Charles Lamb

1775-1834

Gravestone of Charles Lamb
Photograph by David Conway

His tombstone is in a paved enclosure to the south-west of the church. There is a memorial tablet inside the church inscribed with the following words by Wordsworth:

At the centre of his being lodged
A soul by resignation sanctified.
O, he was good, if e'er a good man lived.

Lamb died on the 27 December 1834 in Edmonton after complications to a wound he suffered as a result of a fall on his way to the Bell Tavern at Edmonton. (This is the same tavern that features in Cowper's poem John Gilpin.)

He died just a few months after his lifelong friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The pair had met as schoolboys at Christ's Hospital, London. He was also acquainted with Wordsworth, Southey and Hunt.

Lamb worked as a clerk at the East India Company from 1792 until his retirement in 1825.

Portrait of Charles Lamb

For the whole of his life Lamb cared for his sister Mary, who in 1796, killed their mother in a fit of madness with a table knife. Mary was buried beside him thirteen years later.

Lamb was an accomplished essayist who wrote under the pseudonym of Elia. He was also a literary critic and prolific letter writer.

His most famous poems include: The Old Familiar Faces (see below), Hester (1803) and On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born (1827).