Book Description

Excerpt from The Best Letters of Charles Lamb In this edition of the correspondence of Charles Lamb, that of his sister, Mary Lamb, is for the first time included. In it also appear for the first time between seventy and eighty letters, many of them of the highest importance; and it is the first edition to take note in chronological order of those letters printed by other editors that are not available for the present volumes: a step which should, I think, add to the biographical value of the work. In these two volumes I have, after much consideration, placed my notes at the end of each letter, rather than, as in the five preceding volumes, at the end of the book. My reason for doing so was twofold: in the first place, to serve the convenience of the reader, to whom annotation of the correspondence is often a necessity, and not, as in the case of the other writings, a luxury; and in the second place, because by joining the letters with a few words of commentary they can be made practically into a consecutive Life. The self-conscious deliberate construction of Lamb's essays and poems, each a work of art, forbade the introduction of footnotes that might distract the attention from the true matter of the text: hence, in the preceding five volumes, such remarks as the editor had to make will be found sharply separated from the authors part of the book. But here, where Lamb is often writing without premeditation, with a running pen, and writing moreover for a single reader, it seemed to me that the impropriety of interrupting the correspondence by elucidatory comments was so slight as to be almost non-existent. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.