The Superannuated Man

Lamb’s “The Superannuated Man” is a personal essay included in his Essays of

Elia. Here he gives vent to his feelings after he gave up the job prematurely. The essay
begins with an address to the reader wherein he painfully utters that he has wasted the
golden years of his life – the shining youth – in the irksome confinement of an office. He
calls the office a prison where he spent his life from the “shining youth” through the
middle age till decrepitude and silver hairs, without any hope of release or respite. He
lived to forget that there were such things as holidays, and with a note of pathos he
remarks that these were the prerogatives of childhood. The essayist remarks that if there
are such men, only then they will be able to appreciate “his deliverance”.
The author spent thirty-six years at his desk in Mincing Lane, and when at the age
of fourteen he took the seat in his office melancholia overtook him as he was suddenly
incarcerated from the free life when he had abundant playtime and frequently intervening
long vacations. At the office, which was a counting house in Mincing Lane he had to
work for eight, nine and even ten hours a day. In a moralising tone, Lamb says that as
“time partially reconciles us to anything”, he gradually became content – doggedly
contented, as wild animals in cages. The note of pathos in the writer’s feelings is
markedly poignant.
The author says that he had Sundays but they being days of worship, he hardly
found them recreational. On a Sunday, he found the city gloomy and felt a weight in the
air. He missed the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad singers – the buzz
and stirring murmur of the streets. The bells striking the hours depressed him, and the
closed shops repelled him. Besides Sundays, he had a day at Easter, and a day at
Christmas, with a full week in summer to go and air himself in his native fields of
Hertfordshire. This was a great indulgence that made his “durance” tolerable, and Lamb
waited for one full year for the time to come again. Always feeling that he was a captive
prisoner, the prospect helped him sustain his thraldom.
With increasing years, his health and good spirits flagged. Besides his daylight
servitude, he served over again all night in his sleep as he suffered perpetually from a
dread of crisis. He would often wake up in terror of imaginary false entries, errors in his
accounts, and the like. He became fifty, yet had no prospect of emancipation from the
prison. Lamb’s pathetic statement: “I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had
entered into my soul” – is very moving.
Soon it happened that his colleagues discovered in his countenance marks of
weariness. The junior partner of the firm also noticed this change in his appearance, and
when he enquired Lamb of the reason behind, he “honestly made a frank confession of
his infirmity” and expressed his thought that one day “he should eventually be obliged to
resign his service.” The author opens up his heart to say that he passed a whole week
labouring under the impression that he had acted imprudently in his disclosure, that he
had foolishly given his bosses a handle against himself. This expression of the feeling is
indeed sincere and touching.
The most desired day at last came when he was given the farewell. Lamb gives a
minute description of his torrid hours as the senior partner lectured on his length of
service and his meritorious conduct. When he descanted on the expediency of retiring at a
certain time of life, Lamb’s heart panted. He was granted a pension for life to the amount
of two-thirds of his salary. He considered it a magnificent offer. The essayist gives
account of his reaction without inhibition. He says he did not know what he answered
between surprise and gratitude, but he remembers that he stammered a bow and at ten
minutes after eight he went home forever. The author’s narration of the incident that
came very suddenly and yet astonishingly is frank. It seems he is incapable of expressing
his feelings that were chaotic at that hour. He hails his freedom saying “Esto perpetua” ie.
“let it be perpetual”.
Lamb now goes on to describe his life after his retirement. For the first two or
three days he felt stunned – overwhelmed. He compares himself to a prisoner let loose
after a forty years of confinement. The freedom came to him so suddenly that he could
hardly believe it. While he ran short of time when he was in service, he is now in
possession of Time that required management by a bailiff or a steward. Having all
holidays he thought he had none. During his service life, he used to walk thirty miles a
day, to make most of the holidays, but now time hangs heavy upon him as he could not
walk it away.
The tone of pathos is suddenly lightened by humour when he describes that if his
hours spent for the benefit of others be deducted from the fifty years of his life, he is still
a young fellow. He asserts that the time a man has all to himself is the real time that he
enjoys. The author is again overcome by pathos when he rues over his loss of association
with the partners and the clerks of the Counting House with whom he spent so many
years. Being suddenly removed from them, he feels that they are dead. Quoting from
Tragedy by Sir Robert Howard, he says: “Time takes no measure in eternity.” To be
relieved of this awkward feeling, he visited his office once or twice – to meet his old
desk-fellows – his co-brethren of the quill. He mentions with sadness that during his
visits he did not feel the warmth of pleasant familiarity, which he had enjoyed before
among them. He cracked jokes, but they went off faintly. He felt sad to note that his desk
and the peg had been allotted to another person, and the sight aroused in him a feeling of
remorse. In this mood he gives farewell to some of his colleagues – one by one.
