Letters of Charles Lamb

They are valued for the light they throw on the English literary world in the Romantic era and on the evolution of Lamb's essays, and still more for their own "charm, wit and quality".

[2][3] Lamb wrote his letters in a "bold free hand and a fearless flourish" (his own words), which present no great difficulties to editors, though his spelling and punctuation were sometimes erratic.

In the first sequence of 30 letters written to Coleridge he minutely criticises his friend's poems, advising him to abandon conventional poetic diction and "cultivate simplicity".

The influence he exercised on his friend is seen as crucial in preparing Coleridge for the Romantic revolution that he and Wordsworth launched two years later in their Lyrical Ballads.

"[11] The letters have a great deal to say about Lamb's incessant reading, often among 17th century writers, and it has been argued that his love of Robert Burton, Thomas Browne and the Jacobean tragedies may show an underlying depression and despair which answered to theirs.

"[16] It was the opinion of Thomas Noon Talfourd, who knew Lamb well, that there was scarcely one of his letters "which has not some tinge of that quaint sweetness, some hint of that peculiar union of kindness and whim, which distinguishes him from all other poets and humorists.

"[17] Lamb's reputation as a writer may have fallen since the 19th and early 20th centuries, at any rate among academic critics, but he has never been short of readers who agree with the essayist E. V. Lucas as to "the value and importance of these letters, their good sense, their wit, their humanity, their fun, their timeliness and timelessness".

With Mary's death the need for tactful suppression became less pressing, and a supplementary collection consisting of 82 entirely new letters, Talfourd's Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, appeared in 1848.

To-day, in order to possess a set complete down to the present time, one must purchase at least nine, and possibly more, works, amounting to many volumes―among them Charles Lamb and the Lloyds, of which I was the editor, but which I am debarred from using.His second edition was published in 1912 with 604 letters.