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Digvijay Pandya, Lovely Professional University Unit 8: Charles Lamb-A Bachelors Complaint on the Behaviour of Married ...

Unit 8: Charles Lamb-A Bachelors Complaint on the Notes
Behaviour of Married : Introduction and Detailed Study

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
8.1 Lamb’s Self-Revelation
8.2 Lamb’s Humour, Pathos, and Humanity
8.3 Text—A Bachelors Complaint on the Behaviour of Married
8.4 Summary
8.5 Key-Words
8.6 Review Questions
8.7 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Understand Lamb’s Humour, pathos and humanity
• Discuss A Bachelors Complaint on the Behaviour of Married

Introduction

It has well been said that the essay took a wrong turn in the hands of Bacon. For two centuries
after Bacon the essay in England went on gravitating towards the original conception held by
Montaigne, but it was only in the hands of the romantic essayists of the early nineteenth century
that it became wholly personal, light, and lyrical in nature. From then onwards it has seen no
essential change. The position of Lamb among these romantic essayists is the most eminent. In
fact, he has often been called the prince of all the essayists England has so far produced. Hugh
Walker calls him the essayist par excellence who should be taken as a model. It is from the essays
of Lamb that we often derive our very definition of the essay, and it is with reference to his essays
as a criterion of excellence that we evaluate the achievement and merit of a given essayist. Familiarity
with Lamb as a man enhances for a reader the charm of his essays. And he is certainly the most
charming of all English essay. We may not find in him the massive genius of Bacon, or the ethereal
flights (O altitude) of Thomas Browne, or the brilliant lucidity of Addison, or the ponderous
energy of Dr. Johnson, but none excels him in the ability to charm the reader or to catch him in the
plexus of his own personality.

8.1 Lamb’s Self-Revelation

What strikes one particularly about Lamb as an essayist is his persistent readiness to reveal his
everything to the reader. The evolution of the essay from Bacon to Lamb lies primarily in its shift
from
1. objectivity to subjectivity, and
2. from formality to familiarity.

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