Abstract: The National Library of Australia holds the collection of books relating to Charles and Mary Lamb made by Claude A. Prance (1906–2002). An Englishman who migrated to Australia in 1980, Prance built a library of books relating to the Lambs, beginning in the 1930s. This article explores Prance as an exemplary twentieth-century bookman who took inspiration from Lamb's own bookish practices. I argue that the importance of Charles and Mary Lamb to the Anglophone common reader between the 1870s and 1950s is a neglected aspect of the history of Romantic literary culture that deserves fuller investigation.
Gillian Russell (2026) studied this question.