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Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

de Charles Lamb

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Séries: Essays of Elia (Omnibus)

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Charles Lamb wrote essays under the pseudonym "Elia" in the 1820s. Few have written more evocatively of the past, of childhood, loss, books and plays, and London. This volume contains all the "Elia" essays Lamb collected in book form, including the "Confessions of a Drunkard".
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Essays of Elia is a collection of essays written by Charles Lamb; it was first published in book form in 1823, with a second volume, Last Essays of Elia, issued in 1833 by the publisher Edward Moxon. The essays in the collection first began appearing in The London Magazine in 1820 and continued to 1825.
  Azmir_Fakir | Oct 31, 2022 |
Jag minns nu inte exakt vad det var som fick mig att sätta upp Charles Lambs essäer på önskelistan. Av honom själv samlades ett stort antal under titlarna Elia och Last Essays of Elia, efter det alias han använde när han skrev i tidningarna – eller, alias är nog strikt taget inte rätt ord. Elia var snarare en lätt maskerad version av honom själv, med en livshistoria som delvis sammanföll med författarens, men som också lånade drag av andras, däribland Coleridges, då de båda gått i samma skola som barn och förblev vänner livet ut. Den samling jag fick tag i är i vilket fall någon slags återpublikation av en äldre utgåva, av allt att döma med allt som Lamb publicerade tillsammans med systern Mary, som han fick ansvara för efter att hon i ett vansinnesutbrott knivmördat deras mor. De båda gav tillsammans ut en samling med Shakespearehistorier återberättade för barn, så att de en gång fått en gemensam utgåva med samlade verk är inte konstigt, kanske inte heller att ett billighetsförlag tagit de numera upphovsrättsfria kommentarerna (vilka trots åldern är hjälpsamma), även om man kunde önskat att de åtminstone försökt anpassa noterna efter sidnumrering. Nåväl: när det kommer till den här typen av enkla utgåvor är det här långt ifrån det värsta jag sett. Typsättningen är i alla fall helt acceptabel, och missar som referenser till ett utbytt omslag kan man leva med.

Men önskelistan var det ju: troligen hamnade samlingen där i samband med någon läsning om Shakespeare; några av de mer uppmärksammade essäerna handlar om skådespel, och då är Shakespeare det enda namn som nämns som fortfarande allmänt känns igen bland författarna till dylika. Även i övrigt är dock samlingen fullt läsvärd: Lamb är en konversant, trevlig bekantskap, långt ifrån någon sträng moralist, även om han då och då närmar sig sådan materia. Han framstår som en i botten älskvärd herre, som främst vill roa sin läsare, men ibland faller för frestelsen att mystifiera och sätta upp skuggspel. Han är lätt sentimentalt konservativ, drömmer sig gärna tillbaka till en svunnen guldålder utan att därför alltför hårt beklaga sig över samtiden.

Det hela är trevligt, ger en del intressanta kommentarer till läsning, men är knappast omistlig läsning. ( )
  andejons | Mar 21, 2020 |
The 19th century was a great century for writers. If I could only bring one century of writing with me to a desert island, I would choose the nineteenth without hesitation. Not only for the literature but for the essays: the essayists of the 19th century were wide-ranging in their interests and witty, smart, and wildly and passionately involved with the world they wrote about. They immersed themselves in all sorts of activities, writing being only one their passions, and arguing -- discussion and disputation -- being the foremost. They ranged from deeply pessimistic (Thomas Carlyle) to profoundly positive (Ralph Waldo Emerson), and they wrote about everything from law and society (Oliver Wendell Holmes) to travels abroad and at home (Washington Irving), to art and politics (John Ruskin) to self-knowledge and civil responsibility (Henry David Thoreau).

My two favorite essayists of the 19th century (or any century, for that matter) are William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. They wrote about everything and anything, and they wrote well, with passion and with discipline, and with complexity of argument, acuity of observation, and deliverance of truth. Yesterday I read a 1913 collection of Charles Lamb's essays, entitled Last Essays of Elia. His first Essays of Elia was published in 1823 and his Last Essays of Elia was first published in 1833. In his absolutely marvelous essays, Lamb writes about life in all its humble and daily, as well as unique and grandiloquent, occasions. No matter that he wrote from two centuries past: so many of his observations of human nature, predilections, and pastimes are still true today. Those comments of his that are dated are still fun to read, as when he decries the "modern" art of John Martin and his 1821 painting "Belshazzar's Feast". Lamb was right-on his criticisms, the painting is histrionic, and I would love to read what Lamb would write about the lacerations of Pollock or the cubes of Picasso or the shark of Damien Hirst.

