“’Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense,” Charles Lamb told his school friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797, “and to have her nonsense respected.” Lamb’s nonsense consisted of puns and mischief and the creation, in 1820, of a middle-aged memory machine named Elia, whose autobiographical ramblings, for five years the pride of The London Magazine, were published in two volumes, Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833). Elia did not “conform to the march of time,” wrote Lamb,

but was dragged along in the procession…. The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood. These were weaknesses; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings.

The single-word name, a homonym of “a liar,” should be understood, Lamb wrote, as “without a meaning,” while the relationship between the author and his nom de plume was “a tissue of truth and fiction impossible to be extricated….I will not explain it.”

Both meaningless and inexplicable, Elia was, as Lamb put it, the very “Genius of Nonsense,” and his essays were “sort of unlicked, incondite things—villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases.” Chatting in a relaxed and neighborly fashion about everything and nothing, Elia wrote about the romance of the past, the banality of the present, and his own irrelevance; his voice was camp, asexual, at an angle to the world. His style, thought Thomas De Quincey, was that of a man accustomed to “sudden interruption”: “He literally collapses, literally sinks away from openings suddenly offering themselves to flights of pathos or solemnity in direct prosecution of his own theme.” De Quincey’s writing rose, as Leslie Stephen said, like a “bat…on the wings of prose to the borders of the true poetical region,” while Elia’s, a bird with clipped wings, aimed for the heavens but never quite left the ground.

Whether his tone was intended to be comic or serious is hard to pin down, but the humor—or melancholy—of his fifty-three entertainments often begins with their titles: “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” provides a mock history of pork crackling, “A Chapter on Ears” is about being unmusical (“I have no ear”), and “Confessions of a Drunkard” argues that “the drunkard is not a man with drink added. His very being is drink.” In “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist” we meet the redoubtable Sarah Battle, a demon player for whom “cards are warfare,” and also Elia’s “sweet cousin” Bridget, with whom he played his own most recent game: “I wished it might have lasted forever.” Nothing was lost in the accumulation of Elia’s mental clutter, and no topic was too small for his contemplation: the insufferable affection of married people (“pure, unrecompensed, unqualified insult”), the unsolvable problem of poor relations (“the most irrelevant thing in nature”), his “almost feminine partiality for old china,” his nostalgia in “Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago” and “On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century.”

In his debut essay, “The South-Sea House,” Elia recalls the bachelors in the company that employed him some thirty years earlier. A cashier named Evans, “melancholy as a gib-cat over his counter all the forenoon,” wore his hair powdered and frizzed in the fashion of the “Maccaronies.” Evans’s deputy, Thomas Tame, whose “mind was in its original state of white paper,” affected belonging to a noble line, while the accountant, John Tipp, who “thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it,” would “scrape” on his fiddle “most abominably” in his “fine suite” of rooms. But “reader,” Elia concludes, “what if I have been playing with thee all this while—peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastic—insubstantial…” It was a complicated ruse, to suggest that the portraits in this roll call of the dead were fictitious, when Evans, Tame, and Tipp had in fact all been real people. The only name that was fantastic and insubstantial belonged to Elia himself.

“Methinks I hear you exclaim, Reader,” begins his second essay, “Oxford in the Vacation,” “Who is Elia?” He was a clerk, Elia reveals, “a votary of the desk—a notched and cropt scrivener—one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill.” In his third essay, “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,” Elia recalls his school days at the ancient charitable institution in the City of London that, “very oddly,” Charles Lamb also attended: “In Mr Lamb’s ‘Works,’ published a year or two since, I find a magnificent eulogy on my old school, such as it was, or now appears to him to have been, between the years of 1782 and 1789.” Lamb, however, gave the school too much praise, “dropping all the other side of the argument most ingeniously.” “I remember L. at school,” Elia tells us. His aunt provided him with food parcels, so he did not suffer the same privations as his half-starved fellow pupils: “He had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf.” Unlike Elia, “a poor friendless boy” whose parents “were far away,” Lamb lived near his parents, so he could go home “as often as he wished.” And because he was sponsored by a patron of the school, Lamb was saved from the “execrable tyranny” Elia himself suffered.

