Charles Lamb (1775–1834) was an English author, critic, and minor poet. He is best known for the essays he wrote under the name Elia. He remains one of the most adored and read of English essayists.
Born in Temple, London, Lamb spent his ‘joyful schooldays’ at Christ’s Hospital, where he started a lasting friendship with poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lamb earned his living as a clerk in the East India House. Much of his life was dedicated to caring for his sister Mary Lamb (1764–1847,) who killed their invalid mother in an attack of mania.
Lamb’s early efforts at writing included poetry, a little prose romance titled The Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret (1797,) and John Woodvil (1801)—the result of his analysis of Elizabethan dramatic poetry, in whose revival he was to play so large a part.
Lamb is best known for his essays, most notably collected as The Essays of Elia (1820–23, 1833.) He is also remembered for his children’s books, which comprise Tales from Shakespeare (1807,) on which he collaborated with Mary.
Lamb’s eccentric wit—what he called a “self-pleasing quaintness”—was publicized through the identity of ‘Elia’ in The London Magazine (1820–25,) and his unfashionable dedication to London life as subject-matter earned him a place in the new Cockney School of metropolitan poets and essayists. By 1838, Charles Dickens was writing to associates endorsing the work of “the original kind-hearted, veritable Elia.”
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Charles Lamb
The beggar is the only person in the universe not obliged to study appearance.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Appearance
Pain is life—the sharper, the more evidence of life.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Pain
Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.
—Charles Lamb
A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Laughter
Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Gambling, Competition
To pile up honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness.
—Charles Lamb
For God’s sake (I never was more serious) don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print… substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Reputation
The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Parties
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Law, Lawyers
A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Gardening
Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Society
Is it a stale remark to say that I have constantly found the interest excited at a playhouse to bear an exact inverse proportion to the price paid for admission?
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Acting
Philanthropy, like charity, must begin at home; from this centre our sympathies should extend in an ever widening circle.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Philanthropy
How often the spell of beauty is rudely broken by coarse, loud talking! How often you are irresistibly drawn to a plain, unassuming woman, whose soft, silvery tones render her positively attractive. In the social circle how pleasant it is to hear a woman talk in that low key which always characterizes the true lady. In the sanctuary of home how such a voice soothes the fretful child and cheers the weary husband!
—Charles Lamb
In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Science, Scientists
Ballads are the vocal portraits of the national mind.
—Charles Lamb
Don’t introduce me to that man! I want to go on hating him, and I can’t hate a man whom I know.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Attitude
The vices of some men are magnificent.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Vice, Virtue
Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Children
Hail to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine! Great is thy name in the rubric. Like unto thee, assuredly, there is no other mitred father in the calendar.
—Charles Lamb
Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see another mountain in my life.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Friends and Friendship
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
Topics: Books
Mother’s love grows by giving.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Mothers, Mother
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Lawyers
How a sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated in him as his only duty.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Selfishness, Cancer, Health
In the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise.—No woman dresses below herself from caprice.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Dress
Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
—Charles Lamb
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians were reposing here, as in some dormitory or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Libraries
To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Disease, Sickness
Were I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Home
New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: One liners, Birthdays
A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Humor
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever puts one down without the feeling of disappointment.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Curiosity, News
Who first invented work, and bound the free and holiday-rejoicing spirit down?
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Holidays
It is with some violence to the imagination that we conceive of an actor belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters they assume upon the stage.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Actors
So near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions which in his unregenerate state served to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him (a little turned) to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Sin
Lawyers I suppose were children once.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Lawyers, Law
A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity. He is known by his knock.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Family
What have I gained by health? Intolerable dullness. What by moderate meals? A total blank.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Health
Why are we never quite at ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? Because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Teachers, Teaching
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