Volume 51, Number 16 · October 21, 2004
Loves of the Lambs
By Lorin Stein
Essays of Elia
by Charles Lamb, with a foreword by Phillip Lopate
University of Iowa Press, 453 pp., $19.95 (paper)
A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb
by Sarah Burton
London: Viking, 448 pp., £16.99
The Devil Kissed Her: The Story of Mary Lamb
by Kathy Watson
Tarcher/Putnam, 238 pp., $24.95
In 1820 the editor of The London Magazine, John Scott, approached a forty-five-year-old accountant named Charles Lamb with the idea of writing a series of essays about his daily life. Where Scott got the idea is unknown, but he is said to have offered Lamb two or three times what he paid his other contributors, who at the time included John Keats, William Hazlitt, John Clare, and Thomas De Quincey. Although Lamb was poor and had a chronically ill sister to support, his first reaction was to decline this flattering offer. He had already tried, years before, to write a series of personal essays, and had given up after a handful of installments.
Review, 5639 words
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