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Prose Digvijay Pandya, Lovely Professional University

Notes
Unit 7: Charles Lamb-Dream Children: Critical Analysis

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
7.1 Charles Major Works
7.2 Critical Analysis
7.3 Lexical Features
7.4 Sentence Features
7.5 Article Features
7.6 Summary
7.7 Key-Words
7.8 Review Questions
7.9 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Know major works of Charles Lamb
• Analyse Lamb’s Dream Children

Introduction
A well-known literary figure in nineteenth-century England, Lamb is chiefly remembered for his
“Elia” essays, works celebrated for their witty and ironic treatment of everyday subjects. Through
the persona of “Elia,” Lamb developed a highly personal narrative technique to achieve what
many critics regard as the epitome of the familiar essay style. Extremely popular in Lamb’s day,
the “Elia” essays first appeared in the London Magazine between 1820 and 1825, but were later
collected into two volumes. These nostalgic works have appealed to readers throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly because of their gradual revelation of Lamb’s
literary alter ego and his humorous idiosyncrasies. Lamb’s other writings include criticism of
William Shakespeare’s dramas and the virtual rediscovery of a number of neglected Elizabethan
and Jacobean playwrights in the early nineteenth century. A dramatist and a skilled poet, Lamb
was also a noted children’s author, frequently in collaboration with his sister, Mary. Lamb’s
essays are thought to demonstrate a characteristically Romantic imagination akin to that of the
poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lamb’s contemporaries and friends.
Overall, Lamb is highly regarded as an essayist, an original and perceptive critic, and a noteworthy
correspondent with the renowned literati of early nineteenth-century England.

7.1 Charles Major Works

Although he began his literary career as a sonneteer, Lamb quickly discovered that his talent and
inclination lay in prose, not verse. His first fictional work, a short novel entitled A Tale of Rosamund
Gray and Old Blind Margaret, displays the influence of eighteenth-century sentimental writers
Henry Mackenzie and Laurence Sterne. Lamb’s next literary composition, John Woodvil (1802), set

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