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Prose

Notes 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 can we
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 of 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.

7.3. Lexical Features

7.3.1 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 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)

7.3.2 Repetition of the Word here
When regarding for beautiful things and fine actions, Lamb does not forget to show to 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:
1. Here Alice put out one of her dear mother’s looks
2. Here John smiled, as much as to say, “that would be foolish indeed.”
With this repeating word, we can see these children almost as clearly and as tenderly as Lamb saw
them. If we take the essay’s main purpose into account, we will find the more real they seem, the
more touching is the revelation of the fact that they do not exist, and never have existed.

7.4 Sentence Features

7.4.1 Loose Structure and Post-Modification
Generally speaking, the tone of this essay is relaxed and comfortable, which can be attributed to
Lamb’s use of loose structure and post-modification. Let’s study the sentence below:

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