Between “Engrossing” and “Penning”: Charles Lamb and the Romantic Aesthetics of Emergent Bureaucracy

Charles Lamb was the author of whimsical “familiar essays” but famously also an East India Company clerk, and the relationship between these two aspects of what might broadly be called his “writing career” is sometimes framed as directly antagonistic, as merely irritating, or even as mutually reinforcing. I argue however that Lamb’s own shifting sense of both “engrossing” and “penning” for a living, expressed in his essays and correspondence, was more complex than these dualisms, and that this condition informed deeper tensions that he creatively explored and adapted throughout his career. It is via analyses of Lamb’s works within the historical and theoretical context of his office milieu, an approach informed by readings of Jacques Lacan and Bruno Latour, that I argue his creative engagement with inchoate bureaucratic structures provides a concrete basis for considering the aesthetic motifs and philosophical preoccupations typical of Romanticism more broadly.