Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb (10 February 1775 – 27 December 1834) was an English essayist, poet and antiquarian, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, co-authored with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764–1847).

Friends with such literary luminaries as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth and William Hazlitt, Lamb was at the centre of a major literary circle in England. He has been referred to by E. V. Lucas, his principal biographer, as "the most lovable figure in English literature".

Lamb was born in London, the son of John Lamb (c. 1725 – 1799) and Elizabeth (née Field, died 1796). Lamb had an elder brother, also John, and a sister, Mary. Four other siblings did not survive infancy. Their father, John Lamb Sr. was a lawyer's clerk and spent most of his professional life as the assistant to barrister Samuel Salt, who lived in the Inner Temple in the legal district of London. It was there, in Crown Office Row, that Charles Lamb was born and spent his youth. Lamb created a portrait of his father in his "Elia on the Old Benchers" under the name Lovel.