poignant way his feeling of the solitude of his existence, his sense of all that he had
missed and lost in the world. The key to the essay is one of profound sadness. But he makes
his sadness beautiful; or, rather, he shows the beauty that resides in sadness. There are remarkable
writing techniques to achieve such an effect.

4.3 Lexical Features

Old-fashioned but Elegant Diction

Lamb prefers to use archaic words in order to reach a certain distance between the author’s
real life and his whimsies, such as:
1. And how in her youth she was esteemed the best dancer (esteemed here means admired,
respected).
2. Here Alice’s little right foot played an involuntary movement, till, upon my looking
grave, it desisted here means stopped doing.
3. And how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever offering to
pluck them (pluck, also a poetic word, here means pick).
4. He had meditated dividing with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them for the
present as irrelevant (meditated here means thought, and relinquish means give up).

Repetition of the Word here

While regarding for beautiful things and fine actions, Lamb does not forget to show the
readers pictures of the children—real children until the moment when they fade away. He
repeats the word here altogether eight times, to portray the children’s response. For example:

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