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Dream Children Charles Lamb Analysis

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Romantic elements in Charles Lamb’s essays with special reference to ‘Dream Children’ and ‘A Bachelor’s Complaint’

Charles Lamb (1775-1834), often regarded as the prince of essays belongs to Romantic period. He was an essayist and English writer. Lamb was born in London to Elizabeth Field and John Lamb. He remained bachelor throughout his life. Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey were the three major essayists of the Romantic period He was a part of literary circle along with his contemporaries William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey and Hazlitt. During this period there was shift in English essays from Objectivity to Subjectivity, from formality to familiarity which was initiated by Abraham Cowley. Unlike Francis …show more content…

Description of nature, use of fancy and vivid imagery and their imagination is well portrayed in the works of romantic writers. Charles Lamb had a unique observational skills and a different outlook to perceive characters and humor in his day to day life. This very nature makes him an outstanding critic and a friend. In the essay of the Dream Children; A Reverie, reverie means daydream or a state of being pleasantly lost in one’s thought. The title itself says that Lamb in his dreams imagined he had two children a girl and a boy. The essay began on a merry note and the portrayal of his children, their expression, their movements and actions are just lively and so real that one cannot think at first that they are unreal. The upbraiding and tender look of Alice resembled much like her deceased mother is mere fragments of Lamb’s imagination. This essay has Lamb’s nostalgia and childhood reminiscence in it. His fondest memory of childhood were the time he spent with his maternal grandmother Mrs. Field, care taker of large country house Blakesware, near widford, Hertfordshire. Lamb made use of allusion which is peculiar in romantic essays when the narrator mentioned his pious and religious grandmother who lived in a great house in Norfolk where he used to visit that mansion in the holydays also he told about her work. Lamb was a timid boy and the narrator also mentions in the essay that his grandmother sees the apparition of young infants in the house and though the apparitions do no harm he was so frightened that he had his maid to sleep with him as he was not half as good and religious as she

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