Elia is a “native,” he reveals in “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,” of “sweet Calne in Wiltshire,” but in “A Chapter on Ears” he says he was born near London’s Cavendish Square, and in “The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple” he writes that (like Lamb) he was a child of the Inner Temple. When readers of the London questioned the discrepancies in his autobiography, Elia responded with an admonishment: having not “fixed his nativity (like a rusty vane) to one dull spot,” he would be “born again, in future papers, in whatever place, and at whatever period, shall seem good unto him.”

The date of his death was equally unfixed. “Rejoicings upon the New Year’s Coming of Age,” which appeared in the London in January 1823, was signed “Elia’s Ghost,” and a piece in the same issue called “A Character of the Late Elia” announced that “exactly at twelve last night his queer spirit departed, and the bells of Saint Bride’s rang him out with the old year.” His friends enjoyed the joke. “Charles Lamb was brought up, charged with the barbarous murder of the late Mr. Elia,” wrote the solicitor and author J.H. Reynolds in the London that February, unaware of the barbarous murder that had taken place twenty-seven years earlier in the Lamb family. But the following month, Elia returned. His death, like that of Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, had been greatly exaggerated.

“I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding,” Elia explained in “All Fools’ Day.” Obliquity is as good an approach as any. His ideal reader, Elia wrote in a dedication that he ultimately omitted from the first volume of his essays, should attend to him as they might “to an after-dinner conversation”: “not understanding every thing perversely in the absolute and literal sense,” “allowing for the rashness and necessary incompleteness of first thoughts,” and “not remembering, for the purpose of an after taunt, words spoken peradventure after the fourth glass.” Presenting Elia’s improvisational flair as inebriated table talk, Lamb exploited to the full the uncertain nature of his chosen genre. As G.K. Chesterton wrote in “The Essay,” the form “does not know what it is trying to find…. The drama or the epic might be called the active life of literature; the sonnet or the ode the contemplative life. The essay is the joke.”

“There is something profoundly serious about Lamb’s unseriousness,” writes Gregory Dart, the heroic editor of the six-volume Collected Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, whose fourth volume contains Elia and The Last Essays of Elia. The persona of Elia, Dart argues, was “more reticent and more daring, more delightful and more troubling, than anything which had been achieved in the essay form before.” And this edition of Elia is brighter, bolder, and more exhaustive than anything achieved in Lamb studies before. He was the “linchpin,” Dart argues, between the Lakers (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) and the Cockneys (Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Leigh Hunt). His inspirations were Shakespeare, Richard Steele, Laurence Sterne, Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, and Michel de Montaigne, and his descendants Charles Dickens and James Joyce. I would add to the list of descendants Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Max Beerbohm, while Lamb’s latest biographer, Eric G. Wilson, sees him as a pioneer of autofiction.^*

Dart’s insistence on Lamb’s importance runs counter to Lamb’s own insistence on his insignificance. Casting himself as a recreational scribbler addressing “the most untheorising reader,” Lamb has been largely exempted from two centuries of critical assessment. A.P. Ward’s The Frolic and the Gentle, published in 1934 on the centenary of Lamb’s death, began by announcing that “Charles Lamb is not, I think, a suitable subject for psychological investigation, philosophical disquisition, or critical ingenuity.” According to E.V. Lucas, whose seven-volume Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (1903–1905) was, until now, the most authoritative edition, “the works of Charles Lamb form no integral part of the history of English literature: he is not in the main current, he is hardly in the side current of the great stream.”

Even Hazlitt, who was right about everything, mistook the nature of Lamb’s genius. “Mr. Lamb has succeeded,” Hazlitt argued in The Spirit of the Age (1825),

not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it. He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction. He prefers bye-ways to highways.

It was Hazlitt’s portrait of his friend, Dart argues, that prepared the way “for all future attempts to identify Lamb as a major minor author.” Dart’s Lamb, a minor-major urban Romantic, is not only on the highway but hurtling forward at high speed.

The Elia essays fill 250 pages of Dart’s edition. The remaining 795 pages are composed of psychological investigation, philosophical disquisition, and analytical ingenuity in the form of a critical introduction, critical apparatus, critical bibliography, appendixes, and explanatory notes that cross-reference the essays with Lamb’s reading and letters, explain the many jokes we might have missed, and embed Elia in the context of early-nineteenth-century periodical culture. The volume reads like an intellectual biography of the highest order, not only of Lamb himself but of his whole circle, all of whom were writing for one another.

