Fair

From the listing of this manuscript in Harry B. Smith's Sentimental Library:

This manuscript is neatly written on two large folio sheets. It contains a few corrections and is signed, "Elia."

By many admirers of Charles Lamb this famous essay is considered the most beautiful of his writings, and is certainly one of the most pathetic and self-revealing. 'Dream Children' first appeared in the London magazine for January, 1822, soon after the death of Lamb's brother, John.

Canon Ainger says: "Inexpressibly touching, when we learned to penetrate the thin disguise in which he clothes them, are the hoarded memories, the tender regrets, which Lamb, writing by his lonely hearth, thus ventured to commit to the uncertain sympathies of the great public.. .And there is something of the magic of the genius, unless, indeed, it was a burst of uncontrollable anguish, in the revelation with which the dream ends."

In the present manuscript, the last sentence, in which is described the ending of the dream, is the only passage in the essay which has been erased, and entirely rewritten.

Alice, the mother of the 'Dream Childfren,' is identified as Anne Simmons, Lamb's early love. She married a pawnbroker named Bartram; hence the reference in the essay: 'The children of Alice call Bartram father.

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"The most delightful paper, the most charming essay which the tender imagination of Charles Lamb conceived, represents him as sitting by his fireside on a winter night, telling stories to his own dear children, delighting in their society, until he suddenly comes to his old solitary bachelor self, and finds that they were but dream children who might have been, but never were," Charles Dickens's Speeches.