Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb was a clerk at the East India House for thirty-three years who cared for his sister Mary after she killed their mother in a fit of madness, and who wrote, as Elia, the most loved familiar essays in English, on roast pig, old china and the South Sea House. On the Tragedies of Shakespeare argues that Lear cannot be acted, that the plays are greater in the reading than on the stage, a claim every generation since has tested. He and Mary wrote the Tales from Shakespeare for children. His friends were Coleridge, Wordsworth and Hazlitt, and his Wednesday evenings were the centre of literary London.