Charles Lamb

Youth and schooling

He had an elder brother, also John, and a sister, Mary; four other siblings died in infancy. Lamb spent his youth in Crown Office Row, where he was born. His paternal aunt Hetty cared for him and created a degree of tension in the household with her sister-in-law, though Charles spoke fondly of her. His maternal grandmother, Mrs Field, was a servant to the Plumer family at Blakesware, a large country house near Widford, Hertfordshire, where Lamb spent childhood visits and later wrote about in the essay 'Blakesmoor in H—shire'.

Mary taught him to read at a very early age, and he read voraciously. He is believed to have had smallpox during his early years, requiring a long convalescence. After recovering, he took lessons from Mrs Reynolds, a woman living in the Temple who may have been a former lawyer's wife; Lamb maintained a lifelong relationship with her. Around 1781, according to E. V. Lucas, he left Mrs Reynolds and began studying at the Academy of William Bird.

Family tragedy

Both Charles and his sister Mary experienced periods of mental illness. Charles spent six weeks in a mental facility in 1795. Mary's illness was more severe and led to a fatal event on 22 September 1796. While preparing dinner, she became angry with her apprentice, shoving her, and when her mother admonished her, Mary had a mental breakdown, took a kitchen knife, and stabbed her mother in the heart.

Charles arrived soon after and took the knife from her. He arranged for Mary to be placed in a private mental facility called Fisher House, found with the help of a doctor friend. Charles refused his brother John's suggestion to commit Mary to a public lunatic asylum and used much of his modest income to keep her in the private madhouse in Islington. With friends' help, he obtained her release from lifelong imprisonment; the jury returned a verdict of lunacy, freeing Mary from guilt of willful murder on condition that Charles take personal responsibility for her safekeeping.

John Lamb's death in 1799 was a relief, as he had been mentally incapacitated after a stroke, and allowed Mary to live again with Charles in Pentonville. In 1800 they set up a shared home at Mitre Court Buildings in the Temple. That year Mary's illness returned, and Charles had to take her back to the asylum, writing to Coleridge that he felt melancholic and lonely, adding 'I almost wish that Mary were dead.'

Work

Lamb's first publication was four sonnets in Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects (1796), influenced by Burns and William Bowles. His poems attracted little attention and are seldom read today; he later recognised he was a more talented prose stylist. William Wordsworth wrote in 1815 that Lamb 'writes prose exquisitely', five years before The Essays of Elia began. His contributions to Coleridge's second edition of Poems on Various Subjects included 'The Tomb of Douglas' and 'A Vision of Repentance'.

A temporary falling out with Coleridge led to Lamb's poems being excluded from a planned third edition that never appeared. Lamb published Blank Verse with Charles Lloyd, the mentally unstable son of Lloyds Bank's founder. His most famous poem, 'The Old Familiar Faces', is unabashedly sentimental and still anthologised; the original version included a verse about his mother, which Lamb removed from his 1818 Collected Work. In the late 1790s he began writing prose, starting with the novella Rosamund Gray, whose character is thought to be based on Ann Simmons.

Though weak in plot, it was well regarded by contemporaries; Shelley called it 'a lovely thing' with 'knowledge of the sweetest part of our nature'.

Legacy

Lamb's works maintain a consistent following, reflected in the Charles Lamb Bulletin, though his quirky style is more a cult favourite than a subject of broad scholarly appeal. Anne Fadiman noted that he is not widely read in modern times, kept alive largely through university English departments. Two houses at Christ's Hospital (Lamb A and Lamb B) are named in his honour, and a house at The Latymer School in Edmonton is also named Lamb. The Lamb Prize for Independent Study is awarded annually at Christ's Hospital.

Sir Edward Elgar's orchestral work Dream Children was inspired by Lamb's essay of that title. A quotation from Lamb, 'Lawyers, I suppose, were children once', serves as the epigraph to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Islington honours him with a plaque at 64 Duncan Terrace, Lamb's Mews, Elia Street, Charles Lamb Court, and the former Charles Lamb pub. The Charles Lamb Primary School on Popham Road was renamed after him in 1949.

Henry James Montague named The Lambs Club after the salon of Charles and his sister Mary. Lamb appears in the plot of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Did You Know?

• Christianity played an important role in Lamb's personal life; he described the New Testament as his 'best guide' and read the Psalms for hours.
• Lamb was sympathetic to Priestleyan Unitarianism and was a Dissenter.
• Wordsworth described Lamb as a firm Christian in the poem 'Written After the Death of Charles Lamb'.