Lamb

Lamb

English essayist and critic, Charles Lamb is best known for his series of miscellaneous Essays of Elia published in the London Magazine. He was born on February 10, 1775 in Inner Temple, London to a lawyer’s clerk spending most of his youth among the barristers in Crown Row Office and later representing a picture of that life in Elia on the Old Benchers. In 1782 while at school in London, the seven year old Lamb met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a fellow pupil who became Lamb’s lifelong close friend and who helped stir his growing interest in poetry. Lamb and his sister, Mary published Tales from
Shakespeare in 1807, a retelling of the plays for children, and Mrs. Leicester’s School in 1809, a collection of stories told by school children. In 1808 Lamb published a children’s version of the Odyssey, called The Adventures of Ulysses. Lamb also published an anthology of selections from Elizabethan dramas and contributed critical papers on William Shakespeare and on the artist William Hogarth to the quarterly The Reflector. He died on December 27, 1834 in Edmonton, Middlesex having never married in order to care for his unstable sister, Mary for most of his adult life.