SOURCE: Natarajan, Uttara. “‘A Soul Set Apart’: Lamb and the Border-Land of Imaginative Experience.” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, no. 75 (July 1991): 85-92.

In the following essay, Natarajan emphasizes Lamb's use of the outsider's perspective in his essays.

On the 27th September, 1796, Lamb wrote to Coleridge to tell him that

my poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp.¹

Coleridge responds with suitably solemn and exalted religious consolation, offering, among other sentiments, the following observation upon his friend's condition following the catastrophe:

I look upon you as a man called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God.²

Coleridge is quick to predict a familiar tragic pattern for Lamb's story—it is...