You are to consider *Dream Children* as a human document.
Lamb was nearing fifty when he wrote it. You can see, especially from
the last line, that the death of his elder brother, John Lamb,
was fresh and heavy on his mind. You will recollect that in youth
he had had a disappointing love-affair with a girl named Ann Simmons,
who afterwards married a man named Bartrum. You will know
that one of the influences of his childhood was his grandmother Field,
housekeeper of Blakesware House, in Hertfordshire, at which mansion
he sometimes spent his holidays. You will know that he was a bachelor,
living with his sister Mary, who was subject to homicidal mania.
And you will see in this essay, primarily, a supreme expression
of the increasing loneliness of his life. He constructed all that
preliminary tableau of paternal pleasure in order to bring home to you
in the most poignant way his feeling of the solitude of his existence,
his sense of all that he had missed and lost in the world.
The key of the essay is one of profound sadness. But note
that he makes his sadness beautiful; or, rather, he shows the beauty
that resides in sadness. You watch him sitting there
in his "bachelor arm-chair," and you say to yourself:
"Yes, it was sad, but it was somehow beautiful." When you have said that
to yourself, Charles Lamb, so far as you are concerned, has accomplished
his chief aim in writing the essay. How exactly he produces his effect
can never be fully explained. But one reason of his success
is certainly his regard for truth. He does not falsely idealise his brother,
nor the relations between them. He does not say, as a sentimentalist
would have said, "Not the slightest cloud ever darkened our relations;"
nor does he exaggerate his solitude. Being a sane man, he has too much
common-sense to assemble all his woes at once. He might have told you