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.