Charles Lamb as a Romantic Essayist

Charles Lamb in his Essays of Elia, uses the pseudonym of Elia.

Dream Children: A Reverie, is an essay from this collection which
was published in the form of a book, this was later followed by the
second volume titled Last Essays of Elia. Lamb’s writing style by
nature is very romantic.

The Essays are very personal, as they are somewhat fictionalized

stories of himself. It tells us of what his life would have been had he
made different decisions in his life. In his essays, he mentions his
family members often with different names. In Dream Children: A
Reverie, he fantasizes his life, had he married his beloved Ann
Simmons, who he calls Alice W. in the Elia essays.

Lamb is chiefly remembered for his “Elia” essays, which are

celebrated for their witty and ironic treatment of everyday subjects.
The “Elia” essays are characterized by Lamb’s personal tone,
narrative ease, and wealth of literary allusions. Never didactic, the
essays treat ordinary subjects in a nostalgic, fanciful way by
combining humour, pathos, and a sophisticated irony ranging from
gentle to scathing.

Lamb conjures up humour and pathos in his ‘Elian’ essays.

Although Dream Children begins on a merry note, the dark side of
life soon forces itself upon Lamb’s attention and the comic attitude
gives way to melancholy at the end of the essay. Throughout the
essay Lamb presents his children in such a way that we never
guess that they are merely fragments of his imagination – their
movements, their reactions, and their expressions are all realistic. It
is only at the end of the essay that we realize that the entire
episode with his children is a merely a daydream. We are
awakened by a painful realization of the facts.

The essay, Dreams Children in itself is quite melancholy as most

romantic essays are. In it, Lamb reminisces his childhood by telling
his children stories of when he was younger. The subject of death is
mentioned very often. The fictionalized Charles Lamb, the father,
tells his children stories of their deceased great- grand mother
Field. He mentions that they recently had heard of the horrifying
ballad of the Babes in the Wood. He also tells them stories of his
deceased older brother John L. and how he misses him.

His essays are allusive, which is peculiar to romantic essays. Lamb,

rambles throughout the narratives with ease and is able to return to
the point. He often does it in his writings. This allusive quality is
seen in Dream Children when he begins talking about his
grandmother Field, he then rambles to talk of the house she worked
in, and later to talk about the mantel piece carving of the Babes in
the Wood. He also makes use of parentheses, which gives us an
insight to the characters stream of consciousness. The parentheses
in, Dream Children, mostly show us the observations of the father,
which tell us more about the children’s expressions for dramatic
emphasis.

Lambs essays are highly evocative, and the reader feels empathy
towards the characters. This is a characteristic quality of the
Romantic Essayists.  In Dream Children, the narrator comments on
how similar the daughter’s face is to the mother and he can’t tell
which of the two is in front of him, but only in the end do we realize
that the entire story was just a fragment of his imagination.

His essays have a reflective quality; he talks about his schooling

days in Christ’s Hospital in the essay, Christ’s Hospital Five and
Thirty Years Ago wherein he speaks of himself in the third person
as “L”. Rosamund Gray is another essay in which he reflects upon
his feelings for Ann Simmons as the titular character and how their
relationship doesn’t go too far due to Miss Gray passing away.

To conclude we can see that Lambs essays are very personal.

They possess humour and pathos like most romantic works of
literature. Lamb is also praised for his allusive quality which is noted
by many literary critics. And above all he is highly evocative, a
quality possessed by all Romantic writers.