Parenting & Family Quote by Charles Lamb

The line lands like a small, wicked pinprick: an “I suppose” that pretends to be charitable while quietly refusing to believe it. Lamb, the great essayist of the everyday, turns a throwaway observation into a miniature satire of professional identity. Of course lawyers were children once. The joke is that adulthood, at least in the legal imagination, can look like a kind of moral amnesia so complete it erases any evidence of softness ever having existed.

Lamb’s intent isn’t to accuse every lawyer of villainy; it’s to expose a cultural type. In early 19th-century Britain, the law loomed as an engine of paperwork, property, and punishment, tied to class power and a booming commercial order. “Lawyer” becomes shorthand for a person trained to translate lived experience into argument, precedent, and loophole. Against that machinery, “children once” functions as a lost credential: the original capacity for play, impulsive empathy, and unbilled attention.

The subtext is also self-protective. Lamb was a master of the domestic vignette, a writer invested in tenderness as an intellectual stance. By imagining the lawyer’s childhood as hypothetical, he performs his own allegiance to feeling over procedure. It’s not an anti-law rant; it’s a critique of how institutions harden people into roles, then reward them for the hardness.

The brilliance is its scale: one short sentence that lets you laugh, then makes you notice the chill behind the laugh.