SOURCE: Riehl, Joseph E. “Criticism in Lamb's Lifetime.” In That Dangerous Figure: Charles Lamb and the Critics, pp. 5-26. Columbia, S. C.: Camden House, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Riehl discusses late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century critical reaction to Lamb's works.

The first reactions to Lamb in England were political or, more accurately, class-biased, and later criticism of Lamb has followed the patterns set down in the beginning of his career. And from the beginning, partisan detractors of Lamb have generally also attacked his companions, what is termed his “coterie,” which included Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and other figures of the English Romantic movement. The atmosphere established from the beginning was adversarial. Lamb's detractors of the period brought forward almost all the charges which would be made against him later in the century, and likewise his friends and defenders set out the themes which would continue to be...