‘Little Lamb, who made thee?” What must Charles Lamb (1775–1834) have thought when he first encountered that first line in the poem “The Lamb,” by William Blake? Known for his wit and irony, Lamb might have replied, if only to himself, that whoever made him certainly botched the job. Smallish, with a serious stammer, a drinking problem, and more than a taint of insanity running in his family, Charles Lamb was not dealt the best of hands. That he played through life with these cards to become one of the great essayists in English literature is the more impressive for all that.

On September 22, 1796, when Charles Lamb was 21, the crucial event in his life occurred. On that day, at dinnertime, his ten-years-older-than-he sister Mary, overworked and underappreciated, killed her mother, stabbing her in the heart. After stabbing her mother, Mary Lamb attempted to do the same to her senile father and an aunt living with the family, and would have done so but for Charles’s having forcibly taken the knife away from her. She evaded prison and was put into a mental asylum. Upon emerging from the asylum two years later, she was entrusted to the care of her younger brother, with whom she lived until he, Charles, died in 1834. Mary Lamb spent much of her life (she died in 1847) in and out of mental asylums, and the remainder living with her brother, whom she loved and who loved her. An older brother, John, a man chiefly interested in his own career, was never close with either Mary or Charles.

Having his sister to care for made marriage all but impossible for Charles Lamb, who had fallen in love with more than one woman but had no known active romantic life. Responsibility for the care of Mary also put him under the pressure of earning a living for two, which he did by working no fewer than 33 years upon a high stool as a bookkeeper of sorts at the East India Company.

Lamb may well have felt, as his most recent biographer, Eric G. Wilson, suggests, a combination of resentment about having to care for his sister and guilt over that resentment, while Mary, again according to Wilson, may not have found it easy putting up with her brother’s drinking, melancholy, and relentless punning. Still, there is something deeply touching about the two, brother and sister, each looking out for the other in a relationship that was akin to a substitution for the marriage unavailable to either. “She is all his comfort,” Lamb’s dear friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “he hers.” Eric Wilson is excellent on the relationship between Charles and Mary Lamb, fully recognizing its poignance yet never slipping into sentimentality in recounting it.

That Charles Lamb suffered genuine melancholy, that affliction of continuous fear and sorrow, without any apparent occasion, he himself often allowed. At the age of 20, he suffered a breakdown of sufficient magnitude to put himself in a nearby mental asylum. Writing to Coleridge, Lamb explained that “the six weeks that finished last year and began this your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a mad house at Hoxton — I am somewhat rational now, and don’t bite anyone. But mad I was — and many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume if all told.”

“Humor is often the armor of self-protection,” notes Malcolm Elwin in his introduction to The Essays of Elia, a collection of Lamb’s essays, and Charles Lamb was never short on humor. Inner toughness was another of his self-protections. When Coleridge referred to him in a poem as “my gentle-hearted Charles,” Lamb wrote to complain. “Please to blot out gentle-hearted, and substitute: drunken dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question.”

Lamb worked eight-, nine-, sometimes ten-hour days, six days a week, with a single week off a year for holiday. He was highly sociable but regretted his own sociability, which resulted in his and his sister’s having many of their evenings invaded by visitors. Who knows how many mornings he — a short-hitter, as drinkers who do not require much to achieve drunkenness are called — awoke hung over. Between his work days and his nighttime visitors, he struggled to get his writing done. Before he was 40 he had written a good deal of poetry, a novel titled “A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret” (1798), a tragedy called “John Woodvil” (1802), and a farce called “Mr. H.” (1806), which bombed so badly that it was withdrawn from the Drury Lane Theatre after a single performance. In 1807, Charles and Mary published Tales from Shakespear, a recounting of the plays for children, which is still in print. He turned out other assorted writings, most of them chiefly in the hope of their boosting his income. Life, for Lamb, was never less than a struggle.

Yet no one could surmise from Charles Lamb’s prose style his far-from-easy life. Malcolm Elwin refers to “the cultured quality of his humor” and describes his prose as representing “the ultimate grace of academic pedantry, in the neatness of his rhetoric, his self-consciousness in quotation and allusion, his pleasure in paradox and the use of unusual epithets, his delicate skill in skimming the surface of a subject without stirring mud from the depths by the barest ripple of valid emotion.” In his biography, Eric Wilson holds that Lamb “blends seventeenth-century baroque, the crazed ironies of [Laurence] Sterne, and Lamb’s own wacky nostalgia.”

