With his Elia essays, nearly all written for the London Magazine during the years 1820-1826, Charles Lamb, clerk at the East India Company for thirty-three years, achieved a blend of the personal, witty, poetic, and profound in exquisitely subtle short pieces that made him a major Romantic essayist and have been part of the canon of English literature ever since. He was already known to his contemporaries as a novelist, journalist, poet, writer for children, failed dramatist, and fine critic, devoted to "antiquity"--particularly Latin literature and that of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century writers. His popularity extended through the nineteenth century into the twentieth, but waned after 1934, the centenary of his death. Since the 1960s, however, his reputation has risen again with the publication of new biographical and critical works celebrating and analyzing his artistry.

The nineteenth century saw him chiefly as a beloved, even heroic, whimsical, somewhat eccentric...