SOURCE: Watson, J. R. “‘My Benevolent Friend’: George Dyer and His 1800 Preface.” Charles Lamb Bulletin 108 (October 1999): 170-77.

In the following essay, Watson examines the dual perception of Dyer as both benevolent and irritating, asserting that the author's poetry and preface are tiresome and old-fashioned compared to his contemporaries.

Readers of Charles Lamb will be familiar with the figure of George Dyer, whose eccentric person appears in ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ and in ‘Amicus Redivivus’ (after falling into the river outside Lamb's house at Islington). He was an endless source of delight (as well as inconvenience) to Lamb, as he is to the modern reader of Lamb's letters, where he appears in various absurd situations. His absent-mindedness was legendary: perhaps the best story told about it concerns Dyer's time as a Baptist, and William Frend's teasing him in later years about having drowned a woman by dipping her in...