The English author, critic, and minor poet Charles Lamb (1775-1834) is best known for the essays he wrote under the name Elia. He remains one of the most loved and read of English essayists. Charles Lamb was born on Feb. 10, 1775, in London. At the age...

With his Elia essays, nearly all written for the London Magazine during the years 1820-1826, Charles Lamb, clerk at the East India Company for thirty-three years, achieved a blend of the personal, witty, poetic, and profound in exquisitely subtle short...

The following essay discusses Charles Lamb and his sister, Mary Lamb. Although Charles Lamb was best known to his contemporaries for his essays published under the pseudonym "Elia," his place in the annals of children's literature rests on Tales from...

The author Charles Lamb deserves more popularity than he currently experiences. His life was often difficult, including attendance at a harsh charity school, episodes of insanity, and a family murder. Lamb's writing, especially his essays and criticism, remain perceptive and witty. Lamb was also...

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...

I read pretty much all of At Large and At Small in one sitting, slightly hung over, lying around in bed on a Saturday morning. When I’m reading a collection of essays by a pronounced journalist (Fadiman being the former editor of The American Scholar),...

In the following excerpt, Riehl discusses late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century critical reaction to Lamb's works.

In the following essay, Chandler explicates Lamb's largely neglected poetic response to atheism entitled “Living without God in the World.”

In the following excerpt, Heller assesses Lamb's “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” and other critical essays that concentrate on the act of reading as a creative process.