The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 5: The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796-1820
The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 5: The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796-1820
These letters span twenty-four years of one of English literature's most singular voices, beginning in the immediate aftermath of tragedy, Mary Lamb's psychotic episode and the death of their mother in 1796, and ending in 1820, the year Lamb's wife died and his own faculties began to fade. What emerges is not the polished essayist of "Elia" but something more precious: a man writing in extremis, finding solace in gossip about Wordsworth, complaints about his drudgery at the East India Company, and the elaborate tenderness of his correspondence with his sister. The letters reveal Lamb at his most raw, financially desperate, mentally fragile, prone to drink and despair, yet also wickedly funny, intellectually restless, and endlessly generous to fellow writers. They document the entire arc of a life lived at the margins of greatness: the friendships that sustained him, the literary feuds that entertained him, and the sister whose creative partnership defined his legacy. For readers who have cherished his essays, these letters offer the raw material of the mind that made them.
Editions
X-Ray
“A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.””
— Charles Lamb
“Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.””
— Charles Lamb
“I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have none for books, those spiritual repasts - a grace before Milton - a grace before Shakespeare - a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?””
— Charles Lamb
“Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras”
— Charles Lamb
“The inventor of [this saying, 'That Enough Is As Good As a Feast'] did not believe it himself....Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not”
— Charles Lamb
“Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. … I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected ; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son”
— Charles Lamb
“I am sentimentally disposed to harmony but organically incapable of tune.””
— Charles Lamb
“I don't envy the mule his labyrinthine inlets, those indispensable side-intelligencers.””
— Charles Lamb
“On these little visual interpretations [Valentine's Day cards], no emblem is so common as the heart,”
— Charles Lamb
