Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 4 Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

'I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.'

Charles Lamb was employed full-time as a clerk in the City of London for most of his adult life, hence his literary output is relatively small when compared with freelance contemporaries such as Thomas De Quincey or William Hazlitt (P.P. Howe's complete Hazlitt edition of the 1930s runs to twenty-one volumes; E. V. Lucas's 1903 edition of The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb has five). Nevertheless, what Lamb's oeuvre might lack in size it more than makes up for in quality: both as a contributor to the great Romantic conversation about art and life, and as the English language's greatest familiar essayist, Lamb is an indispensable figure.

This volume contains Elia (1823) and the Last Essays of Elia (1833), the essay collections for which he is best known. It is the fourth volume in the Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, the first scholarly edition of their works in a century.

Gregory Dart, Professor of English, University College London

Gregory Dart spent his undergraduate and graduate years (from 1986 to 1993) at the University of Cambridge. From 1993 he was a lecturer at the University of York, and he has been at UCL since 2000. His publications include Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (1999), on the influence of the French Revolution on the Romantics, and Cockney Adventures (2012), a study of the development of new kinds of metropolitan art and literature in the years 1815-40. In 2010 Dart edited a collection of essays, Restless Cities, with his colleague Matthew Beaumont and he is now working with him on another collection of city essays. His research, both current and prospective, is centrally concerned with Romanticism, the city, and the history and development of the essay form from Montaigne to the modern period.

AcknowledgementsList of Short TitlesList of IllustrationsBiographical Chronology of Charles and Mary LambBiographical RegisterGeneral Editor's PrefaceA Note on the Citation of Lamb's Manuscripts and LettersCritical IntroductionTextual IntroductionELIA (1823)LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA (1833)Explanatory NotesAppendices I-VIIBibliography of Charles and Mary Lamb's WorksSelect Critical Bibliography for Elia and the Last Essays