Lamb developed his voice in the golden age of what Thomas Carlyle called the “self-devouring Review,” where the strongest writers in a cutthroat climate operated under what Elia called “the masqued battery of a fictitious appellation.” De Quincey, whose “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” was published anonymously in the London in 1821, signed his work “The Opium-eater”; when a reviewer was unsure whether “the character in which the Opium-eater speaks be real or imaginary,” De Quincey’s celebrity was sealed. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright’s London essays appeared under the names Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Cornelius van Vinkbooms; it was Janus Weathercock, Lamb pretended, who wrote the “sham account” of Elia’s death and then forged Elia’s following two essays. Weathercock also claimed authorship of De Quincey’s “Confessions,” which Edgar Allan Poe said was the work of Juniper, his pet baboon.

There is no figure in literature, “save perhaps Johnson, whom we know so well” as Lamb, wrote Lucas. But we barely know Lamb at all, not only because he hid behind masks and was excused the rigors of critical analysis but because his friends—each of whom, wrote Edmund Blunden in 1933, believed they understood him better than anyone else—said so little of any depth about his character. Coleridge’s part in his legacy can be found in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (1797), addressed “to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London”:

My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hunger’d after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity!

“The meaning of gentle is equivocal at best,” Lamb wrote to Coleridge in August 1800, “and almost always means poor-spirited.” A week later he wrote to Coleridge again: “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.” The epithet proved indelible: “The frolic and the gentle,” wrote Wordsworth after Lamb’s death in 1835, “has vanished from his lonely hearth.”

Lamb, who threw a famously good party every Thursday night, was not lonely. Nor was he gentle in his relations with Wordsworth, where he assumed the role of Lear’s fool. After telling the poet that he felt “lectured” at in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Lamb received from Wordsworth “four sweating pages” correcting his erroneous opinion and four “equally sweaty and more tedious” pages from Coleridge, “assuring me that, when the works of a man of true genius such as W. undoubtedly was, do not please me at first sight, I should expect the fault to lie ‘in me, and not in them,’ etc.”

Then there was Coleridge’s insistence that Lamb, metropolitan to the marrow, “hunger’d after Nature.” “I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life,” Lamb wrote to Wordsworth, declining the poet’s “very kind invitation” to join him and his sister, Dorothy, in Grasmere.

I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the Town, the Watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles…. The wonder of these sights impells me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much Life.

His parents, John and Elizabeth Lamb, were of solid servant stock. Elizabeth was the daughter of a housekeeper, and John general dogsbody to a kindly barrister named Samuel Salt, who housed the Lambs in two small rooms (which served also as Salt’s wine cellar) beneath his own apartment in the Inner Temple. It was here, in an enclave between the Strand and the Thames, with fountains and sundials and a Gothic hall where his father served at table, that Charles, the youngest of seven children (four of whom died as babies) was born in 1775. His birthplace, he believed, was “the most elegant spot in the metropolis,” but family life was troubled. Elizabeth Lamb lived only for her eldest son, also named John, who “was not worthy,” Lamb told Coleridge, “of one tenth of that affection,” which his sister Mary “had a right to claim.” Their mother “loved her,” Lamb explained to Coleridge,

as she loved us all, with a mother’s love; but in opinion, in feeling, and sentiment, and disposition, bore so distant a resemblance to her daughter, that she never understood her right. Never could believe how much [Mary] loved her—but met her caresses, her protestations of filial affection, too frequently with coldness and repulse.

It was Mary, ten years older than Charles, who raised her brother, teaching him to read from the encomiums on the local tombstones. Charles, in turn, would introduce Mary to the great works of literature and instruct her in Latin.

Thanks to Salt’s sponsorship, Charles was sent, aged seven, to board at Christ’s Hospital, where he befriended Coleridge. Small for his age, with spindly legs and a bad stammer, he might have been the target of bullies, but instead he was pampered and protected. Mary, who stayed at home and received a minimal education, became, aged nineteen, a mantua maker, stitching the delicate and fussy robes worn over stays, stomachers, and petticoats.

Because of his stammer, Lamb left school at the age of fourteen, having reached his full height of five foot nothing; there was little point in preparing the boy for Oxford or Cambridge, whose concerns were chiefly with oratory. Instead, he worked for a year in the examiner’s office at the South Sea House and then for thirty-three years in the accountants’ department of the East India Company. After the death of Samuel Salt in 1792 the Lamb family moved to cramped rooms in Little Queen Street, a squalid area of Holborn. Between December 1794 and January 1795 Lamb met regularly with Coleridge in a tavern called the Salutation and Cat, where they talked poetry and planned a collaboration. (In 1796 four of Lamb’s verses appeared in Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects.)

