Success And Anxiety:Charles Lamb’s Elia In The London Magazine And Other Periodicals

The periodical, the initial medium in which Elia essays were published and by which the popularity of essays won, has a quite subtle or ambivalent relationship with Charles Lamb and his Elia series essays. More precisely speaking, on one hand, Ella’s success largely depended on the fact that Lamb self-consciously confronted and negotiated the nature of the periodical press; on the other hand, the periodical also brought him a great deal of trouble and anxiety. The anxiety not only lowered his status as a periodical essayist, but more important, made Lamb quite concerned about the development of the periodical literature.This thesis aims to illustrate the complicated or paradoxical relationship between the periodical, especially the London Magazine, and Lamb’s Elia by the way of a closing reading of his essays. The reason why Elia could gain success in the periodical is analyzed in detail with the help of association with the19th century’s British social and economical and literary background. Then the focus turns to the periodical anxiety Lamb suffered and his efforts to remedy it in Elia essays. In a word, the periodical in the nineteenth century became an effective carrier which made it possible to mix popular and elite literary genres. By contributing his essays to periodicals, Lamb made initiative attempts to bridge the highbrow and the lowbrow in the periodical and then further pushed development in both the familiar essay and the periodical. In a long run, such a union between the popular and the elite genres Lamb tried in the periodical press also contributed greatly in the process of the middle class nurturing their own cultural consciousness in nineteenth-century England.