Lamb and Nostalgia

It is made evident, in the verse of Old Familiar Faces, that Charles Lamb is haunted by loss.  His mournful nostalgia extends, over the course of the poem, from his mother to past friends to Ann Simmons (his lost love) until it finally reaches, most acutely, his sister.  Lamb is left a sad and lonely man, tortured by the bitter memories of a life characterized by abandonment and death.

This lamentation is re-cultivated in the text of Dream Children, written 25 years afterward under pseudonym.  Indeed, it is a thread adopted almost verbatim as he recollects the busts of Twelve Caesars with which he used to spend so much time (old familiar faces, if you will).  More bitterly, he later recalls the imagined faces of the eponymous grandchildren that could have been, surpassing even the confines of time in his tortured nostalgia.

Ultimately, Lamb's work is largely distinguished by his elegiac relationship to memories and people of his embittered past.