It's a classic for a reason. Brilliant characters, engrossing drama with the added benefit of interesting political, theological and philosophical sections. 

How can you not love something that constantly refers to people as scoundrels and sensualists? I may even start running around labelling people scoundrels for the most trivial things myself. It's too good of a word to be used sparsely, although I might not be able to pass off calling people sensualists, as unfortunate as that is. 

I reckon the first time I encountered this collection was back in high school when our teacher wanted to teach us the Scottish Play, but didn't feel that we were ready to actually start reading the proper text, namely because she felt that maybe we wouldn't fully understand Shakespeare's language (despite the fact that this was year 11 English). Mind you, as we all know, Shakespeare isn't the easiest of authors to read (though I must admit that he is a lot easier to read than some of the modern authors – James Joyce for instance). In fact, as I was reading the piece on Macbeth my mind went back to that day in class, when we all had a photocopy of the story sitting in front of us and were reading it aloud (which I must admit seems really odd these days because I find reading a book aloud amongst a group of people rather odd – and I still wonder how we managed to get through the entire year when half the class involved us sitting there reading the book aloud – not that these were particularly long books mind you, with the exception of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but then again I don't remembering actually reading that one aloud in class).

Anyway, this is a great little book, especially for those of us who happen to have young children (not that I'm one of those people), simply because it has been written in a style that is really accessible to those of us who might not be able to understand the language, or even be able to follow what is in effect a script. Okay, the Lambs do try retain as much of the original dialogue as possible, but only where they use the dialogue. For the most part the story is told using prose, which has a great effect on being able to help us understand the action of the play. I must admit that this is the first time that I have read this particular book in years (and even then I have only read it once before, not counting that time in highschool), and I generally don't grab it off the shelf to get an idea of what a particular play is about – that's what Wikipedia is for.

Mind you, the Lambs haven't included all of the plays in this work – notable absences include the Roman plays (which is a shame because Julius Caesar happens to be one of my favourites) and the History plays. The suggestion is, at least in the introduction to the edition that I read, is that the Lambs were more interested in the plays that operated within the domestic sphere as opposed to those that operated in the political sphere. While that may seem a little odd when we note that plays such as the Scottish Play and King Lear are included (as these two plays very much operate within the political sphere) I can sort of see where the Lambs are coming from – the book is primarily targeted at children, and at the age at which they would have been reading this their experience of the world outside of the home would have been quite limited.

It is interesting to consider the target audience of this book though – written in 1809 it would have mainly been for the children of the middle and upper classes, who no doubt would have been able to read. However it is suggested in Charles Lamb's introduction that it was more for the girls than the boys, as the boys would have had access to the father's library (another indication that it would have been for the upper classes) at a much younger age than the girls. It is also an indication that at the time children's literature would have been literally non-existent, namely because it was expected that when a child learnt to read, they would have been thrown straight into the deep end (though I suspect that the Bible would have been a major part of a child's introduction to literature).

Okay, I'm not really an expert on early children's literature, but it seems as if the Lambs were paving the way for what was to become a multi-million dollar industry. Okay, tales for children had existed for centuries, but many of the stories that we traditionally consider to be children's stories (such as Grimm's Fairytales) were originally written for an adult audience. It wasn't until the 19th century that stories, and books, were written specifically with children in mind. In a way we can trace the modern children's story back to the work of Charles and Mary Lamb, who saw a need to make some of the classic Shakespearian plays more accessible to the younger audience.

This was a difficult read, not just due to some slower passages, but because the main character is so unsympathetic.  Not only is he a opinionated and close-minded, but he sees himself as a victim, mainly of the class system and society.  He goes on like this, despite contradictions to his worldview, never giving other people a chance to prove him wrong, and it's difficult to see this unfold.  The other people he encounters are a little more sympathetic, but not by much.

As with other Gissing novels, this also deal with several heavier topics, like whether religion can survive in a science-oriented world, and whether women should be educated and "emancipated."

After all the drama, I sort of felt like the ending was almost deserved.

We can thank our lucky stars for writer's block, as we'd likely have set fire to the Dead Souls manuscript ourselves if Nikolai Gogol hadn't. Had he, overcome with religious fervor, forged ahead with his plan and complete this three-parter, separated into volumes each of crime, punishment, and redemption, and not starve himself to death, we might've had on our hands a literary misfire it seemed like he, previously so promising, wanted to unleash upon us expectant and unsuspecting masses. Fortunate is everyone, then, that the first (and undeniably best) volume, where Dead Souls plays out its main story, can be taken as more or less self-contained. The second one, while still dazzling in places with great writing, sparkles less so than its predecessor not only because of disjointed chapters, missing words, and lost pages, but also because hints of a crazier and preachier Gogol, already exasperating his friends and fans in real life, start to emerge then in the text. In his later years, he had at one point consoled a critic who had recently lost his wife by this bit of classiness: "Jesus Christ will help you to become a gentleman, which you are neither by education or inclination—she is speaking through me." Another instance: Gogol advised in letters to his readers that "[t]he peasant must not even know that there exist other books besides the Bible." Village priests, he recommended, should accompany them everywhere, and even be made their estate managers. Lovely! It's all a little odd and, considering the incense-smoky shrine to him I'd constructed in my mind after his short stories had so brain-tinglingly won me over, thoroughly disappointing. For all that, on the bright side, what Gogol lit on fire was at least none of the first volume, leading even Vladimir Nabokov to conclude, in his chapter of Lectures on Russian Literature on the author, that "[Gogol] was destroying the labor of long years" not to cleanse himself of the sins he thought his books were, but "because he finally realized that the completed book was untrue to his genius." After that, it's hard to be mad at the guy.

I have a very small collection of Everyman's Library Books. I think they are well made and lovely. I want then all, but for now one at a time will have to do.