Detached Thoughts on Books and Readings
by
Charles Lamb
(Summary
& Analysis)
Charles Lamb was the essayist of the age of
Wordsworth. This age was the beginning of romanticism. The chief
characteristics of this age are –
· Mystery
· Interest
in the past
· Love
of nature
· Interest
in inhumanity
· Love
for the simplicities of life
· Freedom
of imagination and
· Regeneration
of poetic style.
Charles
Lamb is the most loveable of English essayist because of his delicate, old
fashioned style and humour. He was a class mate of S. T. Coleridge. He is the
autobiographical essayist and his essays reflect his nobility of soul, his good
nature, his charity, his simplicity and his kindliness. He frankly tells us his
thoughts and feelings.
In
the essay, ‘Detached thoughts on books and readings’ he talks about the books,
their readings, and also about the readers.
According
to Charles Lamb, he loves to lose himself in other men’s mind by reading their
books. He cannot sit and think, he says that books think for him. He can read
anything which he calls a book.
According
to the essayist, there are somethings which are in books’ shape but are no
books because in library, when we take a volume in a hope of some kind hearted
book and open it we find a withering population essay. Lamb longs to strip the
covers of these things and wants to cover the shivering folios.
According
to Lamb, costly binding should not be lavished upon all kinds of books
indiscriminately because the exterior of the books confers no distinction; it
raises no sweet emotions, no tickling sense of property in the owner.
According
to the essayist, a book in a worn – out appearance is often liked by the lover
of reading. He says that the better the book is the less it demands from
binding. The rare volumes when perishes, we feel regret.
The
essayist further says, that for him, the books which have notes in them are
painful to look at. The names of some poets, says he, sound sweeter and carry a
perfume in them. He says that much depends upon when and where you read a book.
Book of quick interest is for the eye to glide over only. Newspaper always
excite curiosity but when read out, is intolerable. The readers, who read
seldom, are the slow readers. A man who becomes blind regrets not for the good
books but for a magazine or a pamphlet.
In
the last part of the essay, he shows his sympathy for the street readers who do
not have the means to buy or hire a book. He ends his essay with two stanzas,
in one of which a boy wished he never had been taught to read because he had no
money to buy books. In the second stanza, the other boy wished, he never had
learned to eat because he had no money to buy the food.
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