This chapter traces the history of the essay against the backdrop of changing theories of distraction in the long eighteenth century. As the population of urban centres grew, readers’ seemingly waning attention spans had to counter a barrage of auditory and visual stimuli. Everyday diversions were compounded by literary ones: falling paper costs led to an explosion of print material, forcing the periodical essay to compete with a dizzying array of prose fiction, poems, sermons, and histories. Focusing on a series of prominent eighteenth-century and Romantic essayists, particularly Samuel Johnson, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb, we argue that the essay form is powerfully shaped by its engagement with the wandering mind. Debates over distraction that began in the Enlightenment continue to shape the genre today, as modern essay forms – New York Times essays, blogs, Twitter feeds – continue to structure themselves around assumptions about short attention spans.

This chapter examines the irony, complexity, and pleasure in rhetorical ingenuity evident in the satirical essay in English, taking as its central exemplars some of the key historical figures in that tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Irish authors Jonathan Swift and Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth through to the Romantic essayists Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock. It demonstrates how the prose essay became a powerful satirical form in the Georgian period, and discusses the tonal richness and ambiguity which render the satirical essay a key subgenre in the tradition of the prose essay in English. It pays particular attention to the links between satire, colonialism, the Gothic, and the sublime in the form of the essay.

From the outset, food and the essay have shared a kinship, given that one of the original senses of the word ‘essai’ meant the ritual of tasting the French king’s food and drink. From metaphor to content, food has permeated the essay form; in turn, the essay became the vehicle for the emerging field of gastronomy. This chapter constellates several important moments of interaction between literal and literary taste, consumption and appetite, cultural criticism and culinary knowledge in essays by Michel Montaigne, Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, William Kitchiner, Launcelot Sturgeon, Charles Lamb, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Elizabeth Robins Pennell. As cosmopolitan practices of discretionary dining became more widespread, these gastronomic essayistic writers often satirised the burgeoning bourgeoisie and their cultural milieu. Given its flexibility, the essay remains paramount to food writing, in its many forms and genres.

This chapter explores the relationship of the adult essay with the ‘theme’, which was the name for school-essays until the mid-nineteenth century. Themes were, mostly, short prose pieces, focused on a moral subject which was also called a theme, written almost exclusively in Latin until English themes began to emerge in the late eighteenth century. The chapter argues that in the nineteenth century, the modern pedagogical essay emerged out of the Erasmian theme, combining many of its structures with the Baconian essay’s priority on individual experience and ideas. Meanwhile, the Romantic essayists, Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey, chief among them, created the modern literary essay by carrying forward the priority the theme assigned to rhetoric over experience, while on the other hand imitating Montaigne’s play with the oratorical structures of the theme, and with its subject (also called a ‘theme’).

This chapter identifies a subgenre of the essay form – the dream-essay – and charts its trajectory from early modern philosophy, through the Romantic interest in vision and reverie. Arguing that that the dream-essay both arises from and extends the sceptical ethos of Cartesian philosophy, it discusses Montaigne’s position on dreams, René Descartes’s vocational dream, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s dream reveries. With this background established, it turns to the Romantic dreamers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Thomas De Quincey, emphasising how, for these writers, dreaming – and writing about dreaming – elaborates a paradoxical form of consciousness which is also a form of expression. The chapter concludes with brief discussions of the contemporary writers Adam Phillips and W.G. Sebald.

This chapter discusses the poetics of familiarity embodied in the Romantic essay. It locates the origins of that poetics in Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ of 1800 and 1802 to Lyrical Ballads. Responding in turn to the famous preface, the three most notable ‘familiar’ essayists of the era, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, revise a manifesto for poetry into one for prose, a celebration of nature into a proclamation of the city. In their practice, the familiar essay becomes the exemplary form of urban expression in the Romantic era. The characteristic procedure of the essay is the slide from the familiar to the ideal and back again, by directly articulating the ideal bearing of the familiar subject, or by a range of other idealising (and essayistic) strategies.

With an understanding of ‘bibliography’ in its original sense of writing about books, this chapter provides a genealogy of the British bibliographical essay, commencing with the medieval bibliophile Richard de Bury. It traces the development of that species of essay through the eighteenth century, when essays started widely appearing in broadsides, newspapers, and magazines as well as books, motivating essayists to reflect upon the material form in which they were publishing. Following the periodical essayists’ critique of commercial print culture, Romantic essayists like Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey turned their attention to old books, emphasising their tangible, material value, while at the same time upholding literature’s immaterial qualities. In the age of bibliomania, antiquarian books became an opportunity for the bibliographical essay to come into its own among an expanding audience of bibliophiles and collectors.

