Charles Lamb's Imperfect Solitudes

Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia (1820-25) are often seen as minor contributions to the Romantic tradition, and the essays themselves playfully foreground their own minority. This article traces the self-deprecating humour of the Elia essays to the writer's perceived inability to generate for himself the kind of self-enclosure which is envisioned by the Romantic lyric. It reads solitude as both a wished-for state and a concept under formation in the Elia writings, and argues that humour - with its masks, alternate selves, and performance of roles - offers Lamb an alternative to the more serious authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a way of `making do' with imperfect environmental conditions for creativity.