Lamb's detailed but straightforward descriptions of interiors and of landscapes (as in "Blakesmoor in H--Shire") are evocative time capsules of England in the nineteenth century and a must-read for any lover of the English literature of the time, as he gives a perfect backdrop of information -- what everyone reading at the time already knew -- that helps with the atmosphere from the Brontes to Austen. His essays on other occasions and situations of his 19th century life also provide escape into that world with picture-perfect visual observations as well as commentary on the social mores of the time, as in "A Wedding", "The Old Margate Hoy", "Poor Relations", and "Captain Jackson".

Many of his observations are still topical, as well as relevant, as in the "The Tombs in the Abbey" in which he censures the charging of admissions fees into Westminster Abbey, at a cost of two shillings a head. Today's burdensome fee of fifteen pounds falls as heavily and with as little reason. Lamb argues, "Did you ever see or hear, of a mob in the Abbey, while it was free to all? Do the rabble come there....It is all you can do to drive them into your churches; they do not voluntarily offer themselves. They have, alas! no passion for antiquities, for tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they would no longer be rabble."

Lamb is a very clever and witty writer, as demonstrated by the above logic turning rabble into worthy abbey-visitors, and in such inventive and pleasurable essays as the must-read "Rejoicings Upon the New Year's Coming of Age" in which all the days of the year gather at an end of year party. The jesting April Fool places Ash Wednesday next to Christmas Day who proceeds to make that sour puss Lent drink from "the wassail-bowl, till he roared, and hiccup'd", and began to have a really good time; the poor 29th day of February has a seat off to the side and not enough to eat, and Valentine's Day plays court to pretty May "slipping amorous billets-doux under the table, till the Dog-days (who are naturally of a warm constitution) began to be jealous, and to bark and rage accordingly."

Another must-read essay that is both relevant, hysterically funny, and acute in its observations is "Popular Fallacies" wherein Lamb attempts to lay to rest such well-known quips of false wisdom as "Ill-Gotten Gains Never Prosper", "Handsome is as Handsome Does" ("Those who use this phrase have never seen Mrs. Conrady"), and "Love me, love my dog" ( still so relevant, as a recent house guest proved to me).

I particularly liked his demolition of the saying "Enough is Good as a Feast". He argues that no one "really believes this saying. The inventor did not believe it himself....It is a vile cold-scrag-of-mutton sophism; a lie palmed upon the palate, which knows better things." He rightly lumps this saying in with the "class of proverbs which have a tendency to make us undervalue money" and seek to make us see gold as "mere muck." Lamb argues that "legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not muck."

