Charles Lamb at 250

 I started out life as a great fan of short stories. Charles Lamb’s essays punctured my view of the world.

Lamb’s essays weren’t really stories, but they captured me, took me to another place for a while. Astonishingly, essays didn’t even have a plot. I kept reading, even though I wasn’t being kept in suspense. How could spending an hour with an essay be just as engaging as reading a short story?

Lamb’s writing conveys personality. You can’t read a line of his work without getting a sense of the narrator. When Vivian Gornick talks about the persona of a narrator, I think of Lamb.

Lamb is a preoccupation with this online collection of notes. In my earlier days, I’d try to convince people he should be recognized as one of the great English writers. I should have said that I read Lamb with such pleasure that he changed the way I looked at the possibilities of writing.

Lamb was born Feb. 10, 1775, in Inner Temple, London. I’m celebrating his 250^th birthday.