Lamb's first appearance as an author was made in the year of the great tragedy of his life (1796), when there were published in the volume of Poems on Various Subjects by Coleridge four sonnets by "Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House." In the following year he contributed, with Charles Lloyd, a pupil of Coleridge, some pieces in blank verse to the second edition of Coleridge's Poems. In 1797 his short summer holiday was spent with Coleridge at Nether Stowey, where he met the Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, and established a friendship with both which only his own death terminated. In 1798, under the influence of Henry Mackenzie's novel Julie de Roubigne, he published a short and pathetic prose tale entitled Rosamund Gray, in which it is possible to trace beneath disguised conditions references to the misfortunes of the author's own family, and many personal touches; and in the same year he joined Lloyd in a volume of Blank Verse, to which Lamb contributed poems occasioned by the death of his mother and his aunt Sarah Lamb, among them being his best-known lyric, "The Old Familiar Faces." In this year, 1798, he achieved the unexpected publicity of an attack by the Anti-Jacobin upon him as an associate of Coleridge and Southey (to whose Annual Anthology he had contributed) in their Jacobin machinations. In 1799, on the death of her father, Mary Lamb came to live again with her brother, their home then being in Pentonville; but it was not until 1800 that they really settled together, their first independent joint home being at Mitre Court Buildings in the Temple, where they lived until 1809. At the end of 1801, or beginning of 1802, appeared Lamb's first play, John W oodvil, on which he set great store, a slight dramatic piece written in the style of the earlier Elizabethan period and containing some genuine poetry and happy delineation of the gentler emotions, but as a whole deficient in plot, vigour and character; it was held up to ridicule by the Edinburgh Review as a specimen of the rudest condition of the drama, a work by "a man of the age of Thespis." The dramatic spirit, however, was not thus easily quenched in Lamb, and his next effort was a farce, Mr. H , the point of which lay in the hero's anxiety to conceal his name "Hogsflesh"; but it did not survive the first night of its appearance at Drury Lane, in Dec. 1806. Its author bore the failure with rare equanimity and good humour—even to joining in the hissing—and soon struck into new and more suc cessful fields of literary exertion. Before, however, passing to these it should be mentioned that he made various efforts to earn money by journalism, partly by humorous articles, partly as dramatic critic, but chiefly as a contributor of sarcastic or funny paragraphs, "sparing neither man nor woman," in the Morning Post, principally in 1803.
In 1807 appeared Tales founded on the Plays of Shakespeare, written by Charles and Mary Lamb, in which Charles was responsible for the tragedies and Mary for the comedies ; and in 1808, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare, with short but felicitous critical notes. It was this work which laid the foundation of Lamb's reputation as a critic, for it was filled with imaginative understanding of the old playwrights, and a warm, discerning and novel appreciation of their great merits. In the same year, 1808, Mary Lamb, assisted by her brother, published Poetry for Children, and a col lection of short school-girl tales under the title Mrs. Leicester's School; and to the same date belongs The Adventures of Ulysses, designed by Lamb as a companion to The Adventures of Tele machus. In 1810 began to appear Leigh Hunt's quarterly period ical, The Reflector, in which Lamb published much (including the fine essays on the tragedies of Shakespeare and on Hogarth) that subsequently appeared in the first collected edition of his Works, which he put forth in 1818.
Between 1811, when The Reflector ceased, and 1820, he wrote almost nothing. In these years we may imagine him at his most social period, playing much whist and entertaining his friends on Wednesday or Thursday nights; meanwhile gathering that reputation as a conversationalist or inspirer of conversation in others, which Hazlitt, who was at one time one of Lamb's closest friends, has done so much to celebrate. When in 1818 appeared the Works in two volumes, it may be that Lamb considered his literary career over. Before coming to 1820, and an event which was in reality to be the beginning of that career as it is generally known—the establishment of the London Magazine—it should be recorded that in the summer of 1819 Lamb, with his sister's full consent, proposed marriage to Fanny Kelly, the actress, who was then in her thirtieth year. Miss Kelly could not accept, giving as one reason her devotion to her mother. Lamb bore the rebuff with characteristic humour and fortitude.
The establishment of the London Magazine in 182o stimulated Lamb to the production of a series of new essays (the Essays of Elk) which may be said to form the chief corner-stone in the small but classic temple of his fame. The first of these, as it fell out, was a description of the old South Sea House, with which Lamb happened to have associated the name of a "gay light-hearted foreigner" called Elia, who was a clerk in the days of his service there. The pseudonym adopted on this occasion was retained for the subsequent contributions, which appeared collectively in a volume of essays called Elia, in 1823. After a career of five years the London Magazine came to an end ; and about the same period Lamb's long connection with the India House terminated, a pension of £450 (L441 net) having been assigned to him. The increased leisure, however, for which he had long sighed, did not prove favourable to literary production, which henceforth was limited to a few trifling contributions to the New Monthly and other serials, and the excavation of gems from the mass of dramatic literature bequeathed to the British Museum by David Garrick, which Lamb laboriously read through in 1827, an occupation which supplied him for a time with the regular hours of work he missed so much. The malady of his sister, which continued to increase with ever shortening intervals of relief, broke in painfully on his lettered ease and comfort; and it is unfortunately impossible to ignore the deteriorating effects of an over-free indulgence in the use of alcohol, and, in early life, tobacco, on a temperament such as his. Hi-, removal on account of his sister to the quiet of the country at Enfield, by tending to withdraw him from the stimulating society of the large circle of literary friends who had helped to make his weekly or monthly "at-homes" so remarkable, doubtless also tended to intensify his listlessness and helplessness. One of the brightest elements in the closing years of his life was the friendship and companionship of Emma Isola, whom he and his sister had adopted, and whose mar riage in 1833 to Edward Moxon, the publisher, though a source of unselfish joy to Lamb, left him more than ever alone. While living at Edmonton, whither he had moved in 1833 so that his sister might have the continual care of Mr. and Mrs. Walden, who were accustomed to patients of weak intellect, Lamb was overtaken by an attack of erysipelas brought on by an accidental fall as he was walking on the London road. After a few days' illness he died on Dec. 27, 1834. The sudden death of one so widely known, admired and beloved, fell on the public as well as on his own attached circle with all the poignancy of a personal calamity and a private grief. His memory wanted no tribute that affection could bestow, and Wordsworth commemorated in simple and solemn verse the genius, virtues and fraternal devotion of his early friend.