A Masque of Days

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About this book

The New Year celebrates his arrival by inviting the days of the calendar to dinner. Charles Lamb turns feast days, fast days and ordinary dates into quarrelsome guests, each carrying the habits and associations of its name. April Fool arranges the seating, Christmas encourages Ash Wednesday to indulge, and the Twenty-Ninth of February receives a place at the sideboard. The crowded table becomes a scene of jokes, rivalries and elaborate manners.

Presented as a short prose fantasy drawn from The Last Essays of Elia, A Masque of Days mixes holiday customs with puns about seasons, money and public occasions. Songs and speeches keep interrupting the meal, while the guests behave like a gathering of opinionated neighbours. Readers interested in calendar traditions or comic personification can enjoy how an abstract measure of time becomes a noisy social occasion.

About the author

Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb was an English essayist, poet, and antiquarian, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, co-authored with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764–1847).