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Unit 6: Charles Lamb -Dream Children : Detailed Study

a friendship that would last for their entire lives. Despite the brutality Lamb got along well at Notes
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 of 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 dreams as the other poets have done; 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.’
Family tragedy Charles and his sister Mary both suffered periods of mental illness. Charles spent six
weeks in a psychiatric hospital during 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.

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