Charles Lamb Biography

Charles Lamb	Born: 1775-02-10 Birthplace: London, England Died: 1834-07-27 Location of Death: Edmundton, Middlesex, England Race: White Field: Author, Critic Famous for: Essays of Elia
Field: Author

Charles Lamb was an English essayist, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, which he produced along with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764–1847).

Charles Lamb was the youngest child of John Lamb, a lawyer's clerk. He was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, London, and spent his youth there, later going away to school at Christ's Hospital. There he formed a close friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge which would last for many years. After leaving school in 1789 at age 14, "an inconquerable impediment" in his speech disqualified him for a clerical career. For a short time he worked in the office of Joseph Paice, a London merchant, and then for twenty-three weeks, until 8 February 1792, he held a small post in the Examiner's Office of the South Sea House. Its subsequent downfall in a pyramid scheme after Lamb left would be contrasted to the company's prosperity in the first Elia essay. On April 5, 1792 he went to work in the Accountant's Office for British East India Company, the death of his father's employer having ruined the family's fortunes.

Charles and his sister Mary both suffered periods of mental illness, and Charles spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital during 1795. He was, however, already making his name as a poet. On September 22, 1796 a terrible event occurred. His sister Mary, "worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother at night", was seized with acute mania and stabbed her mother to the heart with a table knife. With the help of friends he succeeded in obtaining his sister's release from what would otherwise have been lifelong imprisonment, on the condition that he take personal responsibility for her safekeeping. In 1799, John Lamb died, leaving Lamb (age 24) to carry on as best he could. Mary came to live again with him in Pentonville. In 1800 that they set up a shared home at Mitre Court Buildings in the Temple, where they lived until 1809.

Lamb's first publication was in 1796, when four sonnets by "Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House" appeared in Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects. In 1797 he contributed additional blank verse to the second edition. In 1797 he met the Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, on his short summer holiday with Coleridge at Nether Stowey, and thereby struck up a lifelong friendship. In London he became familiar with a group of young writers who favored political reform, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt.

Lamb continued to clerk for the East India Company and doubled as a writer in various genres, his tragedy, John Woodvil, being published in 1802. His farce, Mr H, was performed at Drury Lane in 1807. In the same year, Tales from Shakespeare (Charles handled the tragedies and Mary the comedies) was published, and became a best-seller for William Godwin's "Children's Library".

Lamb, who had never married because of his family commitments, at age 44 fell in love with an actress, Fanny Kelly, of Covent Garden, and proposed marriage in 1819; but she refused him and he remained until his death a bachelor. His collected essays, under the title, Essays of Elia, were published in 1823 ("Elia" being the pen-name Lamb used as a contributor to The London Magazine). A further collection was published ten years or so later, shortly before Lamb's death. He died of an infection, erysipelas, contracted from a cut on his face, on July 27, 1834, just a few months after Coleridge, and is buried in All Saints' Churchyard, Edmonton, Greater London. His sister, who was ten years his senior, survived him for more than a dozen years, and on her death was buried beside him.