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Notes 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 take 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.
Work Lamb’s first publication was the inclusion of four sonnets in the 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 to
the second edition of the Poems showed significant growth as a poet. These poems included The
Tomb of Douglas and A Vision of Repentance. Because of a temporary fall-out with Coleridge,
Lamb’s poems were to be excluded in the third edition of the Poems. As it turned out, a third
edition never emerged and instead Coleridge’s next publication was the monumentally influential
Lyrical Ballads co-published with Wordsworth. Lamb, on the other hand, published a book entitled
Blank Verse with Charles Lloyd, the mentally unstable son of the founder of Lloyd’s Bank. Lamb’s
most famous poem was written at this time entitled The Old Familiar Faces. Like most of Lamb’s
poems it is particularly sentimental but it is still remembered and widely read, often included in
Poetic Collections. Of particular interest to Lambarians is the opening verse of the original version

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