Charles Lamb

At twenty-six, Charles Lamb tells Wordsworth that the Strand’s crowds, mud, bookstalls and midnight bustle fill him with such joy that he sometimes weeps in the street. How did London become the food of his imagination?

Walter Jerrold’s early twentieth-century biography follows Lamb from the family’s rooms in the Temple to Christ’s Hospital, where he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge—and into the streets he would love all his life. A clerk by the age of seventeen, Charles grows up amid books, family affection and a shadow already gathering over the household. Jerrold looks to Lamb’s essays and letters not just for the facts, but for the man: witty, tender, and unable to resist the city’s restless theater. What did the crowded life of London give him—and what would it ask of him in return?

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