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 An excerpt
The Dreadful Scene Imagined
It was a Thursday afternoon in London, September 22, 1796. Well-dressed men clattered through the cobbled streets, chatting with one another over the knotty cases of law they were tackling. They seemed to stand straighter and taller than those they passed by: the woman hawking eggs on the corner, the street brats throwing old onions at each other. These men had grander things on their minds. They came out of cloistered quarters, the ancient Inns of Court, and into the rabble of London. They noticed the autumnal change of the seasons, more distinct this day even than a week before: the sun sinking nearer the Thames to the south, the clouds gathering thicker and lower, a gray chill in the air.
Just after the slow, hollow chime of the bells of St. Clements marked the hour of four, sounds of violence sliced through the quotidian scene. A chaos of shouting, shrieks, incomprehensible words, a high-pitched scream, then the gasp of an older woman, a young girl’s panicked calls for help as she ran from the scene. Passersby on Little Queen Street heard the unnerving noises, but most on the main street of Holborn carried on without notice. The cries seemed to come from quarters above the dusty little wig shop at 7 Little Queen Street.
The shop’s proprietor could tell exactly where the sounds came from: upstairs, the quarters he had rented for the past few years to the Lamb family. They had always been so quiet, the daughter who did the housekeeping, the son who worked all day, and the three old people, father, mother, and aunt, none of whom had the energy to do or say much of anything. Now and then he would hear the mother raise her voice, complaining, but that was to be expected from a woman so crippled she could no longer walk on her own.
The noise was not to be ignored. The landlord dashed out of his front door, around to the stairway at the side. Taking the steps two at a time, he met the family’s apprentice girl flying down the stairs, her body akilter, face pinched in horror. She flung herself at him, pulled at him, called out, her eyes wide with fear, then with an inchoate shriek flew past him down the stairs, escaping the scene.
The door to the Lambs’ quarters stood wide open. The landlord hurried down the hallway to their front room. The smells of dinner -- roast mutton and turnips -- sweetened the air. The odor grew more pungent as the landlord looked in. The smell of warm blood stopped him short.
Elizabeth Lamb slumped unnaturally in her favorite chair at the window. A stain of red spread out from a ragged tear in her white muslin bodice. Above her stood her daughter, Mary Anne, eyes gleaming, mouth a taut rictus, suspended in a moment of thoughtless inaction. She held a bloodied carving knife on high.
Beside the body knelt the dead woman’s husband, John Lamb. He pulled desperately on her full skirts, helpless to undo the deed. Two trickles of blood ran down his face from a superficial wound above his left eyebrow. He glanced up at his daughter and cowered under the threat of the knife.
Gasps and wheezes came from the room’s far corner as a fourth family member, John Lamb’s elder sister, backed away in terror. She drew one long, rasping breath and collapsed with a muffled thump, breaking the paralyzed silence. The murderess glanced around as if coming out of a trance. Her muscles relaxed. Her face fell. Her hand dropped, still gripping the knife. She stepped back and drew a long, slow breath. Her eyes softened. She blinked and looked around her.
At that moment, a young man burst in through the door. Pushing past the landlord, he cried out, “Good God! Mary! What has happened here? Why?” Then, quickly, Charles Lamb reached around from behind his sister, taking hold of the knife in her right hand. She succumbed to his grasp and gave up the weapon willingly. In that moment, she rested in his strength. Gently, he seated her in one of the dining chairs she had just arranged. The joint of meat meant for dinner sat untouched in the middle of the table. The gravy had started to coagulate. Gray turnip globes sat trapped in a thin white sheet of fat.
Charles Lamb placed the knife on the table, beyond Mary Lamb’s reach, beside the leather case in which it was ordinarily stored. Slowly he moved around the room, assessing the chaos. All that could be heard were the meek sobs of his father, now crumpled on the floor and clutching his wife’s left ankle, and tense chatter from the hallway, where the apprentice girl had returned and was heatedly describing to the landlord what she had seen. The air was electric with the smell of blood and held breath.
Charles Lamb gathered the utensils scattered all over the wooden floor. Blood stains marked the carving fork’s tines. From its position in the room, Charles determined it to be the object that had struck his father in the forehead. He did not have to look at his sister to feel her spirit in retreat. She sat silently, sidelong to the table, just as Charles had placed her, motionless, staring downward. Only her hands moved, folding and unfolding, one then the other hand on top, fingers madly flying. Seizing one quiet moment, Charles sat in a chair facing Mary and took those wild hands in his. He looked intensely into her eyes. She dared to look back at him, face flickering with guilt and trepidation. Their eyes met, and for that one moment, she felt saved.
