SOURCE: Monsman, Gerald. “Charles Lamb's Elia as Clerk: The Commercial Employment of a Literary Writer.” The Wordsworth Circle 21, no. 3 (summer 1990): 96-100.

In the following essay, Monsman explores the relationship between Lamb's occupation as an accounting clerk for the East India Company and his work as a creative writer.

In “Recollections of Charles Lamb” (1838), Thomas Dequincey describes his first encounter with Lamb at the East India House, seated at “a very lofty writing-desk, separated by a still higher railing from that part of the floor on which the profane—the laity, like myself—were allowed to approach the clerus, or clerkly rulers of the room. Within the railing, sat, to the best of my remembrance, six quill-driving gentlemen; not gentlemen whose duty or profession it was merely to drive the quill, but who where then driving it—gens de plume, such in esse, as well as in posse—in...