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Unit 6: Charles Lamb -Dream Children : Detailed Study

of The Old Familiar Faces which is concerned with Lamb’s mother. It was a verse that Lamb chose Notes
to remove from the edition of his Collected Work published in 1818.
I had a mother, but she died, and left me, Died prematurely in a day of horrors - All, all are gone, the old
familiar faces.
From a fairly young age Lamb desired to be a poet but never gained the success that he had hoped.
Lamb lived under the poetic shadow of his friend Coleridge. In the final years of the 18th century
Lamb began to work on prose with the novella entitled Rosamund Gray, a story of a young girl
who was thought to be inspired by Ann Simmonds, with whom Charles Lamb was thought to be
in love. Although the story is not particularly successful as a narrative because of Lamb’s poor
sense of plot, it was well thought of by Lamb’s contemporaries and led Shelley to observe “what
a lovely thing is Rosamund Gray! How much knowledge of the sweetest part of our nature in it!”
In the first years of the 19th century Lamb began his fruitful literary cooperation with his sister
Mary. Together they wrote at least three books for William Godwin’s Juvenile Library. The most
successful of these was of course Tales From Shakespeare which ran through two editions for
Godwin and has now been published dozens of times in countless editions, many of them illustrated.
Lamb also contributed a footnote to Shakespearean studies at this time with his essay “On the
Tragedies of Shakespeare,” in which he argues that Shakespeare should be read rather than
performed in order to gain the proper effect of his dramatic genius. Beside contributing to
Shakespeare studies with his book Tales From Shakespeare, Lamb also contributed to the
popularization of Shakespeare’s contemporaries with his book Specimens of the English Dramatic
Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare.
Although he did not write his first Elia essay until 1820, Lamb’s gradual perfection of the essay
form for which he eventually became famous began as early 1802 in a series of open letters to
Leigh Hunt’s Reflector. The most famous of these is called “The Londoner” in which Lamb famously
derides the contemporary fascination with nature and the countryside

6.3 Dream Children

Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when they were children; to stretch their
imagination to the conception of a traditionary great-uncle, or grandame, whom they never saw.
It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about, me the other evening to hear about their great-
grandmother Field, who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in
which they and papa lived) which had been the scene — so at least it was generally believed in
that part of the country — of the tragic incidents which they had lately become familiar with from
the ballad of the Children in the Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the children and their
cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the great hall, the
whole story down to the Robin Redbreasts, till a foolish rich Person pulled it down to set up a
marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no story upon it. Here Alice put out one of her
dear mother’s looks, too tender to be called upbraiding. Then I went on to say, how religious and
how good their great. grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by every body, though
she was not indeed the mistress of this great house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in some
respects she might be said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her by the owner, who
preferred living in a newer and more fashionable mansion which he had purchased somewhere in
the adjoining county; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had been her own, and kept up the
dignity of the great house in a sort while she lived, which afterwards came to decay, and was
nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried away to the owner’s other

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