The story of Mary Lamb and her act of matricide has lurked in footnotes for more than a century. If discussed at all by those who study English literature of the early nineteenth century, Mary Lamb plays the part of an albatross to her younger brother, Charles Lamb, who is considered one of the finest essayists in the English language. Never placed in the highest empyrean with Shakespeare and Milton, still Charles Lamb and his nimble wit stand for style and sensibility -- utterly English, cunningly idiosyncratic, universally amusing. Contemporary essayist Phillip Lopate calls Lamb’s Essays of Elia, his best-known work, “not only an essential text, but a near-buried treasure, an all-but-lost masterpiece.”(1)
These days, as Lopate suggests, few but college students read the essays that brought Lamb his reputation. He is remembered as a beloved member of the Romantic circle of poets, an intimate of both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. His name is just as likely known, though, in combination with his sister’s for their Tales from Shakespear, a retelling for children of Shakespeare’s finest, first published in 1807 and still in print today. Through nearly two centuries now, countless parents have, with a combination of duty and pleasure, introduced Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies to their children through the writing of the Lambs. Few know of the matricide that had occurred ten years before the book was written. That is how Mary Lamb would have wanted it.
Silence muffles most of the evidence concerning Mary Lamb’s murder of her mother. By and large, the scene just described is a tissue of speculation, hung on a few firm facts. Charles Lamb lived until 1834, Mary Lamb until 1847, carrying for more than half a century memories of the deed she had committed at the age of thirty-one. Mary, Charles, and their friends conscientiously kept private any information they had regarding Mary’s actions and state of mental health. They may have talked, but rarely did they write things down. Even the public record lacks a clear indication of the steps taken to extricate Mary Lamb from any painful legal consequences. What we do know is that she was put into a madhouse, the matricide deemed an act of lunacy, and Charles designated her guardian. It was a task he took on for life, recognizing that his sister had more promise than madness in her.
Things could not have turned out much better for her in that year of 1796. She was not tried for murder. She was not relegated to a prison like Bridewell or a mental hospital like Bethlem, that infamous icon, part asylum, part prison, part zoo, still recalled in the word “bedlam.” Instead, under the gentle care her brother provided, Mary Lamb lived as freely and productively as a woman of her time and temperament could expect -- maybe even more so.
In some ways, her times promised improvements for the working poor. Mary Lamb was twelve when the American colonies declared their independence; she was seventeen when King George III capitulated to the Sons of Liberty, calling troops and ships back across the Atlantic. She was twenty-two when French peasants stormed the Bastille, an exhilarating event for some observers in London, excited by the political promise of democracy and ignorant of the cruelty and carnage yet to come. Mary Lamb lived in an age of fierce debate between aristocratic tradition and democratic revolution, acted out on the world stage and argued daily in the Halls of Parliament and the streets of London. A new social order was emerging, founded on the principles of inborn human rights rather than the privilege of family heritage.
But extending rights to women was not the point for most radical intellectuals of the day. “Every individual is born equal in rights with his contemporary,” wrote Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man (1791); still the prevailing opinion remained that women were “to be considered . . . so weak that they must be entirely subjected to the superior faculties of men,” as Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in her groundbreaking A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).(2) Now revered as one of the world’s first feminist philosophers, Wollstonecraft was seen by many of her contemporaries as an irrational libertine and a threat to the social order.
The first expectation of a woman in those days was to be married; the second was to bear children. In September 1796, nearing the age of thirty-two, Mary Lamb had done neither. She did, however, meet stiff responsibilities to her birth family. In her youth, she cared for her brother Charles, ten years her junior. As he grew up, her attention shifted to the needs of her elders: her father, aged seventy, who likely suffered a stroke around 1792; her mother, aged sixty and, suffering from some sort of arthritis or paralysis, growing ever less able to walk or stand on her own; and her aunt, her father’s sister, aged about seventy-five. Considering that the average life expectancy in London around 1800 was only forty years, the Lamb family lived long lives.
The murder of Elizabeth Lamb set Mary Lamb on a path altogether different from the one planned for her by her family and her society. Charles abided by his promise to watch over her, and the two of them lived in what he called a state of “double singleness” until he died in 1834. Mary lived another eight years, to the age of eighty-two. She left a legacy of three books, all co-authored with her brother: Tales from Shakespear, published in 1807; Mrs. Leicester’s School, a book of short stories, and Poetry for Children, both published in 1809. Not until 1838, though, did her name appear with Charles’s on the title page of the perennially reissued Tales from Shakespear, but we have it from Charles’s own letters that his sister contributed the larger share to it and to the other two books. A few years later, in 1815, she made one foray into writing for adults, contributing an essay “On Needle-work” to the fashionable new British Ladies’ Magazine. After that, Mary Lamb put down the pen.