Charles Lamb is among those writers who found their true form, or genre, latish in their careers. (George Eliot, who began as an editor and critic, is another. Joseph Conrad published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, in his 39th year.) For Lamb, of course, that form was the essay. He became an essayist only because he was invited to write essays for the Reflector, a short-lived magazine edited by his friend Leigh Hunt. Later his essays became one of the glories of the London Magazine, for which he began writing in 1823, at the age of 48, under the name of “Elia,” pronounced Elia, with a strong accent on the first syllable.

Lamb came naturally to the essay. He was a man who distrusted ideas, whose mind naturally gravitated to the particular while eschewing the general, who digressed with charm, for whom wit came easily and laughter was itself, as Eric Wilson notes, an aesthetic. In the less than a decade left him, Lamb would turn out a sufficient number of essays to establish himself well in the line of great essayists that includes Plutarch, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Samuel Johnson, and William Hazlitt, and continues into the 20th century with Max Beerbohm, H. L. Mencken, and George Orwell.

Eric Wilson has organized his book around Lamb’s various essays, few of which are as straightforward as at first they might seem. Wilson’s very title, “Dream-Child,” derives from the Lamb essay “Dream Children,” in which the author wakes from a reverie in which he imagined himself with a son and a daughter: “Awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget [his name in his essays for his sister Mary] unchanged by my side,” his imaginary son “gone for ever.” Never able to restrain his free-ranging wit, when once asked how he liked children, Lamb replied, “Boiled.”

Dream-Child does all that a superior biography of a writer ought to do. The book explains how Charles Lamb became a writer, the kind of writer he was, how his writing works, and why it has endured. While availing himself of all the resources of modern scholarship, Wilson does all this in an accessible style, filled with impressive observations and sly insights. He writes, for example, that Lamb’s essays, “if not drunk, are three gins into the evening: a bit woozy, loose-tongued, extra witty, somewhat outlandish, and flirting with falling apart.”

Wilson’s biography recounts Lamb’s relations with all the notable Romantics: Robert Southey, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, William Blake, Benjamin Haydon, and above all Coleridge, his dearest friend, who wrote of him: “Charles Lamb has more totality and individuality of character than any other man I know, or have ever known in all my life.” Lamb was among the first publicly to recognize the genius of John Keats, yet he loathed Byron and Shelley.

Charles Lamb is himself thought to be among the Romantics, but he was a Romantic, contra Wordsworth, who felt deadened by the countryside and enlivened by the crowded street scenes of London life. “Mr. Lamb has succeeded,” his friend William Hazlitt wrote of him, “not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it.” Hazlitt notes that Lamb was a writer who preferred “bye-ways to highways,” who chose to “stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a tottering doorway, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative of embryo art and ancient manners.” Lamb’s essays, Hazlitt writes, occupy “that nice point between egotism and disinterested humanity.”

As for the rewards of a Charles Lamb essay, Wilson captures them nicely when he writes: “And what else are Lamb’s essays but his casual attempts to make a small period entertaining, for himself and his reader? His verbal drifts aren’t going anywhere in particular. Whim is the guide. But when the final punctuation presses, you realize, oh, I didn’t know I wanted to be here, in this mood or this idea, but I don’t desire to be anywhere else. And like any brilliant improviser, in jazz, say, or acting, Lamb might have known he was getting there all along; he found the impeccable time to stop.”

Lamb allowed he had little interest in public affairs, “except,” as he wrote, “they touch upon me & so turn into private. . . . I cannot make these present times present to me.” He knew that true worth had little to do with social class. His politics, a rather soft utilitarianism, were neither central to his character nor in any serious way marked his mature writings.

Reading Charles Lamb on the origin of cooked meat, the travail of young chimney sweeps, the rediscovery of old friends, the social behavior of married couples, the arrangement of the calendar, the relative virtues of borrowing and lending, the invalidity of saying grace before meals, and much more reminds one that there are so many more delightful, fascinating, yes, even significant things in the world than public affairs and politics — and a most pleasing reminder it is.