For seven years--from October 1782 until November 1789--Charles Lamb
remained at Christ's Hospital, and then, close upon fifteen years of
age, returned to his parents in the Temple. His brother John had
obtained an appointment in the South Sea House, probably through the
kindly offices of Samuel Salt, who was a Deputy-Governor, and at some
unascertained date between 1789 and 1792, Charles found employment in
the same office; not, however, for long, for in April of 1792 he was
appointed clerk in the accountant's office of the East India House, at
a commencing salary of L70 per annum. This same year which thus saw
the founding of Charles Lamb's humble fortunes, saw also the beginning
of the break-up of his home, for the immortal old Bencher, Samuel
Salt, died, and the Lamb family was left without its mainstay. John
Lamb the elder was past work, already, we may believe, passing into
senility; and John Lamb the younger, who appears to have been
prospering in the South Sea House, had presumably set up his bachelor
home elsewhere. Salt bequeathed to his clerk and factotum a pension of
L10 a year, and various legacies amounting to about L700. The old
home in the Temple had to be given up, but whither the family first
removed is not known. Four years later they were living in Little
Queen Street--now a portion of Kingsway--off Holborn, in a house on
the west side, the site of which is now covered by a church.
At the end of 1794--though his first known verses are dated five years
earlier--Charles Lamb had, so far as we are aware, the pleasure of
seeing himself for the first time "in print," and curiously enough
here at the earliest beginning of his life as author he was intimately
associated with Coleridge; indeed, his "effusion," a sonnet addressed
to Mrs. Siddons, appeared in "The Morning Chronicle" on 29th December,
with the signature "S. T. C." Coleridge, we learn from Lamb's letters,
altered the sonnet and was welcome to do so, and the poem properly
appears in both of their collected works; the recension is certainly
not an improvement on the original. In the spring of 1796 a small
volume of Coleridge's poems was published, four sonnets by Lamb being
included in it; and in May, 1796, was written the earliest of the rich
collection of Lamb's letters which have come down to us. In this
letter we have the first mention of the shadow which overhung the Lamb
family.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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