On 22 September 1796, 21-year-old Charles Lamb, a clerk at the East India Company, returned home to find that his sister, Mary, had stabbed their mother in the heart. For some time, Mary had shown signs of strain from the demanding responsibility of looking after her aged parents in the Lambs’ cramped and dingy London lodgings. The previous day, Lamb had tried and failed to get a doctor to see her. The next day, she finally snapped. Lamb gave a stark summary of the matricide in a letter to his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp.’ The Morning Chronicle reported that a ‘young lady’ became deranged due to ‘the harassing fatigues of too much business.’

Had Mary committed her deed three years later, she would have been sentenced to life imprisonment under a new Act of Parliament. Instead, Lamb was given permission to look after her, and he did so for the rest of his life. But that life was hard. Caring for Mary and his senile father took up much of his spare time and denied him the opportunity of settling down and starting a family. Mary’s relapses brought challenges: Lamb needed constant funds to pay for her periodic confinements in asylums, and on more than ten occasions, when her bouts of madness rendered them ‘a sort of marked people’, the pair had to move house. To make ends meet, Lamb worked hard in the accounting job he hated. ‘I am, like you, a prisoner to the desk,’ he wrote to a friend in 1822. ‘I am very tired of clerking it, but have no remedy.’ He suffered a breakdown which he dismissed as a ‘temporary frenzy’. He was self-conscious about his stutter and drank heavily to overcome it and to endure frequent ‘sad depression of spirits’. Coleridge considered him ‘gentle-hearted’; Lamb regarded himself as a ‘drunken dog’.

To partly offset his troubles and to fully supplement his income, Lamb turned his hand to writing in a variety of forms. Some didn’t work: his poetry paled in comparison to that of his Romantic contemporaries and good friends; his sentimental novel flopped; and his farcical play was hissed by the audience when it was performed at Drury Lane. Fortunately, his 1807 children’s book, Tales from Shakespeare, which he co-authored with Mary, was a huge success. But better work was yet to come. In August 1820, at the age of 45, Lamb found his métier and his voice with the first of many brilliantly novel essays that he contributed the London Magazine under the enigmatic nom de plume of Elia. This year, which marks the 250^th anniversary of Lamb’s birth, is an opportune time to take stock of his finest work.

Lamb’s Elia pieces are richly multifarious. They deal with a diverse range of subjects – actors, witches, beggars, Quakers, schoolmasters, chimney sweeps. They cover equally varied topics, from marriage to childhood to illness to drunkenness to the merits of roasting pigs. These essays saw Lamb ploughing a different furrow to that of his literary friends: in contrast with William Wordsworth’s focus on the sublimity of nature, Lamb’s work revolved around common-or-garden individuals, aspects of the city and facets of ordinary life (‘a mob of people is better than a flock of sheep,’ he once proclaimed); and unlike William Hazlitt’s essays, Lamb’s writings largely steered clear of politics, contentious issues and contemporary events.

Under the guise of reflective, self-effacing Elia, Lamb set out to charm his readers. He did so magnificently. The essays are lively and colourful. They blend singular thoughts with echoes, both stylistic and linguistic, of past masters such as Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton and Laurence Sterne. They brim with insight, wordplay, whimsy, irony and moral intelligence. ‘Who does not eulogise his writing,’ Lamb’s editor wrote, ‘for displaying a spirit of deep and warm humanity, enlivened by a vein of poignant wit, – not caustic, yet searching.’ Indeed, the Elia essays are so warm and witty that it is hard to believe they were written by a man who had suffered so many hard knocks.

In Lamb’s first Elia essay, ‘Recollections of the South Sea-House’, he starts as he means to go on by establishing a shared intimacy between himself and his reader. In this case he does so by having Elia take us on a tour of a London locale. After mapping the neighbourhood, where ‘Threadneedle-street abuts upon Bishopsgate’, Elia leads us into the eponymous building. In contrast to the nearby busy bank, it is now a shadow of its former self: work has dried up, phantom clerks haunt empty rooms and ‘an indolence almost cloistral’ pervades the offices.

In another essay on place, ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, Elia relays his pleasure from visiting libraries. Instead of picking up and dipping into old tomes, he prefers to walk among the shelves and ‘inhale [the] learning’. In a later essay from 1822, ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’, Elia’s pleasure comes from perusing pages and losing himself in other writers’ thoughts. ‘I dream away my life in others’ speculations,’ he reveals. ‘Books think for me.’ For Elia, great books look best in poor condition. ‘How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn-out appearance,’ he writes. ‘How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight!’ He then branches off to state how, where and when to read certain books: Milton ‘almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him’; Shakespeare’s late plays deserve to be read on winter evenings, with ‘the world shut out’; Candide should never be read ‘in the serious avenues of some cathedral’.

Elia treasures books but places little value on money. In one of the greatest Elia essays, ‘The Two Races of Men’, he makes a distinction between those ‘races’, namely men who borrow and men who lend. Flouting logic, he mischievously declares that borrowers are the better breed, being ‘trusting and generous’, whereas lenders are ‘lean and suspicious’. We see Elia in playful mode again in ‘All Fool’s Day’, in which he extols ridiculous ideas, particularly those of the dunces in Jesus’ parables. Elsewhere Elia pokes fun at certain individuals’ attitudes towards manners, institutions and conventions. ‘Grace Before Meat’ scoffs at gluttons who pray before falling on their dinners ‘like hogs to their troughs’. ‘A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People’ excoriates men and women who after exchanging vows and becoming husbands and wives – ‘married monopolists’ – give short shrift to those that are single.

Some Elia essays offer glimpses into the life and character of their true creator. Lamb provides sketches of Mary and various eccentric family members. He employs Elia as a stand-in to describe his first trip to the theatre as an ‘awestruck’ young boy. ‘Christ’s Hospital Five-and Thirty Years Ago’, a depiction of Lamb’s time at boarding school during his ‘unfledged years’, encompasses high points such as physical exercise and grammar classes (‘We lived a life as careless as birds’) and rock-bottom lows in the form of punishments or arbitrary cruelty – ‘the severity of masters, or worse tyranny of the monitors.’ One personalised essay stands apart from the rest: ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ comprises both a stark, vulnerable self-portrait and a grim cautionary tale about addiction and falling in with ‘men of boisterous spirits, sitters up a-nights, disputants, drunken’.

The most beguiling Elia essays are the one-offs, the anomalies, the writings that go their own way, adhere to their own rules and resist neat classification. ‘Modern Gallantry’ sees Lamb making a rare foray into political territory and appealing for fairer treatment for women in society. The wonderfully titled ‘Mrs Battle’s Opinions on Whist’ is a delightful, no-frills celebration of valuable time spent indulging in a recreational activity with a dear companion. Perhaps the oddest of the lot, ‘Witches, and Other Night-Fears’ involves Elia recollecting the nightmares that afflicted him during his childhood. After delineating his ‘nervous terrors’ through a stream of phantasmagorical visions, he goes on to confess with shame that nowadays his dreams are tame and dull in comparison. ‘There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns, “Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,” to solace his night solitudes – when I cannot muster a fiddle.’

Lamb shouldn’t have been so hard on himself. Coleridge’s conjuring act was, after all, fuelled by opium. Lamb may have bewailed the ‘poverty’ of his dreams but there was nothing wrong with his imagination, and certainly not during the few snatched hours of the day he spent writing. His Elia essays are infused with inventiveness. There is darkness in them too, just as there was darkness in Lamb’s life ever since that fateful, life-changing day in 1796. But those strikingly original essays are also shot through with light, light which illuminates, casts a warm glow and every now again sparkles.