Elia

The pen-name of Charles Lamb for his essays in the London Magazine between 1820 and 1833. The real Elia was an Italian who worked as a clerk at the South-Sea House; I'm not sure why Lamb thought this name was a suitable pseudonym. The essays were collected into two books, The Essays of Elia in 1823 and The Last Essays of Elia in 1833. The character of Elia is both autobiographical and whimsical, but since Lamb was very whimsical about real life, the inconsistencies and flights of fantasy are all part of it. The essays cannot be read as straight biography. Sometimes Charles Lamb is mentioned in them, as a schoolfellow of Elia, only vaguely known, and much richer.

The Essays of Elia contains these essays:

• The South-Sea House
• Oxford in the Vacation
• Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago
• The Two Races of Men
• New Year's Eve
• Mrs. Battle's Opinion on Whist
• A Chapter on Ears
• All Fools' Day
• A Quakers' Meeting
• The Old and the New Schoolmaster
• Valentine's Day
• Imperfect Sympathies -- full text is on E2
• Witches and Other Night Fears
• My Relations
• Mackery End, in Hertfordshire
• Modern Gallantry
• The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple
• Grace Before Meat
• My First Play
• Dream Children: A Reverie -- full text is on E2
• Distant Correspondents
• The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers
• A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars
• A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig -- summary is on E2
• A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People
• On Some of the Old Actors
• On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century
• On the Acting of Munden

The Last Essays of Elia contains these. The friend in the preface is Charles Lamb himself, commenting on poor Elia's quirky style: "Crude they are, I grant you -- a sort of unlicked, incondite things -- villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases."

• Preface by a Friend of the Late Elia
• Blakesmore in Hertfordshire
• Poor Relations
• Stage Illusion
• To the Shade of Elliston
• Ellistoniana
• Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading
• The Old Margate Hoy
• The Convalescent
• Sanity of True Genius
• Captain Jackson
• The Superannuated Man
• The Genteel Style in Writing
• Barbara S---
• The Tombs in the Abbey
• Amicus Redivivus
• Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney
• Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago
• Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art
• Rejoicings Upon the New Year's Coming of Age
• The Wedding
• The Child Angel: A Dream
• Confessions of a Drunkard
• Old China
• Popular Fallacies
  1. That a Bully is always a Coward
  2. That Ill-gotten Gain never Prospers
  3. That a Man must not Laugh at his own Jest
  4. That such a one Shows his Breeding. -- That it is Easy to Perceive he is no Gentleman
  5. That the Poor Copy the Vices of the Rich
  6. That Enough is as Good as a Feast
  7. Of Two Disputants the Warmest is Generally in the Wrong
  8. That Verbal Allusions are not Wit Because they will not Bear a Translation
  9. That the Worst Puns are the Best
  10. That Handsome is that Handsome does
  11. That we must not Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth
  12. That Home is Home though it is never so Homely
  13. That you must Love Me and Love my Dog
  14. That we should Rise with the Lark
  15. That we should Lie Down with the Lamb
  16. That a Sulky Temper is a Misfortune