Lamb seems to have meditated a collected edition of his works as early as 1816, for we find him telling Wordsworth (Sept. 23, 1816), that he had offered the book to Murray through Barron Field, but that Gifford had opposed the project successfully.
[Page 1.] Rosamund Gray.
First printed, 1798. Reprinted in the Works, 1818.
Rosamund Gray was published in 1798 by Lee & Hurst under the title A Tale of Rosamund Gray and old Blind Margaret, by Charles Lamb. It then had this dedication:—
This Tale
is
Inscribed in Friendship
to
Marmaduke Thompson,
of
Pembroke Hall,
Cambridge.
Thompson was at Christ's Hospital with Lamb. In the essay on that school in Elia, written in 1820, he is called "mildest of Missionaries" and the writer's good friend still, but there is no evidence that the intimacy was actively continued after the early days.
At the time that Rosamund Gray was written Lamb was twenty-two to twenty-three. It was his first prose of which we know anything.
Lamb reprinted the story without the dedication, under the title Rosamund Gray, a Tale, in his Works, 1818, the text of which is followed here. The differences of punctuation are numerous, but the text is mainly the same. In Chapter VI. ([page 14], line 9) the phrase "take a cup of tea with her," ran, twenty years earlier, "drink a dish"; [page 14], line 8 from foot, after "beauties of the season" old Margaret originally said, "I can still remember them with pleasure, and rejoice that younger eyes than mine can see and enjoy them. I shall be," etc.; and at the end of the same chapter ([page 16]), in the 1798 edition, came the quaintly particular passage which I have thrown into italics:—