Charles Lamb’s Pen-Pushing: Books, Authorship, and the Writer of Autographs

This essay explores the works and work-life of Charles Lamb: essayist, East India Company “writer,” or clerk, and a literary celebrity unusually willing to supply autographic writing to his fans. Against the backdrop of narratives of media shift and ideals of workforce efficiency crystallizing during Lamb’s lifetime, it analyzes the conflicting cultures of penmanship that funneled into the manuscript book—a category that, we should more often recall, included at this time both ladies’ albums and counting-house ledgers.