Humble and self-effacing, insecure and doubtful of her capabilities, in many ways Mary Lamb followed the formula prescribed for a woman of her time. But by force of her creativity and intellect -- fired, perhaps, by her mental condition -- she broke through the restraints of propriety. Her upstart act of matricide, as horrifyingly wrong as it was, freed her to explore the rights of woman yet to come. Her life -- and in particular the fruitful years between the matricide, 1796, and her last publication, 1815 -- allow a fascinating study of this turning point in history. Picture Mary Lamb as a Michelangelesque female figure emerging from the past into the modern world’s future, in 1796 an unformed block of stone and by 1815 the closest she would become to the woman she could have been.
(1) Philip Lopate, Foreword, Charles Lamb:Essays of Elia, vii.
(2) Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 109, 100, 108.
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Questions and Answers with author Susan Tyler Hitchcock
1. Who is Mary Lamb?
Many people ask that question. She and her brother Charles wrote the famous Tales from Shakespeare, published in 1806 and in print ever since. Generations have first encountered the plays of Shakespeare by reading Charles and Mary Lamb’s classic story versions. Mary Lamb was the daughter of servants in London, born in 1764 and died in 1847. She lived almost all her life with her brother, Charles, and the two of them coauthored two other children’s books, popular in their times.
2. Why is her story worth telling?
Many know her name and her famous Tales from Shakespeare, but few know that ten years before that classic was written, when Mary Lamb was 31, she killed her mother with a kitchen knife. Her brother, then 21, whisked her into a private madhouse and promised authorities he would take care of her for the rest of his life. Thus began a lifetime of, as Charles called it, “double singleness,” during which time the brother and sister lived together, Mary caring for Charles as much as he cared for her.
3. What intrigues you so much about this story and these times?
I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the 1960s and early 1970s. There, and then, we genuinely felt, believed, and lived as if we were moving into the Age of Aquarius. We believed that the promises of the peace movement, the hippie culture, and women’s liberation really were going to be fulfilled in the here and now. We were challenging the way our society framed reality and ethics. It was thrilling. The same thing was happening in the minds and hearts and lives of the English Romantics during the lifetime of Mary Lamb. She was no radical activist, but she was a sympathetic observer, and in her own quiet, polite way, she effected a revolution in her own life.
4. How did you learn about Mary Lamb?
I discovered her in a footnote to a poem by Charles Lamb in a literature anthology. That is where she has lurked for many years, described by the literary establishment as her brother’s burden to bear, without which he would have been a much greater literary success. I challenge that view, believing that she is a noteworthy author in her own right and that the relationship of support and nurturance between Mary and Charles was mutual.
5. What else did Mary Lamb write?
She appears to have written a good two-thirds or more of all three books coauthored with her brother. Tales from Shakespeare was first. Next they wrote Mrs. Leicester’s School, a collection of short stories that would today be considered young adult literature. Finally they wrote Poetry for Children, an anthology of poems, some corny and some thought-provoking. Mary Lamb also wrote an interesting essay for adults called “On Needle-work,” in which she admonished middle-class women for doing their family’s sewing and in so doing leaving little paid business for working-class seamstresses.
6. How did you research this book?
I read the letters and literary writing of Mary and Charles Lamb, and their friends, which including William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In London, I made a point of finding neighborhoods, addresses, and, when possible, the very houses in which the Lambs lived, to have a clearer visual sense of their world.
7. What distinguishes your book about Mary Lamb?
I see Mary Lamb as symbolic of all women, who must break free of the past and of their family’s expectations in order to become themselves. Her life came at a critical turning point in history for women in general, when opportunities for professional accomplishment and recognition were just beginning to emerge. I use her story as an occasion to delve into the cultural and historical background of her times, the late 18th century and early 19th -- the Romantic period in England, in many ways reminiscent of the culture clashes characterizing ourday and age. By reading my book, people get a glimpse of the political background of those times, including the crisis in the monarchy during the madness of George III; the spirit of the times, as English radicals, many of them friends of the Lambs, faced trials and severe censure for their revolutionary and romantic ideas; the rise of the middle class, and with it educated women for whom books and magazines were published in greater number every year; and the changing understanding of mental illness and its treatment.
8. What’s next?
I am turning to another Mary among the Romantics who intrigues me so much: Mary Shelley. I’m working on a book about the evolution of the myth of the Frankenstein monster, which she invented with her 1819 novel and which has taken on such a bundle of meanings since. My book will include the fascinating story of her writing the novel Frankenstein, but also look back to her influences and inspirations, and forward to the way in which her story was snapped up by popular culture both in Britain and America and told over and over up to the present day, in both amusing and serious contexts.
