The Adventures of Ulysses

Description

The Adventures of Ulysses is a book written and published by Charles Lamb in 1808. In it Lamb retells the story of Homer’s Odyssey in prose form that is easy to comprehend and entertaining for young kids.

The book is short, but it provides a very accurate rewriting of the original story, comprising all the major events in the journey of Ulysses to Ithaca. Lamb uses the Greek epic of Odyssey as a starting point and builds his own story upon it, speeding up the narration and making it more enjoyable for juvenile readers. Lamb’s story includes not only the most important adventures of the journey to Ithaca, but also the major characters of the original epic, populating is story with giants, sirens, soldiers, enchanters, warriors, beautiful women and many others. Each of the ten chapters in the book tells the story of an adventure and each chapter brings Ulysses closer to his kingdom, Ithaca, to his beloved wife, Penelope and his son, Telemachus, whom he has not seen for over a decade and who has become a grown man since Ulysses left to fight in the Trojan war.

Lamb decided to write The Adventures of Ulysses after he saw how popular his previous book, Tales from Shakespeare, was. In the prose adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays Lamb and his sister, the co-author were driven by the same intention: to provide an easy-to-read and enjoyable version of important literary works. However, The Adventures of Ulysses was not as appreciated by the public as Tales from Shakespeare, at least not in the beginning – the book was reprinted and became successful only after Lamb started writing his Essays of Elia in 1820. He published the essays first in The London Magazine and then in collected form in 1823 and the huge success of the essays attracted attention towards Lamb’s previous work such as The Adventures of Ulysses as well.
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