Charles Lamb

First published in Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, II, 7 January 1835, p. 8. It was reprinted (slightly reworked and without the first two paragraphs) in Hunt’s Table-Talk, pp. 156–8. Lamb and Hunt were both educated at Christ’s Hospital, but did not come to know one another until 1810 (Blunden, 1930, p. 56). Lamb contributed to Hunt’s Examiner, Reflector, and Indicator, and the two were fellow-contributors to The New Monthly Magazine (see headnote above, pp. 41–2). In 1823 he described Hunt as ‘one of the most cordial-minded men I ever knew, and matchless as a fireside companion’ (Works, vol. i, p. 232). For his part, Hunt shared many of Lamb’s interests, and often praised him highly. In the 1818 ‘Preface’ to Foliage, he discussed William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and then observed that

between these two…I should place Charles Lamb, a single one of whose speculations upon humanity, unostentatiously scattered about in comments and magazines, is worth all the half-way gabbling of critics on establishment. (Hunt, Literary, pp. 129–30)

In 1824 he remarked that he ‘would give a great deal to have…my prose as easy and full of matter as Elia’s’ (Hunt, Literary, p. 210). For his 1830 Chat of the Week review of Lamb’s Album Verses, see above, pp. 111–13. Hunt wrote the present essay just shortly after Lamb died on 27 December 1834. Friends felt the tribute was ‘cold’ (Blunden, 1930, p. 261). Hunt replied that his ‘notice was hastily written’, and that he had ‘endeavoured to cram into it all I could’. But ‘what man’, he asked,

has praised him more frequently and warmly than myself in his lifetime? I loved him so much, and so thoroughly understood, let me say, some points of his character, owing to fellow-suffering of no common sort, that if there was any appearance of levity in the article, out of the gravest gravity did it issue. (Correspondence, vol. i, pp. 279–80)

In the months that followed, Hunt reprinted several of Lamb’s essays in the London Journal. He also reprinted ‘all the prose elegies on Lamb he met with, and many times made his own comment, with the result that the second volume of the work provides a Nenia Eliana, an anthology of the grief for Elia’ (Blunden, 1930, p. 261). 297TO the great regret of his friends, and the loss of the lovers of wit and fine writing, Mr Lamb has just died, suddenly.¹ There was a brief but happy mention of him in the ‘Times’ of Monday,² which we regret to say we accidentally missed copying, and cannot, at this moment, recur to. The following cordial notice, from the ‘True Sun,’³ is the only other we have seen up to this present writing, but many others will have appeared by the time it is published.