After essaying poetry and the drama (for both of which he maintained a
lifelong liking, writing in each form during his latest years), the
next kind of literary expression on which Lamb ventured was that of
stories and verses for children. In "Rosamund Gray," which is scarcely
a tale for children but rather a classic novelette, he gives the story
of a young orphan girl living at Widford in Hertfordshire with her
blind grandmother. The girl is beloved by young Allan Clare, and one
evening, wandering in sheer joy over the scenes of past delightful
rambles, she is assailed by a villain. Her blind grandmother finding
her gone from the cottage dies of a broken heart, and poor Rosamund,
disgraced and terrified, seeks the home of Allan and his sister and
there dies. It is a terrible story told with a beautiful simplicity.
Of how far it may have been founded on fact we do not know, but in
Rosamund, Lamb seems to have depicted something of a likeness of the
"fair-haired maid" with whom he had been in love, and in Elinor Clare
there can be no doubt that he portrayed much of the character of his
own loved sister.
The first of Lamb's known publications professedly for children was
"The King and Queen of Hearts: showing how notably the Queen made her
Tarts, and how scurvily the Knave stole them away: with other
particulars pertaining thereto," and this was only recovered about ten
years since after having been forgotten for the best part of a
century. The booklet, which was issued anonymously, consists of a
number of rough pictures, each accompanied by half a dozen lines of
Hudibrastic verse; the inspiration being of course the old nursery
rhyme about the tarts made by the Queen of Hearts and their subsequent
fate.
The "Tales from Shakspeare," which followed, were written by both
Charles Lamb and his sister: indeed the work seems at first to have
been intended for Mary's hand alone, but her brother undertook the
telling of the stories of the tragedies, and to use his own words, out
of the twenty tales he was "responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon,
Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of
grammar, for none of the cuts, and for all of the spelling." When the
work was originally produced it had illustrations to which Lamb
objected. His reference to tail-pieces is possibly an indication that
he sometimes rounded off the stories for his sister, just as he
certainly completed the preface for her. Though the dual authorship of
the volume is referred to in the preface the publisher put Charles
Lamb's name as author of the whole on the title-page of the book. The
"Tales" are of course designed for young readers--they are told, as it
has been recognized, with a kind of Wordsworthian simplicity--as an
introduction to "the rich treasures from which the small and valueless
coins are extracted." How admirably they have served their purpose for
generations of readers is to be seen in the long succession of
editions in which the work has been issued.
Again did brother and sister collaborate in the next of the children's
books associated with the name of Lamb, and again Charles was
responsible for but about a third of the whole. Of the ten tales in
"Mrs. Leicester's School" he wrote but three. These stories, which are
supposed to be told by young girls to their school-mates, are simple
records of childish experiences recounted with childish naïveté. They
met with some success during the lifetime of their authors--ten
editions being disposed of in something under twenty years--and still
hold their own, both as gift books for the young and as parts of that
wonderfully varied, yet almost wholly delightful body of literature,
associated with the name of Lamb. Here, as later in the "Essays of
Elia," we have recollections of the actual events of their own
childhood permeating the invented narratives and imparting a new
interest to the whole. Coleridge prophesied remarkably about this
little book, when in talking to a friend he said:
It at once soothes and amuses me to think--nay, to
know--that the time will come when this little volume of my
dear and well-nigh oldest friend, Mary Lamb, will be not
only enjoyed but acknowledged as a rich jewel in the
treasury of our permanent English literature; and I cannot
help running over in my mind the long list of celebrated
writers, astonishing geniuses, Novels, Romances, Poems,
Histories, and dense Political Economy quartos, which,
compared with "Mrs. Leicester's School," will be remembered
as often and praised as highly as Wilkie's and Glover's
Epics and Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophies compared with
"Robinson Crusoe!"
In the "Adventures of Ulysses" Lamb sought to provide what he termed a
supplement to Fénelon's long-popular "Adventures of Telemachus." He
took the story from Chapman's translation of Homer's "Odyssey," that
translation which a few years later was to inspire John Keats with one
of his finest sonnets. In a preface, a model of concise expression,
the author of the tale explained:
By avoiding the prolixity which marks the speeches and the
descriptions in Homer, I have gained a rapidity to the
narration which I hope will make it more attractive, and
give it more the air of a romance, to young readers; though
I am sensible that, by the curtailment, I have sacrificed in
many places the manners to the passion, the subordinate
characteristics to the essential interests of the story. The
attempt is not to be considered as seeking a comparison with
any of the direct translations of the "Odyssey," either in
prose or verse; though if I were to state the obligations
which I have had to one obsolete version, I should run the
hazard of depriving myself of the very slender degree of
reputation which I could hope to acquire from a trifle like
the present undertaking.
If Chapman's translation of Homer was "obsolete" in 1808, it was yet
to be restored to the favour of readers, thanks to the loving homage
of Lamb and Keats. "Chapman is divine," wrote the author of the
"Adventures of Ulysses" to a friend, "and my abridgement has not quite
emptied him of his divinity." In his story Lamb shows how he had
recognized the moral value of the story of Ulysses, of "a brave man
struggling with adversity," but wisely leaves that moral to be
insensibly impressed upon the reader, for he not only refrained from
formulating a definite "moral" in such a case, but has explicitly
recorded his repugnance from the method.