SOURCE: Woodbery, Bonnie. “Lamb's Early Satire of the Economists.” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, no. 81 (January 1993): 26-30.

In the following essay, Woodbery considers Lamb's “Edax on Appetite” and “Hospita on the Immoderate Indulgence of the Pleasures of the Palate” as satirical attacks on the economic theories of Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, and others.

In The Spirit of the Age, William Hazlitt captured in print the myth that Charles Lamb had ‘succeeded not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it. … His taste in French and German literature is somewhat defective: nor has he made much progress in the science of Political Economy or other abstruse studies’.¹ Lamb, however, was not as ignorant about economic matters as Hazlitt would lead us to believe. In a letter dated 28 November 1810, Lamb tells Hazlitt that he has sent to him a copy of Cobbett's Political Register for 24 November...