Romantic Drama

Among all modes of literary expression, drama was the most popular, most lucrative, and most influential of the era. S. T. Coleridge, Joanna Baillie, Lord Byron, Mary Mitford were among the poets whose plays were successfully performed, and Coleridge joined Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt as critics of the drama. To shield church and state, censorship was exercised under the Licensing Act (1737). This Act granted to the licensed Theatres Royal the exclusive right to perform traditional comedy and tragedy. Originally directed to perform only musical entertainment and pantomime, the unlicensed theatres gradually introduced more spoken dialogue and relied on melodrama to attract audiences.

Charles Lamb, Elia (1823), title-page

If Lamb had written only one book in his life, and it was this one, he would still be regarded as one of the great essayists in the language. By the time this collection was published, Lamb was already a literary celebrity because of the rage for everything to do with Elia generated by the individual essays published under that name in the London Magazine. The publisher was Taylor and Hessey, who had published Keats, among others, and who presumably thought the four letters spelling Elia's name would be more than enough to guarantee a brisk sale.

Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

Side portrait of the essayist and poet Charles Lamb

“ÉTUDE SUR L’HUMOUR”: CHARLES LAMB NA BIBLIOTECA DE MACHADO DE ASSIS

Resumo O presente artigo se propõe a investigar a edição francesa de Charles Lamb, Essais Choisis, que Machado de Assis possuía em sua biblioteca. Esta edição foi publicada em 1880, no mesmo ano em que Machado inicia as Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas na Revista Brasileira, e contava com um extenso aparato crítico, “Étude sur L’humour”, no qual o tradutor, Louis Dépret, investiga as bases filosóficas e literárias do humor inglês e da obra de Lamb. Assim, neste artigo, faremos uma análise filosófica e filológica dos termos associados ao humor discutidos no prefácio de Dépret, por meio do qual esperamos aprofundar o conhecimento que Machado possuía do humorismo e ensaísmo de Lamb.

What’s in a Name?

Charles Lamb treated album verses as occasions for rethinking and recuperating human relationships in an alienating modern culture. Lamb uses the unpromising occasion of writing a poem for a stranger to meditate on ethical, formal, and affective questions raised by the album transaction. Lamb’s poems for strangers problematize female identity; they draw on gendered stereotypes or nominative determinism but suggest that names and albums are unreliable determinants of female identity. One such poem for a stranger was the primary evidence in critical debates triggered by Lamb’s collection Album Verses, with a Few Others (1830). The chapter shows why Lamb presented an aesthetic defence of this minor, occasional genre, resisting the aggressive masculinity of periodical reviewing, and affiliating himself instead with the marginal literary values of manuscript culture—the feminine, domestic, and juvenile.

Charles Lamb, Elia, and Essays in Familiarity

Charles Lamb helped develop the familiar essay genre through his Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays (1833). Highly popular through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he faded from view through the twentieth century thanks to New Critical scorn. This chapter restores the Elian voice to contemporary conversations about the essay, tracing Lamb’s influence and afterlives in the work of later writers from Anne Fadiman to David Foster Wallace. More broadly, the chapter uses Lamb to open up the many nuances of the familiar essay, and to trace its origins and debts. From conversation to letter-writing to the work of the Romantic poets and the strange persona of Elia himself, it explores the many meanings and histories of the familiar mode.

Charles Lamb, Roast Pork, and Willow Crockery

Charles Lamb’s work communicates both his frustrated wish to study classics and the Orientalist atmosphere of his employment at East India House. ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’ envisions the discovery of cooking in China but—although it has correspondences with Thomas Manning’s travels—the source is Porphyry’s treatise on vegetarianism. ‘Old China’ is an ekphrastic treatment of an imaginary crockery set in the chinoiserie aesthetic, but the primary influence is Keats’s ‘Grecian Urn’. Lamb’s and Joanna Baillie’s responses to chinoiserie chart fluctuations in British opinion on China, and interrogate whether crockery was a gendered interest. Via Mark Lemon, Lamb’s writing on China has had lasting influence on narratives that arose about the Willow pattern popularized by Wedgwood and Spode. The Willow pattern imitated Chinese aesthetics, but the Willow narrative is Ovidian rather than Chinese.