A new biography of Charles Lamb

 Here’s a cause for celebration: Clare Bucknell reports in the New York Review of Books that a new biography of Charles Lamb, the English essayist, has been published.

It’s Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb by Eric G. Wilson, a professor at Wake Forest who appears to be interested in Lamb's peculiar cast of mind.

I’m excited about the new biography because I have the current standard, written by E.V. Lucas. It was published 117 years ago.

Public enthusiasm for Lamb has never threatened to unhinge the republic.

But I love him dearly. I’m resigned to being in the minority in estimating his value.

I think “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” is the great English essay. When I was younger, I read everything I could by Lamb: Essays of Elia, of course, but also the letters — those magnificent letters.

If you’re curious about why such a minor writer could inspire such devotion, there is a single sentence in Professor Bucknell’s review that gets to the matter. She quotes a passage of Lamb’s writing and says:

This is Lamb cogitating.

That’s it exactly. Lamb thinks aloud, just as Montaigne thought aloud. (But interesting thinkers are interesting because they don’t think like others. Montaigne’s thinking is nothing like Lamb’s.)

Lamb’s and Montaigne’s essays are examples of the kind of writing I like best: one person with an interesting mind trying to think something out.