Charles Lamb Collection

Charles Lamb was born to John and Elizabeth (Field) Lamb in London on February 10, 1775. Two of his siblings survived to adulthood, John (1763-1821) and Mary Ann (1764-1847). Charles Lamb studied at Christ's Hospital but left the school at the age of fifteen due to his chronic stammering. He began working as a secretary and later entered the mercantile trade, joining the East India Company as a clerk in the accounting department in 1792. Mental illness ran in the Lamb family, and Charles spent six weeks in an asylum in Hoxton in 1795. In September of 1796, Mary Lamb (who was afflicted with the same disease and spent considerable amounts of time in private asylums during her life) killed her mother in a fit of mania. A jury found her to be insane and she was removed to the Hoxton asylum. Once she was deemed to be recovered, she would only be allowed to return home on the condition that a family member take responsibility for her care. Charles Lamb accepted this responsibility and devoted much of the rest of his life to his sister.

Lamb began his literary career in the late 1790s, contributing several poems to his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Poems, second edition, by S. T. Coleridge, to which are now added poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd (1797). During the 1800s, Lamb began writing journalistic pieces, theatre, and children's literature. He authored several children's books with his sister Mary, including Tales from Shakespear (1807) and Mrs Leicester's School (1809). Charles and Mary Lamb also began giving weekly soirées at their home in 1806. Charles Lamb became increasingly well known in the London literary scene in the 1810s and began writing essays for John Scott's London Magazine under the pseudonym Elia (an anagram for a lie). He retired from the East India Company in 1825 due to declining health and died on December 27, 1834 following a fall at his home.