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Reviewers' comments
"Hitchcock moves smoothly across a range of topics, from a fascinating (and often unsettling) look at psychiatrict treatments in the early 19th century to providing a vivid picture of daily life in Georgian London. This is altogether a pleasurably solid and fascinating piece of work."
—Bill Bryson, BOMC Judge
"A vibrant literary biography."
—Booklist
"...an accomplished, compassionate telling of a most unusual life-story."
—A Common Reader, May 2005
"...capably rescues Mary from the footnotes of her brother's story."
—The New Yorker
"Susan Tyler Hitchcock presents Mary with feminist sympathy... Mary deserves to be rehabilitated, but... of greater interest are glimpses of 19th-century London worlds not often visited: the Bethlem Hospital... and the emerging industry of publishing books for children..."
—Frances Taliaferro, Wall Street Journal
"This book adds an important dimension to our understanding of an era dominated by men, highlighting Mary's contributions to Charles's work as well as documenting the effect of madness on her life and creativity."
—Library Journal
"Hitchcock's mesmerizing book is a story of madness witnessed and lamented, murder lived through and forgiven, and private mayhem the forged an extraordinary sibling bond. . . . Aside from Hitchcock's re-creation of the murder, told in italics with an odd, novelesque suspense, this is a calm and deliberate book. The lovely thing about Hitchcock's structure is that as the Lambs' lives continue, the crime recedes in the reader's memory, too."
—Christina McCaroll, The Christian Science Monitor
Read the entire review
"American writer Susan Tyler Hitchcock gives us a compelling analysis of Mary Lamb's life. . . . Hitchcock's book is first-rate, an engaging work of scholarship lucidly written."
—Michael D. Langan, Buffalo (N.Y.) News
“Mad Mary Lamb is a wonderful book: a fascinating story, beautifully written, it is a superb account of the complicated intersection of insanity and literature. Hitchcock’s portrayal of the dark but riveting world of Mary Lamb is excellent.”
—Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, Exuberance: The Passion for Life, and The Fire Within: Manic Depressive Disorder and the Creative Mind
"Susan Tyler Hitchcock's book, Mad Mary Lamb, has the thrills and chills of a novel, the careful documentation of a work of scholarship, and the sophisticated craft of a truly excellent piece of writing. She manages to combine these elements with grace and pizzazz. A 'must read' and major contribution."
—Frances Sherwood, author of Vindication, Green, and The Book of Splendor
"Susan Tyler Hitchcock gives us a compelling analysis of Mary Lamb's life. . . . Hitchcock's book is first-rate, an engaging work of scholarship lucidly written."
—Michael D. Langan, The Buffalo (New York) News
“With energy, clarity, compassion, meticulous research, and a deeply empathetic imagination, Susan Tyler Hitchcock has here summoned up from the shadowy past the life and times, at once tragic and triumphant, of the greatly gifted Mary Lamb. Mad Mary Lamb is a powerful story told with passion, authenticity and grace, a significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the bygone age.”
—George Garrett, past poet laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia, author of Death of the Fox, Entered by the Sun, Double Vision, and many others
“A compelling tale of murder, mental illness, familial love and literary redemption."
"Hitchcock’s powerful narrative also provides wonderful insights into nineteenth-century literary London, the birth of children's literature in England, and the lives of a fascinating circle of women
and men.”
—B. Ashton Nichols, Curley Faculty Professor of Language and Literature, Dickinson College, author of The Revolutionary ‘I’: Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation and The Poetics of Epiphany
“Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s archival archaeology and sympathetic imagination combine powerfully to reconstruct a terrible, transforming moment in the life of a complicated woman who has received too little attention. . . . With skill and sensitivity, Hitchcock makes a fully persuasive case for the importance of Mary Lamb to the history of intelligent, creative women.”
—Stephen Cushman, Taylor Professor of English, University of Virginia, author of Cussing Lessons, Bloody Promenade, and others
“An informed and sympathetic portrait of a troubled mind and humble heart.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"Mad Mary Lamb is a book about a nearly forgotten woman. It is all the more compelling because of the author's creative, dogged research in primary sources. Mary Lamb wrote some letters herself, along with poetry, a children's book, and an article on sewing, but her documentary trail is decidedly scattered and sparse. I remember reading about her in a short footnote in my Norton Anthology of English Literature, and wondering what her life was like.... Charlottesville writer Susan Tyler Hitchcock tells it with thoughtfulness and skill."
—Jennifer Davis McDaid, Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch |
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