EXPLORING URBAN LIFE THROUGH CORPUS LINGUISTICS: A STUDY OF CHARLES LAMB’S ESSAYS

Abstract

This study explores the representation of urban life in six selected essays by Charles Lamb, namely The South-Sea House, Oxford in the Vacation, The Old and the New Schoolmaster, The Two Races of Men, The Superannuated Man, and Old China, through a corpus linguistic approach. The research investigates the semantic patterns and linguistic features that characterise urban spaces, people, and activities in Lamb’s prose. A specialised corpus was compiled from the selected essays and analysed using concordance and collocation techniques. The findings reveal that Lamb’s portrayal of urban life is strongly associated with themes of nostalgia, domesticity, social interaction, and personal reflection. Frequent lexical items such as old, house, china, schoolmaster, hope, and peace demonstrate how urban environments are represented as spaces of memory, cultural continuity, and human connection. Concordance patterns further show that Lamb constructs urban identity through occupational roles, interpersonal relationships, and everyday experiences rather than through descriptions of physical city structures alone. The analysis reveals recurring semantic patterns associated with education, commerce, friendship, domestic life, and personal memory, which collectively shape Lamb’s representation of urban experience. Furthermore, these semantic patterns portray urban spaces as centres of human interaction, intellectual activity, and emotional attachment, emphasising the social and cultural dimensions of nineteenth-century urban life. The collocational analysis highlights the significance of emotional and social values in shaping Lamb’s depiction of urban life. Overall, the study demonstrates that corpus linguistic methods provide valuable insights into the linguistic construction of urban experience in literary texts and contribute to a deeper understanding of Charles Lamb’s essays as reflections of nineteenth-century urban culture.