"This Lime-tree Bower My Prison" is dedicated to "Charles Lamb, of the India House, London." Throughout the poem, the speaker addresses "gentle-hearted Charles," observes that he must miss nature while being stuck in the big city, and hints that he has suffered unusually in recent years. The poem as a whole portrays this Charles as a sensitive if long-suffering person and a beloved friend of the speaker's. We know that Samuel Taylor Coleridge based this poem on an autobiographical experience: a number of friends, including the writer Charles Lamb, came to visit him at his home, and Coleridge was prevented from joining them for a walk after sustaining an injury to his foot. But who was Charles Lamb outside of Coleridge's poem, and to what extent is Coleridge's description useful in understanding him? Here, we'll briefly discuss the writer's biography and his accomplishments.
Lamb was born in London in 1775. He began attending Christ's Hospital (a reputable school, catering to the sons of poor but respectable families, despite its confusing name) as a young child. At school, he became close with his classmate Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As "This Lime-tree Bower My Prison" suggests, the two remained close throughout their lives. Lamb left school in 1789, but didn't attend university. Instead, he found work at the East India Company as a clerk. He'd remain there for 33 years, while his literary career flourished. Coleridge often played a role: Lamb's first published work, a set of four sonnets, was actually included in a 1796 collection of Coleridge's poems. Coleridge, while perhaps his closest friend, wasn't Lamb's only literary collaborator. He collaborated with the writer Charles Lloyd on a book of poetry in 1798, and worked with his sister Mary on an 1807 collection adapting Shakespeare's work for young readers. This work was so successful that, over the following two years, Charles and Mary produced a number of other collections for children, and Charles wrote several by himself. Collaboration and competition played integral roles in Lamb's work—he would become part of a close-knit group of contemporaries, including Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Robert Southey, to whom Coleridge sent an early edition of "This Lime-tree Bower My Prison."
But Lamb also wrote successfully and prolifically on his own, becoming best-known for his essays and criticism. His 1808 commentary as the editor of the collection Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare altered the literary world's perception of Shakespeare's milieu. He then wrote essays and criticism for the journal The Reflector, producing a collection of his works in 1818. During the early 1820s, Lamb began writing essays in the London Magazine, under the pen name Elia. It was these essays that made him a household name. He was known for approaching his subjects with levity and modestly, containing a great deal of insight within an unassuming, humorous space. These essays were collected in the volumes Essays of Elia and The Last Essays of Elia published respectively in 1823 and 1833.
Yet, as Coleridge suggests in his poem, Lamb's life was marked by tragedy as well as literary success. Much of this was related to his older sister Mary. Lamb and Mary had been close as children and remained so as adults, but by the time their parents became ill in the early 1790s, Mary's severe mental health problems had become evident. Despite this, she, along with Charles, assumed the burden of supporting and nursing their parents. During a period of intense mental instability in 1796, Mary stabbed her and Charles's mother to death. As a result, she was legally placed under her brother's care. Charles, too, was hospitalized during a period of acute mental illness in 1795, though his mental health problems were less severe and recurring than his sister's. In general, both siblings lived highly functional lives. Because of Charles's role as his sister's caretaker they lived together and were known to be avid entertainers. Mary, too, was a writer in her own right and a member of the same literary circles as her brother. In 1823, the siblings even informally adopted an orphaned girl named Emma Isola. However, Isola's marriage to Lamb's friend and publisher Edward Moxon coincided with a rapid worsening of Mary's mental health, leaving Lamb isolated. He moved with Mary to the town of Edmonton, near London, where she could receive more constant care. It was there that Lamb died, in 1834.
Though Lamb's career as a writer was notable on its own terms, his friendship with Coleridge was indispensable to both his personal life and his growth as a writer. In fact, he died only weeks after his oldest friend. In the short period after Coleridge's death and before his own, Lamb wrote of Coleridge, "I feel how great a part he was of me," reflecting on the absence the poet had left in his life. "This Lime-tree Bower My Prison" echoes that sentiment, expressing, from Coleridge's perspective, the depth and closeness of the two writers' relationship.
