Charles Lamb Essays Of Elia My Relations
Varyarmah Knox
In 1792 while tending to his grandmother, Mary Field, in Hertfordshire, Charles Lamb fell in love with a young woman named Ann Simmons. Although no epistolary record exists of the relationship between the two, Lamb seems to have spent years wooing her. The record of the love exists in several accounts of Lamb's writing. "Rosamund Gray" is a story of a young man named Allen Clare who loves Rosamund Gray but their relationship comes to nothing because of her sudden death. Miss Simmons also appears in several Elia essays under the name "Alice M". The essays "Dream Children", "New Year's Eve", and several others, speak of the many years that Lamb spent pursuing his love that ultimately failed. Miss Simmons eventually went on to marry a silversmith and Lamb called the failure of the affair his "great disappointment".
Similar to what you may address in the essay on memory and nostalgia, one of the hallmarks of Romanticism was an fixation with the past, be that Walter Scott's Ivanhoe which depicted medieval England or James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, which mourns the death of the vanishing of the Native American in the United States. Like other Romantics, Lamb used the past as a reliable source of subject matter, but somewhat unique amongst the Romantics, he mainly focused on his own past. Another key attribute of Romantic literature is its lyrical style, and Lamb's own lyricism may well be his most relevant contribution to the essay form. By striking a conversational tone and letting himself veer into evocative, purple prose, Lamb created essays that were at once personable and eloquent. You can explore his novel sentence construction, with its multitude of run-ons, as well as his lurid word choice.