The Literary Endeavor Continues. . . .

I am happy to say that the work continues on the final edition of my book Humble Men in Company; The Unlikely Friendship of Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It will still be a few months before it goes to print, these things work at a glacially slow speed. I have read a great deal since I put the manuscript in the hands of the copy editor at the publisher and look forward to going through the book again and adding a few important observations and making sure the prose has no major problems.

In the meantime, since my father died, I have finished my novel tentatively entitled The City of Angels which is a semi-autobiographical story of my last year in Los Angeles. Now the work must go ahead looking for a publisher. I am also now close to having a first complete draft of a new book on Charles and Mary Lamb. This one is an unapologetic appreciation of the wit and wisdom of Lamb and his sister, which is thematic in nature with chapters about friendship, death and dying, melancholy, etc.For those who love Lamb I hope that the book will be an enjoyable and insightful read. All of this work on Lamb is, as I have said before, a build-up to a more comprehensive book on the remarkable roll of interconnected friendships in the English Romantic period. Such a book, however, is many years in the making and must be constructed against the backdrop of much other work on the era.

I have not reported on any new books that I have received lately because I don't think I have ordered a single book since my dad died. But reading goes on apace and I am currently reading the Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey in six volumes circa 1834, compiled by his son. It is interesting but I always find reading about Southey a little frustrating because he was Romanticism's greatest turn-coat, giving up entirely on his youthful radicalism and embracing the Toryism and rampant nationalism that so dominated the mainstream of English politics in the generation after the French Revolution. So it goes.