File:Portrait of Charles Lamb (1775-1834) by John Watson Gordon.jpg

English: Sir John Watson Gordon R.A., P.R.S.A.

Portrait of Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

oil on canvas, in a painted oval

A celebrated essayist, poet and novelist, Charles Lamb was born in London in 1775, the son of a servant, John Lamb, and his wife Elizabeth. In 1782, under the patronage of his father's employer Samuel Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple, Lamb was enrolled at Christ's Hospital school, where he was was a fellow pupil with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was through Coleridge, whom would remain a source of much of Lamb's inspiration throughout his life, and with whom he collaborated in the publication of a series of poems in 1797, that Lamb met William and Dorothy Wordsworth, who would equally remain lifelong friends. A close associate of William Hazlitt, with whom he shared a critical enthusiasm for painting, Lamb was an integral part of the literary world of Regency England, and a central figure in the Romantic movement.