Charles Lamb: The Elia Essays Explained for English Literature Exams

Ask a room of English Literature aspirants who wrote Tales from Shakespeare and most will say Charles Lamb. That answer is only a third right. The book (1807) was a joint project with his sister Mary, and Mary did most of it: she retold the comedies, while Charles took the six tragedies, among them King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello. Examiners like this kind of half-truth because it separates students who memorised a list from students who know the writer. This guide is built to put you in the second group.

Asked in: UGC NET, State SET, GATE, KVS and State PGT/TGT, UP PGT and Assistant Professor exams.

Why examiners keep coming back to Lamb

Lamb is the easiest Romantic prose writer to set questions on, and that is exactly why he appears so often. His life gives clean factual hooks (a clerk for 33 years, a pen name borrowed from a real person, a sister he looked after for decades). His essays have memorable titles that make good options. And he sits in a crowd of prose writers who are easy to confuse: Hazlitt, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt and Landor. A good half of the ‘Lamb’ questions on this site are really tests of whether you can keep these five apart.

My advice on priorities is simple. Spend most of your time on the Elia essays and the people around Lamb. Spend a little on the Shakespeare work (the Tales and the Specimens). Spend almost nothing on his poems and plays beyond the titles and dates in the table below. For UGC NET and SET papers in particular, the statement-type question (choose the correct statements about Lamb) is now common, so you need facts you can check, not vague impressions of a ‘gentle’ essayist.

Lamb’s works in order

One date students get wrong: Essays of Elia is 1823, not 1820. The essays began in the magazine in 1820; the book came three years later. A site question asks exactly this (see the table further down).

The Elia essays you should know by name

There are 28 essays in the first series and 24 items in the second. You do not need all of them. These are the ones that turn up as options, as passage sources, or as ‘which collection’ questions.

From Essays of Elia (1823)

• ‘The South-Sea House’: the first essay signed Elia. A portrait of the old trading company office and its clerks. The pen name came from an Italian clerk Lamb had worked beside there.
• ‘Oxford in the Vacation’: Lamb, who never went to university, wanders the empty colleges and imagines himself a scholar.
• ‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’: school memories, told partly from the viewpoint of a boarder like Coleridge. Pair it with Coleridge, who was at the same school.
• ‘The Two Races of Men’: the world divided into ‘the men who borrow, and the men who lend’. The borrowers come off better.
• ‘New Year’s Eve’: reflection on time, age and death. Often set as a passage.
• ‘Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist’: comic character sketch of a fierce card player.
• ‘Imperfect Sympathies’: Lamb admits to prejudices he cannot reason himself out of.
• ‘Dream-Children: A Reverie’: the narrator tells two children, Alice and John, about their family, and they fade away: they were never born. Probably his most admired essay.
• ‘The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers’: affectionate essay on the London child sweeps.
• ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’: the mock-history of how roast pork was discovered in China when a boy, Bo-bo, burned down his father Ho-ti’s cottage. Know both names.
• ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’ (1822): his defence of Restoration comedy as a world of fantasy outside everyday morality. Expect it in criticism and drama papers too.

From Last Essays of Elia (1833)

• ‘Old China’: Elia and his cousin Bridget look at a china teacup and remember when they were poorer and happier. The ‘competence to age’ passage asked on this site comes from here.
• ‘The Superannuated Man’: a clerk’s release after decades at a desk. Lamb drew on his own retirement from East India House in 1825.
• ‘Poor Relations’: comic study of the embarrassing relative at the dinner table.
• ‘Sanity of True Genius’: argues that great wit is sane, not mad. A useful line for criticism questions.
• ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’: Lamb on the pleasure of old books and the ‘books which are no books’.

A quick rule that settles most ‘which series’ questions: if the essay looks back on old age, retirement or past poverty (‘Old China’, ‘The Superannuated Man’), think Last Essays. ‘Dream-Children’ is the exception people trip over; it is in the first series.

The Elia family: who is really who

Elia writes about his relatives as if they were characters, and examiners treat them as a matching exercise. Here is the key.

Two nicknames outside the essays are worth a line each. Coleridge addressed him as ‘my gentle-hearted Charles’ in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ (1797), and Lamb protested in a letter that he did not want to be called gentle-hearted in print. Later critics gave him the title ‘the prince of English essayists’, which shows up in MCQ stems as a clue.

Charles and Mary: the partnership exams test

In 1796 Mary Lamb, in a fit of mental illness that would return through her life, killed their mother. Charles took on her care, and they lived together until his death. You do not need the biography in detail, but you do need its literary result: a working partnership that produced three books.