The author closes the essay with a description of his life after “the date of first
communication.” He took fifteen days to arrive at a state of tranquillity. The first flutter
had by now diminished and he discovered “an unsettling sense of novelty.” Plenty of
time in hand, he found himself in the morning at Bond Street, and it seemed to him he
had been sauntering there at that very hour for years past. He digressed into Soho to
explore a bookstall. He stood before an old picture in the morning and doubted if it had
been there so long.
Deep in his heart, Lamb felt as if time was flying past. Lamb thought he had
passed into another world. His mind experienced contrasting feelings. At times, it
appeared life had become so uneventful. Time appeared to stand still. He lost track of
the calendar. The yearning for the Sunday was not there. Nor did he experience the
typical mid-week feeling on Wednesday. Saturday nights had lost their characteristics.
Now all days of the week appeared equal with no torment, no anxiety and no worries.
Lamb did not feel it bothersome to visit the church, which trip previously irked
him because it cut short his holiday. His humour is palpable when he says that he could
visit a sick friend, and interrupt a man of business with a proposal to take a pleasure trip
to Windsor on a fine May-morning. He could now have Lucretian pleasure to watch the
toilers, and if he had a son, he would name him Nothing-to-do. Lamb could not marry
and have children as he had to look after his insane sister; but always in his heart of
hearts, he longed to have John and Alice. A touch of this feeling is discernible in his wish
to christen his dream son Nothing-to-do if he had had a child. Finally, he gives his
feeling: “Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative; I am
altogether now contemplative.”
The tone of essay is deeply sobered when Lamb calls himself “Retired Leisure.”
His face is now vacant, his gesture is careless, he perambulates at no fixed pace, nor does
he have any settled purpose. Lamb’s humour flashes again when says: “When I take up a
newspaper, it is to read the state of opera”, because he finds that his work is done or
“Opus operatum est”. He is satisfied and now he has the rest of the day to himself.
The essay is indeed a long and grand soliloquy. The author gives an account in detail
of how felt when he was an employee in the Counting House in Mincing Lane, how he
wished to have freedom from the exacting job, how finally he found his freedom and how
generous were the partners of the firm. He also narrates his post retirement life – his joy
and remorse, his initial boredom, and finally his reconciliation with life. It is an ideal
essay in as much as the author does not theorise on a subject. It is not a treatise, but an
expression of the author’s mind in certain moments of his life. It seems to be pages lifted
out of his personal diary. The essay is charming, but it is charming not because of its
content but because the contents reveal the charm of the mind that has conceived and
recorded the impression. “The only thing necessary,” says Benson, “is that the thing or
the thought should be vividly apprehended, enjoyed, felt to be beautiful, and expressed
with a sudden gusto.” “The Superannuated Man” having fulfilled all the conditions, can
rightfully claim to be a good personal essay.
 Dream Children
“Dream Children” is a unique essay, channeling the logic and flow of a dream in a
series of long sentences of strung together. Lamb deftly uses these stylistic conceits to
pull the reader into a reverie, creating a sense of tumbling through this dream world with
its series of dovetailing tangents. In fact, the essay could prove confusing and hard to
navigate until the reader gets to the end when. We are ripped out of this odd dream state
into the most familiar state Lamb can be found in—sitting next to his sister.
To some extent, this piece blurs genre lines between essay and fiction.
Commonly, we understand essays to be works of non-fiction, but in this one Lamb uses
his typical interior-facing autobiographical approach to make room for a fictional
narrative inside of a dream. The fact that his children exist is a fiction, as is the idea that
he married Alice, as may be the existence and deaths of Field and John L. We know that
the real life Charles had a brother John Lamb, but in choosing the rare occasion to write
of his real life brother inside of this vivid dream, Lamb seems to be choosing to write
about a fantasized version of his real life. Here, Lamb models his essay on a dream,
bringing the fantasy that fuels his creative energies to the fore, blurring the lines between
that fantasy of his past life and that life to which he dedicates his writing practice.