Some 20th-century readers turned against him for the same reason (notably, the Leavisite Denys Thompson in a chapter in Determinations: Critical Essays ) seeing him as shrinking away from real engagement with political and social issues. Victorian readers tended to deal with the critical difficulties Lamb posed by turning him into a secular saint and reading his work through the lens of his self-sacrifice. The Lambs’ cultural and social position, as the well-educated children of servants, is equally difficult to read. The genre which made his name, the familiar essay, is similarly difficult to categorize and has endured a long period of neglect, little-known to general readers and rarely taught. While he occasionally makes trenchant political statements and is responsible for some fierce satirical verse, his politics are always evasive. Yet he also has allegiances to the second generation of Romantics: Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Keats in particular. Lamb is of the same generation as the Lake School, a Christ’s Hospital boy alongside Samuel Taylor Coleridge, early reader of Lyrical Ballads, as well as visitor and critic of Wordsworth and Southey. This confusion over where and how to place Lamb has resonated through criticism ever since, and has, to some extent, also affected his sister Mary’s writing. Yet Robert Southey, also featured in the cartoon, expressed amazement at finding his friend Lamb in such company and wondered what he was doing to be “croaking” there. An Anti-Jacobin cartoon of 1798 by Gillray, accompanying a poem entitled “New Morality,” famously places Lamb and his poetic collaborator Charles Lloyd at the center of a bestiary of radical thinkers and writers: Lamb and Lloyd are transmuted into a small frog and toad, clutching a copy of their volume Blank Verse while Jacobin sympathizers caper around them. If the Lambs are tricky to categorize in literary terms, their politics, similarly, are hard to define. The Lambs’ writing cuts across different categories: essays, children’s writing, poetry, and drama.
His writing, and the writing of his sister, spans period and genre, from the 1790s to the 1830s: it reflects 18th-century literature, responding to Cowper and to earlier essayists, but it is also in dialogue with Romantic contemporaries and was also important for Victorian writers and even modernist authors. From the beginning of his literary career, Charles Lamb’s writing has proved hard to categorize and to critique.
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