Essays

This collection gathers the familiar essays Lamb published in the London Magazine and later volumes, often under the name Elia. The pieces are short, conversational, and set in late Georgian London and in memories of childhood: clerks and counting-houses, theatres, old china, chimney-sweeps, relations, and the habits of a bachelor lodging in the city. He writes as a spectator of manners rather than as a moralist with a system. Several essays turn on loss, family, and the distance between the grown speaker and his past. The book is a sequence of sketches, not a treatise, and its unity is the voice that moves from street to recollection.

Full black buckram binding with a design in gold. Red-brown slipcase.