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Unit 8: Charles Lamb-A Bachelors Complaint on the Behaviour of Married ...

The Note of Familiarity Notes
Lamb’s contribution to the English essay also lies in his changing the general tone from formality
to familiarity. This change was to be accepted by all the essayists to follow. “Never”, says Compton-
Rickett, “was any man more intimate in print than he. He has made of chatter a fine art.” Lamb
disarms the reader at once with his buttonholding familiarity. He plays with him in a puckish
manner, no doubt, but he is always ready to take him into confidence and to exchange heart-beats
with him. In the essays of the writers before him we are aware of a well-marked distance between
the writer and ourselves. Bacon and Addison perch themselves, as it were, on a pedestal, and cast
pearls before the readers standing below. In Cowley, the distance between the reader and writer
narrows down-but it is there still. It was left for Lamb to abolish this distance altogether. He often
addresses the reader (“dear reader”) as if he were addressing a bosom friend. He makes nonsense
of the proverbial English insularity and “talks” to the readers as “a friend and man” (as Thackeray
said he did in his novels). This note of intimacy is quite pleasing, for Lamb is the best of friends.
No Didacticism
He is a friend, and not a teacher. Lamb shed once and for all the didactic approach which
characterises the work of most essayists before him. Bacon called his essays “counsels civil and
moral.” His didacticism is too palpable to need a comment. Cowley was somewhat less didactic,
but early in the eighteenth century Steele and Addison-the founders of the periodical essay-set in
their papers the moralistic, mentor-like tone for all the periodical essayists to come. Even such “a
rake among scholars and a scholar among rakes” as Steele arrogated to himself the air of a teacher
and reformer. This didactic tendency reached almost its culmination in Dr. Johnson who in the
Idler and Rambler papers gave ponderous sermons rather than what may be called essays. Lamb is
too modest to pretend to proffer moral counsels. He never argues, dictates, or coerces. We do not
find any “philosophy of life” in his essays, though there are some personal views and opinions
flung about here and there not for examination and adoption, but just to serve as so many ventilators
to let us have a peep into his mind. “Lamb”, says Cazamian, “is not a moralist nor a psychologist,
his object is not research, analysis, or confession; he is, above all, an artist. He has no aim save the
reader’s pleasure, and his own.” But though Lamb is not a downright pedagogue, he is yet full of
sound wisdom which he hides under a cloak of frivolity and tolerant good nature. He sometimes
looks like the Fool in King Lear whose weird and funny words are impregnated with a hard core
of surprising sanity. As a critic avers, “though Lamb frequently donned the cap and bells, he was
more than ajester; even his jokes had kernels of wisdom.” In his “Character of the Late Elia” in
which he himself gives a character-sketch of the supposedly dead Elia, he truly observes : “He
would interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest; and yet, perhaps not quite irrelevant
in ears that could understand it.”

The Rambling Nature of His Essays and His Lightness of Touch
The rambling nature of his essays and his lightness of touch are some other distinguishing features
of Lamb as an essayist. He never bothers about keeping to the point. Too often do we find him
flying off at a tangent and ending at a point which we could never have foreseen. Every road with
him seems to lead to the world’s end. We often reproach Bacon for the “dispersed” nature of his
“meditations”, but Lamb beats everybody in his monstrous discursiveness. To consider some
examples, first take up his essay “The Old and the New School-master.” In this essay which
apparently is written for comparing the old and new schoolmaster, the first two pages or thereabouts
contain a very humorous and exaggerated description of the author’s own ignorance. Now, we
may ask, what has Lamb’s ignorance to do with the subject in hand? Then, the greater part of the
essay “Oxford in the Vacation” is devoted to the description of his friend Dyer. Lamb’s essays are
seldom artistic, well-patterned wholes. They have no beginning, middle and end. Lamb himself
described his essays as “a sort of unlicked incondite things.” However, what these essays lose in

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