Charles Lamb's works

Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was an English essayist.

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In the early 19th century, there was a writer in English literature. He was short and thin, and the bottom of a black tuxedo that London staff often wore clung to his thin legs. The face is long, and a pair of hazel eyes sometimes reveal melancholy air and sometimes contain naughty light; He is gentle and sometimes a little stubborn; He has a stuttering problem, but he likes to make one-liners among his friends; His article is also a bit tortuous and eccentric. This man is the English essayist Charles Lamb.

As a writer, such titles as "great" can't be added to Lamb's head, but as an essayist, Lamb is a world-renowned family alongside Montaigne.

Lamb was born in poverty, and his father was a close servant of a lawyer. At the age of seven, he entered the London Christian Kindness School for poor children. He learned Latin very well and was a high flyers. Unfortunately, he stuttered and could not enter the university. At the age of 14, he left school to fend for himself. He worked as a clerk in the South Sea Company in London and then in the East India Company for 36 years until he retired at the age of 5. Therefore, he once joked that his real works "complete works" are the big account books that are logged in the company every day.

Lamb's life experience was ordinary but he suffered many misfortunes. When he was a child, he often went to live in the country grange where his grandmother was the housekeeper. He met a little girl named Anne Simmons, who was a childhood friend and had feelings. But when he was 2, Anne married a pawnbroker. Under the blow of lovelorn love, Lamb was once insane and lived in an insane asylum for six weeks before he recovered. The following year, a great disaster happened in his family: his sister Mary was overworked and went crazy because she was busy sewing day and night to supplement her family. She stabbed her mother with a knife. This incident decided Lamb's life path all his life. In order to support his old father and take care of his crazy sister, he totally shouldered the heavy family burden on himself. In order not to make Mary wander into the madhouse, he never married, lived alone with his sister and lived a cold and lonely life.

most of lamb's literary writing is done after work. He has written poems, legends, plays and papers on Shakespeare's plays. Art criticism, and Mary co-wrote A Collection of Tales of Shakespeare's Plays (the Chinese translation before liberation in China was called Shakespeare's Yuefu Skill)-a popular book originally written for British children, and now it has become a must-read book for beginners of Shakespeare's plays all over the world.

In p>1818, at the age of 43, Lamb published two volumes of Collected Works, and planned to "seal the pen". However, a discerning editor-in-chief of London Magazine asked him for a manuscript, and the content and form of the article were not limited, and one was published every month. This is an extremely valuable opportunity for a writer. Lamb can write what he is most familiar with and happy to write without any constraints. So he borrowed an old colleague's name "Ilya" as a pen name, and published more than 6 essays one after another. Later, he published two books, namely "Ilya's Essays" (1823) and "The Continuation of Ilya" (1833), which are the most important representative works of Lamb.

Lamb's essays have various contents: he writes about the past of his youth, his relatives and friends, his hard life as a clerk, or his little pleasure in taking time off from work, or rambles about the books he has read, poems he has read, plays he has seen, actors he knows, street scenes in London, beggars, poor children sweeping chimneys, bookworms, bachelors and drunkards. His brushwork is narrative, lyrical and argumentative, and the language used is a mixture of words and phrases in the vernacular. His mood is harmonious and harmonious, which implies personal bitterness in banter.

From the perspective of literary history, Lamb's essays belong to a branch of the English Romantic literary movement. Get rid of the constraints of rationalism ideologically and pursue the liberation of personality and feelings; Lamb is no different from other British romantic writers in terms of creative methods, and pursues "I write my heart by hand". But the difference is that when other romantic writers (such as Wordsworth) focus on rural areas and nature. When lofty ideals and passionate love are the objects of his songs, Lamb takes the city life in London as his description object in his essays. He searched for poetic things from all the people in the city, and endowed ordinary things in daily life with a romantic splendor. Dr. Annette Rubinstein, an American scholar, pointed out that Lamb was the spokesman of middle and lower-class "white-collar workers" such as clerks, teachers, accountants and hired literati in the capitalist society in the 19th century.

Lamb lived at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, when the biggest political event in Europe was the French Revolution. In his early years, Lamb, like other British young people, was influenced by the French revolution, made a group of radical friends, wrote articles and published magazines together, fought against reactionary conservative forces, and was also attacked by the other side. However, in the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon failed, the situation in Europe changed greatly, and feudal forces were restored; The British government's policies are becoming increasingly reactionary, and Lamb's friends are becoming divided. Some are besieged by public opinion, some are being tried and imprisoned, some are in exile, and some are conservative. In this situation, lamb only talks about daily chores when writing articles. Behrel, a critic, said: "Lamb knows that his nerves are fragile and he knows the heavy burden he has to bear in his life, so he desperately hides in those trivial things and deliberately plays the fool to avoid becoming crazy because of excitement." He has his difficulties. Nevertheless, Lamb has always had sincere sympathy for the underprivileged, the weak, women, children and the disabled in his life. For his radical friends in adversity, such as Godwin, Hunter and Hezlet, he has always maintained friendship and tried his best to give support and help. This kind of feeling can be detected from the words in his essays.

Lamb uses a special style of writing in his essays, which is full of personality and courage-after reading his essays, you can understand his personal experience, personality and feelings. Therefore, he said: His essays don't need a preface to introduce, because each of his essays is his own "preface". His articles are full of twists and turns, ups and downs, and interesting-this is determined by his unfortunate character and his "miscellaneous studies" developed by his extensive reading. His style is like a strange flower that broke through many obstacles, twisted and sprouted from under a big stone, and finally opened. His writing with pen is to sublimate personal misfortune into wonderful prose works. He often tells jokes with a straight face. There is a sense of humor that others can't imitate in the two essays on suppressing Ilya's swelling. This humor is a tearful smile from a kind heart.

By the way, the term "rambling prose" is an early translation of the famous essay in English literature after the May 4th Movement in China. Today it is generally called "essay" or "essay", and its meaning is naturally "rambling".