Happy Birthday, Charles Lamb
Born February 10, 1775, London, England | Died December 27, 1834, Edmonton, England
Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates British essayist and poet Charles Lamb on the 250th anniversary of his birth.
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“What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.”
“It is good to love the unknown.”

First published essay:
“The Londoner,” The Reflector, 1802.
Select nonfiction bibliography:
“On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation, 1811.
Essays of Elia, 1823
The Last Essays of Elia, 1833
See also:
Visit the Charles Lamb Society, founded in 1935 to study the life, works and times of Charles and Mary Lamb and their circle; to publish the Charles Lamb Bulletin, a biannual peer-review journal; and to support conferences and research into the life, works and times of Charles and Mary Lamb and their circle.
Listen to essays by Lamb read by various readers.
Read Clare Bucknell’s “‘So Whimsical a Head’,” a review of a recent biography of Charles Lamb, New York Review of Books, 2022.
Read Felicity James’s, “Bibliography of Charles Lamb Scholarship, 1998-2010,” Charles Lamb Bulletin, 2010).
Read Anne Fadiman, “The Unfuzzy Lamb,” in At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
Read William Hazlitt, “Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon,” The Spirit of the Age, 1825.