'The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among the cart-rucks of figures and cyphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation.' Charles Lamb was employed full-time as a clerk in the City of London for most of his adult life, hence his literary output is relatively small when compared with freelance contemporaries such as Thomas De Quincey or William Hazlitt (P.P. Howe's complete Hazlitt edition of the 1930s runs to twenty-one volumes; E. V. Lucas's 1903 edition of The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb has five). Nevertheless, what Lamb's oeuvre might lack in size it more than makes up for in quality: both as a contributor to the great Romantic conversation about art and life, and as the English language's greatest familiar essayist, Lamb is an indispensable figure. This volume contains Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), the essay collections for which he is best known. It is the fourth volume in the Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, the first scholarly edition of their works in a century.
This fourth volume of The Collected Works of Charles and Mary Lamb contains Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb's masterpieces of the Romantic essay form written in his Elia persona. Lamb's seminal essays are presented with critical and textual introductions, explanatory notes, and textual variants.
