Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine:

Metropolitan Muse

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Simon P Hull

The History of the Book

The inherent ‘metropolitanism’ of writing for a Romantic-era periodical is here explored through the Elia articles that Charles Lamb wrote for the London Magazine. A large number of Lamb’s essays are discussed in their historical context but also, crucially, within the context of the periodical as an integral part of Lamb’s construction of self. Hull argues that Lamb’s persona of Elia is a pivotal figure in the London Magazine – an embodiment of what London is and what it stands for.

Lamb is an author who has proved particularly problematic for literary criticism. Here Hull is able to provide a balanced treatment, interpreting Elia as simultaneously an aspect of Lamb’s humour and his political sensibility.

Sample pages

• Charles Lamb: Introduction
• Charles Lamb: Index

Readership

Literature, Romanticism, Book History

Contents

Introduction
1 Consuming the Periodical Text: Hunt, Hazlitt and the Anxiety of Cockneyism
2 Domesticating the Flâneur: Coleridge, De Quincey and the Forms of Metropolitanism
3 The Great Wen and the Rural Gothic
4 Utility and Pity: Wordsworth, Blake and Egan, and the Act of Charity
5 Lamb, Theatricality and the Fool
Conclusion

Related titles

• Blackwood's Magazine, 1817–1825: Selections from Maga's Infancy
• Conservatism and the Quarterly Review: A Critical Analysis
• Contributors to the Quarterly Review: A History, 1809–25
• The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx
• Unknown London: Early Modernist Visions of the Metropolis, 1815–1845

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