Structure of Charles Lamb's Essays: A Critical Study

There is always a never-ending charm and an aura that accompanies the ‘light and cleverly written’ personal essay. The uniqueness of the personal essay lies in its intimacy – the capacity of the writer to connect – intimately with his/her audience, on matters relating to memoir, philosophical speculations, familial anecdotes, portraits, visualisations, etc. The charm of the personal essay lies not only in its style, language and technique (tone and voice), but also in its capacity to provoke thought and arouse the emotions.

Ideas of political, personal and artistic liberty in the aftermath of the French Revolution, provided artists and intellectuals the much needed artistic liberties to break free from the bonds of tradition that had hitherto ‘shackled/fettered’ the 18^th century imagination. In short, in a personal essay, the personality of the writer takes centre stage – one’s likes and dislikes, character, temperament, feelings, attitude, desires, hopes, beliefs, fantasies etc are foregrounded through the essay. As the famous critic Carl Van Doren, in his “Note on the Essay”, puts it: “An essay is a communication.. the person who communicates anything in any way must be a person. His truth must have a tone, his speech must have a rhythm which are his and solely his. His knowledge or opinions must have lain long enough inside him to have taken root there; and when they come away they must bring some of the soil clinging to them”.

The essence of the personal essay consists in its conversational tone, and its truthfulness to the subject discussed, (albeit with degrees of exaggeration!), bordering on the self, and providing too much distraction on the way.

Apart from poetry, which is considered the crowning glory of the Age, the Romantic age was also rich in literary criticism and prose. Literary prose of the period gave a lot of importance to aesthetic autonomy of a work of art, egalitarian ideals, imaginative thinking, overtly emotional language, and uniqueness of the individual, etc. Humour, Descriptive style, reflective style, quotes and anecdotes are other features of the personal essay.

Hunt, Hazlitt, Coleridge and Lamb were not only contemporaries but also good friends who collaborated with and influenced each other.

Thomas McFarland regards Romanticism as a “great mountain range” and its various writers as different peaks in that range. “Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey are true “mountains” of Romanticism, rather than “foothills” (i.e., lesser, marginal writers), that are “aligned so that their perspective takes in the snow–capped peak of Coleridge!”

Among these prose giants, Charles Lamb is rightfully called the prince of essayists and the master of the personal essay, because of his capacity to develop a highly personalised narrative style through his ‘literary alter ego’ “Elia”.

William Zeiger in the monumental Encyclopaedia of the Essay gives a very descriptive rendering of the life and works of Lamb:

Charles Lamb worked as a clerk for a mercantile firm from the age of 17 until he retired at 50. A writer by avocation, he published poetry, a novel, two plays, critical essays, stories for children (with his sister Mary), and familiar essays.
Lamb helped shape the English essay. Before the Romantic period, the essay was defined by the work of Addison and Steele – familiar in tone, social and didactic in purpose. In the hands of Lamb and his contemporaries, the essay became familiar not only in tone but also in purpose. Rather than posing as models of a social class, Lamb and writers like William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey appeared personally in their own texts and declared their personal opinions. The personality of the writer merged with the substance of the essay. Lamb stands apart even from his contemporaries, however, in foregrounding the writer’s personality, for two reasons. First, in Lamb’s essays, the personality of the writer nudges the thesis off stage. Writing in the persona of Elia, a charming, curious, and talkative London bachelor, Lamb reminisces, describes a scene or a character, proposes one opinion only to replace it with another – often all of these in a single essay – never seriously advancing a thesis. One effect is that the reader, after “conversing” with Elia, is so well entertained as not to notice, or mind, the absence of a point. Elia’s personal charm is the whole essay. Another effect of the essays’ taking no strong stands, however, is that Elia’s personality is elusive. A feeling of intimacy combines with a sense of never knowing where the essays rest intellectually. For these reasons, in Lamb’s hands the English essay becomes not a vehicle for ideas, but a plaything, a divertissement.

The familiar tone of his essays comes partly from a conversational flow of words – Lamb took great pains revising his texts in order to achieve the effect of conversational ease – and partly from a choice of the most commonplace subjects. The subjects of the essays suit the tone. Lamb – or Elia – does not try to figure out life, any more than he tries to explain himself personally.
Lamb’s familiar tone was directed to a familiar audience – educated Londoners whom he knew personally. His puckish humour moved him often to mix fact with fiction, historical accuracy with imagination. His love for the literature of previous centuries seasoned his essays with old-fashioned expressions and allusions to Shakespeare, Milton, and the prose writers Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Thomas Fuller; even at the moment they were published, Lamb’s essays had an archaic flavour because of his taste for literature over a century old. He also possessed what he called an “antithetical manner”, which led him to entertain contrary viewpoints with equanimity. Finally, he was sentimental, sometimes to the point of sentimentality. Each of these idiosyncrasies contributes in its own way to the elusiveness of the essays, and together they have caused some critics to call them “quaint”; yet Lamb’s ability to make his own idiosyncrasies the subject of artful reflection helped create the familiar or personal essay.
No single passage can illustrate all of Lamb’s qualities, but perhaps a few citations can give a sense of his style.

With this citation as the backdrop, let’s proceed to analyse the structure of his famous essay “Dream Children: A Reverie”.

The Structure of a text tells us the way in which information is organised within a text, and the way in which its constituent elements are connected. Authors present information to their readers in a structured way, so that students can analyse how information is organised, and thereby also understand the author’s craft. In other words, the structure of a text helps us understand ‘how a text is built’.

Some of the commonly used text structures are:

Description

Chronological Sequence

Problem and Solution

Cause and Effect

Compare and Contrast

Order of Importance, etc.

“Dream Children: A Reverie” is very interesting from a structural point of view. The whole essay is written in ONE HUGE PARAGRAPH, which is very unique for a personal essay. However, Lamb takes these artistic liberties mainly because of the fact that, they are in the main, personal in nature, and also because of the intimacy that he seeks to establish with his reader.

There is a chronological sequencing of events along with descriptive sketches that are vivid and realistic in their portrayal.

Lamb starts off on the deductive approach to his subject, by giving the reader a generalised dictum on children. This generalised dictum was common with the pioneering English essayists like Sir Francis Bacon. In Bacon’s most anthologised essay “Poor Relations”, for example, he starts off with a general hypothesis that, “a Poor Relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, - a piece of impertinent correspondency – an odious approximation, - a haunting conscience, - a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity, - an unwelcome remembrancer, - a perpetually recurring mortification, - a drain on your purse, - a more intolerable dun upon your pride, - a drawback upon success, - a rebuke to your rising, - a stain in your blood, - a blot on your scutcheon, - a rent in your garment, - …” then he proceeds to deduce with illustrations, the reasons for his hypothesis.

Similarly, Lamb uses the generalised hypothesis and then proceeds to foreground the plan of his essay in the first two sentences.

“It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other evening to hear about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in they and papa lived)”

The whole essay has just about 20 sentences, with two sentences as long as twelve lines each. to be contd...

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