Coleridge, who left Cambridge without taking his degree, had enlisted in the army in 1793 under the name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache before being discharged for reasons of “insanity.” In late 1795, aged twenty, Lamb spent six weeks in “a mad house at Hoxton” where he believed himself to be Young Norval, the hero of John Home’s 1756 tragedy Douglas. “Dream not Coleridge,” Lamb wrote him in June 1796, “of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad.” He had lost his mind over a love affair, Lamb suggested, but “my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another.” It cannot have been a coincidence that Lamb’s breakdown took place just when Coleridge first met Wordsworth and began the conversations that led to the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798).

The madness in the Lamb family, which came from the paternal side, was shared by Charles and his sister. In September 1796 he returned from work to find that Mary, “in a fit of insanity,” had fatally stabbed their mother while dinner was being prepared; their father was wounded on the forehead by a fork she had thrown, and the aunt who lived with them was lying on the floor, insensible. “I was at hand only time enough,” Lamb wrote Coleridge, “to snatch the knife out of her grasp.”

“I date,” he said, “from the day of horrors.” From that day forward, his past was erased and the clock reset. The catastrophic moment might have formed a tale in Lyrical Ballads; like Wordsworth’s Mad Mother, Mary felt a “fire” in her “brain” and “in [her] head a dull, dull pain,” assuaged only by the thought of her “little boy.” It might also have been a moral by Hogarth, Lamb’s favorite artist, whose illustrations of the effects of poverty and despair later lined the walls of his rooms.

The coroner’s verdict was “lunacy.” A newspaper reporting the case added, “It seems the young Lady had been once before, in her earlier years, deranged, from the harassing fatigues of too much business.” Mary, who suffered from what we now might call bipolar disorder, was overworked. Sewing for eighteen hours a day while caring for an increasingly paralyzed mother, a father with dementia, and a difficult aunt who had not spoken to Mary’s mother for twenty years, Mary had no breaks, no friends, no money, no prospects of marriage, no time in which to read or walk or think, and nowhere to go to be alone. Not even at night could she get any respite, because she shared a bed with her mother.

It was sewing that drove her to matricide, she suggests in her important essay “On Needle-Work,” published in 1815 in The British Lady’s Magazine. “I believe it is every woman’s opinion that the condition of men is far superior to her own,” Mary wrote. “‘They can do what they like,’ we say.” Time, for men, divides “real business” from “real leisure,” but Mary’s life allowed for no such distinction. She sewed for business during the day, and in the evenings she repaired the household linen. Meanwhile Charles, whose work gave him dignity and relief from the family, was drinking and smoking in London taverns with his interesting friends.

Mary got away with murder. In an enlightened decision, she was neither imprisoned nor punished; instead, she was admitted to a “mad house” in Islington with the proviso that she would return home, once she recovered her sanity, to the care of Charles. Their older brother, John, preferred that she spend the rest of her years in Bedlam, but Lamb would not hear of this. So after the death of their father in 1799, Charles and Mary began their lives as “old bachelor and maid.” Lamb, who had no further episodes of psychosis after 1795, became an alcoholic, while excess excitement or any talk of death turned Mary into a tiger. Her breakdowns were cyclical: at the earliest signs of mania, Lamb returned her to the asylum. Weeping with her as they made their way through London, he carried her straitjacket over his arm. And every few years they packed up their books and Hogarth prints and moved to a new area where the neighbors would not know them as “marked people.”

The dispatch of her mother brought Mary her freedom: she exchanged stitching for writing. In 1807 Charles and Mary Lamb collaborated on a selection of stories for children, Tales from Shakespeare, in which she took the comedies and he the tragedies. The book has never been out of print. “You would like to see us,” Mary wrote to a friend,

as we often sit, writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Night’s Dream; or, rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan: I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while, and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished.

Two thirds of the plays were retold by Mary, whose name did not appear on the title page until the seventh edition, in 1838. She followed Tales from Shakespeare with a collection of stories, Mrs. Leicester’s School (1809), which explored the theme of motherless children and miserable homes.

In 1818 Lamb published the two-volume edition of his Works, which included his studies of Hogarth and Shakespeare, and in 1820, aged forty-five, he invented a character named Elia who lived with his spinster cousin, Bridget. For Elia and Bridget, who appears in three of his essays, there has been no unspeakable event.