Lamb himself was a man not born to money; he worked for years as a clerk, took on the care of his ill sister, and in his spare time, wrote and read and enjoyed life. He understood money and what its true worth was, as he understood so many things in life. He was able to articulate in his essays all that he observed and thought about, to lay aside the mundane and accepted ideals and to instead develop and present original, exciting, and enlivening ways of thinking about the ordinary happenings and the exceptional, the minor occurrences and the major ones. Lamb was thorough in his examination of life, and in his enjoyment, and he was sought to share that understanding and enjoyment to others through his wide-ranging, free-wheeling, and yet wholly disciplined -- and completely gratifying -- Essays of Elia. ( )
1 vote NinaSankovitch | Jan 3, 2011 |
Lamb describes “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,” where he was a hospitaller. “The Two Races of Men” are the lenders and the borrowers; this is mostly about Coleridge borrowing and not returning books, but when he did, they would be “enriched with annotations, tripling their value.” Lamb and I both have tin ears, but he is funnier about his: “I have been practicing God Save the King all my life; whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary corners; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it.” He tells us candidly about his prejudices in “Imperfect Sympathies”: “I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.” Jews, Negroes and Quakers also make it onto Lamb’s list of mild aversions.
“Grace before Meat” is one of the tighter-structured essays. Lamb begins by saying the custom probably began in the early days of man, when regular meals weren’t a sure thing. He says he thinks he ought to say grace before taking a walk, meeting with friends, or after solving a problem. Grace, he thinks, befits a poor man’s table better than it does the feasts f the rich. He quotes from the “table richly spread” temptation scene in Milton’s “Paradise Regained (“they are like to be short graces where the devil plays the host” and says that in general, graces “seem to involve something awkward and unseasonable.” He admires the Quakers’ silent grace, as well as the reserved eating and drinking that follows, mentions that Samuel Johnson used to make “inarticulate animal noises over a favourite food. Was this the music quite proper to be preceded by the grace?” He also quotes his school-fellow Le Grice, who, when asked to say grace, would look around the table and say “Is there no clergyman here?” and then, after a pause, “Thank God.”
Lamb describes seeing his first plays at six years old.
In writing to a friend in Australia, Barron Field, he provides reasons for procrastinating letter-writing in general while pretending it’s just when he’s writing to someone so far away: letters usually comprise “news, sentiment and puns.” The news will be old, and sentiment, too, is “a dish [that] requires to be served up hot.” The same applies to jests (“Distant Correspondents”).
“The Praise of Chimney Sweepers” seems sincerely felt, and the message of charity and generosity is carried into the next essay, “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis.” Lamb may be the only person ever to wish for more “MENDICITY.” “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” is justly famous. “A Bachelor’s Complaint” details, but with much self-deprecation, the newly-married woman’s ways of detaching her husband from his old friend.
“On Some of the Old Actors” like “My First Play” is a reminiscence of the distant past of the theater. The names are no longer known (except that of Barrymore), but the talents seem to be perennially apparent. Of one, Lamb writes “He seemed come upon the stage to do the poet’s message simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity as the nuncios in Homer deliver the errands of the gods.” Lamb understands that the problem his contemporaries see with “The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century” is not in the plays but in the spectators, who confuse the characters onstage with real people. He knows that an actor does not completely stay in character, but makes it obvious that he is acting and brings the audience in as party to his “Stage Illusions.” He praises the late actor Elliston (who was always acting), imagining him in the nether world.
About books, he thinks it is the rarely-read ones that need original editions—Shakespeare will do in any cover. In “The Old Margate Hoy” he speculates about why the sea is always disappointing when seen for the first time.
“Old China” is an essay in which Lamb makes a connection between the china that he collects and how the past looks from here. It’s about perspective, which the blue willow china described in the opening paragraphs lacks. “A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it.” The books and prints he and “Bridget” bought in the past, when they had little money, were careful purchases and prized. They now watch plays from the shilling gallery instead of the pit. But things that they can now easily afford have not the relish of those they had to save for, and sacrifice for.
“Confessions of a Drunkard” may be the first description of alcoholism from the point of view of the alcoholic. Lamb says there is a “constitutional tendency” to drunkenness and “when a man has commenced sot” it is very hard to start reforming. He sees clearly that not everyone has the tendency. He talks about screaming at the effort of abstaining for just one day. At twenty-six, he began drinking excessively, possibly as a way of lessening his stammer. Soon he has to drink until he becomes drunk: “In my stage of habit . . . to stop short of that measure which is sufficient to draw on torpor and sleep, the benumbing apoplectic sleep of the drunkard, is to have taken none at all.” And he insists that once one has arrived at this state, “reason shall only visit him through intoxication . . . . The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.” He talks about the abulia consequent upon habitual drinking: “any small duty . . . haunts me as a labour impossible to be got through. So much the springs of action are broken.” His powers of concentration are gone: “This poor abstract of my condition was penned at long intervals, with scarcely any attempt at connection of thought, which is now difficult to me.” This assertion of lost powers is perhaps disingenuous, since many a sober essay writer begins with disconnected pieces.
Lamb talks about the “regal solitude” of the sick man, his self-pity (“He is his own sympathiser; and instinctively feels that none can so well perform that office for him”) and complete lack of interest in the rest of the household and the world. Convalescence (the subject of the essay) is a demotion from this monarchy and dream of self-absorption. In another essay, Lamb observes that though genius is often talked about as being akin to madness, nothing could be saner. “The Superannuated Man” is about adjusting to retirement.
Lamb ends the “Last Essays of Elia” with the rather tedious “Popular Fallacies.” ( )
  michaelm42071 | Sep 5, 2009 |
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Charles Lambautor principaltodas as ediçõescalculado
Augustine BirrellIntroduçãoautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Bate, JonathanEditorautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Lucas, E. V.Editorautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Tillotson, GeoffreyIntroduçãoautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
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Charles Lamb wrote essays under the pseudonym "Elia" in the 1820s. Few have written more evocatively of the past, of childhood, loss, books and plays, and London. This volume contains all the "Elia" essays Lamb collected in book form, including the "Confessions of a Drunkard".

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