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A Short Note on 'New Year's Eve' by Charles Lamb

Experiment Findings · April 2020

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Sanjeev Vishwakarma
Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gorakhpur University
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 A Short Note on ‘New Year’s Eve’ by Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb was a Romantic essayist who began his literary career as an unsuccessful poet
and dramatist but he established himself as the Prince of Essayists (said by Hugh Walker). He
wrote his essays in a subjective manner in which he talks more about his eccentricities,
idiosyncrasies, dreams, visions and follies. He creates humour even during a deep sense of
pathos, sufferings and pains. His style in most of his essays is a mixture of reflective, descriptive
and narrative ones and the model of subjective essays in which almost all of his essays are
written is much similar to that of the French essayist Montaigne (the father of essays).

In the essay ‘The New Year’s Eve’, Charles lamb relates his story with a blend of descriptive and
reflective styles. He thinks about and recalls his past days when he was a youth and reflects
about his ageing future that brings a pessimistic note to him. When he recollects his past
memories he seems to be more descriptive and reflective while the projection of his imaginary
world that is his would-be future, in the world of dreams of having a wife and children is more
reflective in nature. The tone of his writing is generally sad and pathetic and his mood seems
quite pessimistic in this essay. His fear from becoming old and reluctance to switch from the
previous year to the new one make Charles Lamb a more serious writer which has a keen
observation of the grey-moment that connects the old and the new years. He uses a very apt
metaphor to give this moment a pictorial view: “I saw the skirts of the departing Year.”

The essay seems to be Charles Lamb’s reflections on the idea of death and mortality that is an
inevitable part of the human existence, though he does not become ready to accept the realities of
life that people grow old and pass away at a certain point of time. Merely the slightest
consciousness of death frightens Charles Lamb in this essay and makes him more dejected, pale
and gloomy, and the sense of futility and stagnation in his life has crept in into his life in such a
way that he feels that a year seems to end in June instead of December as the end of spring and
summer season denote the end of all hopes and possibilities.

Charles Lamb always shows cleverness in the depiction of his characters in his essays and at the
same time he becomes mysterious and vogue when he talks about other characters. He is famous
for exchanging the personhood of his characters in essays and he keeps certain names of his
characters elliptic and abbreviated. Sometimes, he omits the inner spellings of their names and
 writes only the beginning and the ending letters, for example, “Alice W----n”. His prose is more
poetic in nature and his language is loaded or pregnant with his deep feelings and emotions. He
is more subjective in the treatment of his subject matters and his language chooses very suitable
metaphors to express his subtle ideas and unique experiences. Almost all of his essays were
published in the collection of his essays Essays of Elia which appeared in several editions. He
published his essays in the name of Elia (a pen name) which he adopted directly from a person
Elia whom he met when he was working in the South Sea House, a representative office of the
East India Company in England.

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