Lamb twice fell in love but did not marry, and seems not to have minded his celibacy. After his retirement, at the age of fifty in 1825, Mary’s attacks became more regular and lasted longer. In 1826 Elia wrote his final entertainment, a list of sixteen “Popular Fallacies,” including “That We Should Lie Down with the Lamb.” This brief piece, Dart suggests, might have become a “firm statement of literary conviction—that prose too, under the right circumstances, can be a vehicle for literary sublimity”—had Lamb not, ironically, lost his conviction and settled instead for “a little domestic hymn to candles.”

The Last Essays of Elia was published in 1833, and in December 1834—six months after the death of Coleridge—Lamb died of an infection incurred after falling in the street. Mary, insane at the time of his death, did not fully absorb the blow. After her own death in 1847, the family secret was revealed by Lamb’s friend and literary executor, Thomas Noon Talfourd, in a memoir praising his subject for his “moral strength” and “self-sacrifice.” The legend of Saint Charles was now consolidated.

Lamb called life with Mary “a sort of double singleness,” which also describes his life with Elia. But before the day of horrors, the lives of Charles and Mary Lamb could not have been more separate. From birth he had everything and she had nothing; as adults he had a future and she only a past. It was Mary’s past that Lamb absorbed. “Her memory is unnaturally strong; and from ages past,” he wrote to a friend in 1834, “she fetches thousands…from the ten years she lived before me. What took place from early girlhood to her coming of age principally lives again (every important thing and every trifle) in her brain with the vividness of real presence.”

Mary had no memory, however, of the murder of her mother, for which she forgave herself immediately. She believed she was also forgiven by her victim, who was waiting for her in heaven. Lamb saw his sister as blameless, but I doubt he forgave himself. According to the coroner’s report, a few days before the catastrophe Mary had shown

some symptoms of insanity…which had so much increased on the Wednesday evening that her brother early the next morning went in quest of Dr. Pitcairn—had that gentleman been met with, the fatal catastrophe had, in all probability, been prevented.

The most remarkable aspect of the murder of Elizabeth Lamb, apart from how little she was mourned, is that a story of female servitude has become one of male sacrifice. The Elia persona is part of that myth: Lamb created an alter ego, it is assumed, in order to return to the prelapsarian world of the Inner Temple; Elia was the man he might have become had Mary not hung around his neck like an albatross. “Who can gauge the amount of strain and sacrifice which the relationship must have imposed on Charles?” wrote John Gross in these pages in 1983. “I know no parallel,” wrote Benjamin Ellis Martin in 1890, to the “strain of more than forty years of undeviating devotion…. He never even said to himself that he was doing something fine.” “In this constant and uncomplaining endurance,” wrote Lamb’s friend Barry Cornwall in his 1866 memoir, “his life was heroic.”

But this is not how Lamb experienced his life. He had no sense of doing anything noble or selfless: Mary was essential to his being. “I am a widow’d thing, now thou art gone,” he wrote in his poem “Written on Christmas Day 1797,” when she was incarcerated. When Mary was “not violent,” he told a friend thirty-five years later, “her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of the world.” The “sacrifice,” as Lamb suspected, had been Mary’s own: in their shared psychic economy, she carried the insanity for them both. “If Mary hadn’t done what she did,” argues Eric G. Wilson in Dream-Child (2022), “he might have passed through the portal of lunacy again. But after she killed, he had to settle for smaller rebellions: gin, punning, poetry.”

“Lamb discovered Elia in himself,” writes Dart, “he did not discover himself in Elia.” He also discovered Mary in himself, and Elia in Mary. Lamb’s description of Mary with her “rambling chat,” her “memory unnaturally strong,” including “every important thing and every trifle,” might serve also as a portrait of Elia. “For twelve hours incessantly she will pour out without intermission all her past life,” Lamb wrote of his sister the year of his death, “forgetting nothing, pouring out name after name…sense and nonsense; truths and errors huddled together; a medley between inspiration and possession.” Mary’s hardships, compared with his own privileges, mirror the distinctions drawn by Elia between Lamb’s easy ride at school and his own experience of loneliness and brutality; Elia’s innocence echoes Mary’s pristine conscience. “What he tells us, as of himself,” wrote the “Friend of the Late Elia” in his preface to the Last Essays, “was often true only (historically) of another.”