Pater describes the writings of Charles Lamb as ‘an excellent illustration of the value of reserve in literature’. The remark is surprising because Lamb more often is celebrated for the warm familiarity of his essays rather than the withholding and coolness associated with reserve. It is Pater himself who was famed for his reserve, shy in company and elusive in his writing. But his essay on Lamb identifies a different quality of reserve and the different ways in which it can operate as an element of literary style. The humour of Lamb’s writing is a form of reserve that conceals the tragic facts of his life. Such concealment works through excess and deflection, masking the personal without seeming too remote or buttoned-up. What Pater values in Lamb provides insight into the peculiar reserve of his own writing, with its paradoxical mix of the personal and impersonal, and its style that is at once so elusive and so individually distinctive.

Centring on a reading of ‘The Recluse’, this chapter opens with a consideration of the representation of peace in ‘Home at Grasmere’ (1800–1806), a poem later known as ‘Part First, Book First’ of ‘The Recluse’. Through close readings of the 1808 ‘Recluse’ fragments that Wordsworth went on to adapt for The Excursion, the chapter investigates how remnants of the poet’s early interest in radical, pacificist thought speak against the poem’s declared allegiance with the values of Britain’s political and religious establishment. Noting how the poem’s composition is bisected by the composition of the pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra (1810) and the letter to the military theorist Sir Charles Pasley (1811), writings that explore the links between armed struggle, national independence, and the primacy of the Imagination, the chapter goes on to consider how The Excursion, through the character of the Solitary, grants expression to the revolutionary hope for perpetual peace, world citizenship, and delight in Fancy’s ‘mutable array’.

This chapter argues that the personal essay came into being at the beginning of the twentieth century, evolving from the familiar essay favored by writers such as Charles Lamb and Virginia Woolf. Prior to the twentieth century, the essay as a form was assumed to be personal but only in a deliberately circumlocutory manner. But the pressure to constitute a stable self brought to bear by academic and other institutions gave rise to a new conception of the personal essay, and to confession more generally, as a vehicle of “spectacular personhood.”

This chapter details how the essay form participated in changes in conduct, tact, and ways of living in nineteenth-century England, promoting an “ethics of unknowing” that was constantly subject to experimentation and revision. Particular attention is paid to essayists such as William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, who continued the Montaignean tradition in ways that responded to the urbanized modernity of the capitalist metropolis.

Charles Lamb spent two periods working at the library of the British Museum, in 1804–1807 and 1826–1827, as preparation for a volume of extracts from old plays in the Garrick collection entitled Specimens of English Dramatick Poets (published 1808) and latterly a series of contributions based on the same collection that appeared in William Hone’s Table Book (1827). In the roughly twenty years separating these two periods both the library itself and Lamb’s working life changed significantly, Lamb having left the employment in the East India Office to become a ‘superannuated man’ in 1825. This chapter examines these changes in the context of the emergence of scientific and literary Institutions in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In tandem with the British Museum, the libraries of these Institutions facilitated the emergence of institutionalized reading or professional literary ‘research’, with long-term implications for the emerging literary field in the Romantic period. Lamb’s two sojourns working on the Garrick plays offer a perspective from which to gauge diversification in reading practices in the early nineteenth century, who could read in institutional contexts, and what, ultimately, such reading might be for.

Built around two visits to Westminster Abbey, this short coda compares early eighteenth-century attitudes to theatrical transitions to William Hazlitt's and Charles Lamb's writing about actors. Both Lamb and Hazlitt emerge as hostile to what I have called the art of transition, as they each denigrate the performance of a character in favour of the study of that figure’s psychological constitution.

This essay explores the particular forms that Jonsonian politics took across the period from the 1790s to the 1830s through two detailed case studies. The first explores the uses of Jonson made by the radical lecturer and political reformer, John Thelwall, from 1794–6. Thelwall offers a reading of a public Jonson whose presence in the lecture room and in political pamphlets is vitally connected with the discourses of political possibility made available by and in this post-Revolutionary moment in English history. The second case study explores contrastingly private uses of Jonson made by Charles Lamb, a writer who for a long time was sweetened by his posthumous reception into a far less political, engaged and awkward writer than he should now seem. Lamb’s annotated copy of the Jonson third folio is for the first time available to study after its purchase by Princeton University Library. The essay suggests that these annotations have their origin in the moment of mid-1790s protest to which Thelwall’s Jonson had belonged, and in which Lamb, too, played a part. Over the course of his many returns to reading Jonson, Lamb inscribes a Romantic politics in Jonson’s margins, a politics that today may have renewed relevance.

The Romantic Revolution in Taste entailed a radical revision of the category of art and a toppling of the traditional hierarchy of the senses. In the wake of the French Revolution, Parisian gastronomers emerged as necessary adjuncts to the phenomenon of the restaurant, guiding the public in the formerly exclusive practice of food connoisseurship and applying the aesthetic art of judgment to products of culinary artistry. This chapter examines the response of British literary writers and critics to the cultural upheaval the age of gastronomy represented. It surveys the different “schools” of thought that emerged at this time – in the language of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Leg of Mutton School, the Cookery School, the Soda-Water School – in addition to the more well-known Cockney and Lake Schools – and considers the role of William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, William Kitchiner, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron in the Romantic Revolution in taste.