ABSTRACT
Charles Lamb was remembered in Coleridge’s will as ‘my oldest Friend, & ever-beloved Schoolfellow’. For the ‘poor friendless boy’ of Lamb’s essay, school-holidays offered only a burden of extra solitude; the boy is not explicitly a picture of the young Coleridge – he dreams of Calne in Wiltshire, not of Devon – but he does reflect part of the poet’s experience between the ages of nine and eighteen. Seeing Coleridge as by nature homeless and rootless was a way of explaining and extenuating some of his faults – his unreliability, his capriciousness, his lack of will. In Lamb’s case, the letter of 1823 coincides with his composition of the essay extracted, ‘Christ’s Hospital five and Thirty Years Ago’ (first published in the London Magazine and reprinted in the volume Elia, usually known as The Essays of Elia). Lamb accounts for Coleridge’s ‘veering about’ as an adult by describing his homelessness as a school-boy.