• Tales from Shakespear (1807): Mary the comedies, Charles the six tragedies.
• Mrs. Leicester’s School (1809): stories in the voices of schoolgirls.
• Poetry for Children: verses for young readers, written mainly by Mary with her brother’s help.

When an option reads ‘Charles Lamb wrote Tales from Shakespeare‘, most papers still accept it, since his name has always been on the book. When a statement says he wrote it alone, or wrote the comedies, mark it wrong.

Magazines and friends

Lamb’s prose belongs to the periodical culture of the 1810s and 1820s, and questions on him often hide inside questions about that world.

• The London Magazine (founded 1820): home of the Elia essays until 1825. Hazlitt and De Quincey also wrote for it; De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater first ran there in 1821.
• Leigh Hunt’s Reflector: where Lamb published his papers on Shakespeare’s tragedies and on Hogarth. The Shakespeare essay is the source of his famous view that King Lear cannot really be acted, only read.
• Coleridge: friend from Christ’s Hospital onward. His 1796 Poems carried Lamb’s first sonnets.
• Wordsworth: a friend whose poetic theory Lamb defended. The June 2025 UGC NET question below turns on this.
• Hazlitt: close friend, and the critic who described him in The Spirit of the Age (1825) as succeeding ‘not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it’. That line has been set as a question.
• Thomas Hood, Landor and Hunt: all part of the circle Lamb wrote pen-portraits of in his letters and essays.

For the wider Romantic picture, read this alongside our guides to P. B. Shelley and John Keats. For the Shakespeare side of Lamb, our William Shakespeare guide covers the plays he retold. If you want to see where Lamb’s city essays lead, the Charles Dickens guide is the natural next step; Britannica notes that Lamb’s urban subjects anticipate Dickens.

Asked in exams: real questions from this site

Each question below comes from a previous year question page on Limitless Literature. Where the page names the exam and year, it is shown; otherwise the entry is marked as a previous year question. Follow the link to practise the full set.

Notice the pattern. Only two of these eight ask for a plain date. The rest test the pen name, the job, the circle and the essays. That is where your revision time should go. For more practice across periods, use the topic-wise PYQ collection or browse all previous year question papers.

Exam traps (and the right answers)

1. ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ is by Lamb. Wrong. It is Hazlitt’s account of meeting Coleridge and Wordsworth. Lamb appears as a distractor in this site’s question (British Literature PYQs, Q91).
2. The Round Table was written by Lamb and Hazlitt. Wrong. It was Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt (same page, Q143).
3. Lamb wrote The Revolt of the Tartars. Wrong. That is De Quincey, and the June 2025 statement question used it to make statement D false. De Quincey is also the answer for ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (British Poetry PYQs, Q34) and for the ‘literature of knowledge’ and ‘literature of power’ distinction (Literary Criticism PYQs, Q14).
4. The London crowd never attracted Lamb. Wrong, and it was the other false statement in June 2025. Lamb was a devoted Londoner who loved its streets, theatres and bookstalls.
5. ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous’ is Lamb’s line. Wrong. It is Byron’s, after Childe Harold; Lamb was a distractor in the cancelled June 2024 paper (UGC NET June 2024, Q1).
6. Lamb worked all his life at the South Sea House. Wrong. He was there only a few months before joining East India House in 1792. The South Sea House gave him his first essay and his pen name, not his career.

Self-test: five questions

Revision plan for Lamb

If you have one evening, do it in this order. First, the eight questions in the table above, until you can answer each without looking. Second, the essay list, grouped by series. Third, the four confusable prose writers: Hazlitt (The Spirit of the Age, Table-Talk, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’), De Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the ‘literature of power’), Leigh Hunt (The Examiner, The Reflector) and Landor (Imaginary Conversations). Last, the works table, but only these years: 1807, 1808, 1820, 1823 and 1833.

If you have more time, read ‘Dream-Children’ and ‘A Dissertation upon Roast Pig’ in full. They are short, they are funny and sad in turn, and once you have read them you will not mix up their details in an exam hall. For a reliable short biography, see the Britannica entry on Charles Lamb.

FAQ

Why did Charles Lamb use the name Elia?

He borrowed it from an Italian clerk he had worked with at the South Sea House. He first used it for his 1820 essay on that office in the London Magazine, and kept it for the whole series.

When were Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia published?

Essays of Elia came out as a book in 1823. Last Essays of Elia, the second series, followed in 1833.

What was Charles Lamb’s job?

He was a clerk at East India House, headquarters of the East India Company, from 1792 until he retired in 1825, about 33 years. Before that he worked briefly at the South Sea House.

Did Charles Lamb write Tales from Shakespeare alone?

No. He wrote it with his sister Mary Lamb in 1807. Mary retold the comedies and Charles the six tragedies.