SOURCE: Parker, Mark. “Ideology and Editing: The Political Context of the Elia Essays.” Studies in Romanticism 30, no. 3 (fall 1991): 473-94.

In the following essay, Parker suggests the political relevance of Lamb's seemingly apolitical Elian essays by considering the circumstances of their original publication in the London Magazine.

Mario Praz presents a singular picture of Charles Lamb in The Hero in Eclipse—as a man whose essays trace his determined probing of the wounds given him by nascent capitalism, whose ideals are aristocratic but whose place as a clerk is socially ambiguous, and whose “Biedermeier” aesthetic is marked by an “ability to express the quintessence of bourgeois feeling.”¹ This tendentious assessment has not been taken up by later critics, who have preferred immanent or at least more formal approaches to the essays of Elia. But beneath the somewhat programmatic thrust of Praz's remark lies an important yet unregarded aspect of...