Books in Brief: A Portrait of Charles Lamb

A Portrait of Charles Lamb, by Lord David Cecil (Scribner’s, 185 pp., $19.95)

Charles Lamb is one of those writers who are remembered as much for the company they kept as for their own literary achievement. Although he was an esteemed essayist in his own time, Lamb is better known now as a friend of writers such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, and Mary Shelley. In A Portrait of Charles Lamb, David Cecil, the distinguished English biographer, describes a man who was “an ambiguous blend of mood and thought” and whose life was sustained and nourished by friendship, a puckish sense of humor, and a delight in irony and the absurd. Cecil describes Lamb’s Essays of Elia as “the utterance of a spirit imaginative, tender-hearted, joyous, but which had been forced by hard circumstances to lead a life shadowed by tragedy.” Through the kindness of his father’s employer, Charles was educated at the famous London school, Christ’s Hospital, where he was a classmate of Coleridge, but he had to leave school early and go to work to support his family. He remained a clerk in the accounting department of the East India Company for the rest of his working life, partly because he was obliged to look after his sister, who had killed their mother and suffered recurring bouts of violent insanity. His drab and shadowed life was relieved by his writing and by the evenings he spent talking with his friends, who delighted in his wit, his insight, and his zest for life. No one, said Hazlitt, “ever stammered out such fine, deep, eloquent things in half a dozen sentences as he does.” Cecil’s book is an admirable addition to the Scribner Literary Library editions. Lavishly illustrated, it is a civilized, not overly scholarly account of a man who was an important contributor to English literature and a well-loved member of London literary circles in the early nineteenth century.

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Judith Chettle

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A Portrait of Charles Lamb, by Lord David Cecil (Scribner’s, 185 pp., $19.95)

Charles Lamb is one of those writers who are remembered as much for the company they kept as for their own literary achievement. Although he was an esteemed essayist in his own time, Lamb is better known now as a friend of writers such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, and Mary Shelley. In A Portrait of Charles Lamb, David Cecil, the distinguished English biographer, describes a man who was “an ambiguous blend of mood and thought” and whose life was sustained and nourished by friendship, a puckish sense of humor, and a delight in irony and the absurd. Cecil describes Lamb’s Essays of Elia as “the utterance of a spirit imaginative, tender-hearted, joyous, but which had been forced by hard circumstances to lead a life shadowed by tragedy.” Through the kindness of his father’s employer, Charles was educated at the famous London school, Christ’s Hospital, where he was a classmate of Coleridge, but he had to leave school early and go to work to support his family. He remained a clerk in the accounting department of the East India Company for the rest of his working life, partly because he was obliged to look after his sister, who had killed their mother and suffered recurring bouts of violent insanity. His drab and shadowed life was relieved by his writing and by the evenings he spent talking with his friends, who delighted in his wit, his insight, and his zest for life. No one, said Hazlitt, “ever stammered out such fine, deep, eloquent things in half a dozen sentences as he does.” Cecil’s book is an admirable addition to the Scribner Literary Library editions. Lavishly illustrated, it is a civilized, not overly scholarly account of a man who was an important contributor to English literature and a well-loved member of London literary circles in the early nineteenth century.