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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.