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Article: Charles Lamb on Romantic reading and social decorum.(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Wordsworth Circle
- Article date:
- June 22, 2008
- Author:
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For Lamb, reading is essentially an indoor, private activity for pleasure rather than duty. Yet he also regards it as an essentially social activity. As he declares in "A Quaker's Meeting," "In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by--say, a wife--he, or she, too, (if that be probable), reading another, without interruption or oral communication? can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words?--away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness" (2:46). (1) However fragmentary Lamb's thoughts on books and reading may appear, they offer an index to a sensitive ...