Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London

by Susan Tyler Hitchcock

Book Overview

After killing her mother with a carving knife, Mary Lamb spent the rest of her life in and out of madhouses; yet the crime and its aftermath opened up a new life. Freed to read extensively, she discovered her talent for writing and, with her brother, the essayist Charles Lamb, collaborated on the famous Tales from Shakespeare. This narrative of a nearly forgotten woman is a tapestry of insights into creativity and madness, the changing lives of women,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393057410
• ISBN13: 9780393057416
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 333 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A violent murder gives birth to a literary icon

"Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London" begins with the September 1796 murder of elderly Elizabeth Lamb. Her spinster daughter, Mary, snapped under the strain of caring for her aging parents and aunt, and reacted to a caustic remark by plunging a carving knife deep into Mrs. Lamb's chest. Mary was confined in a private lunatic asylum for several weeks, and spent the rest of her life juggling literary brilliance and debilitating insanity. Her champion was her brother, famous essayist and poet Charles Lamb, with whom she lived until his death in 1834. Charles and Mary Lamb co-authored a children's book called Tales from Shakespeare, which became a bestseller and remained in print for many years. Together and separately, the Lambs produced children's books, poetry collections, and magazine and newspaper articles. Their success made them central figures in an energetic writers' and artists' circle that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and William Hazlitt. The book is well-written but the title is somewhat misleading. It's not a work of True Crime per se: "Mad Mary Lamb" is both a biography of the Lamb siblings and a history of early nineteenth England's literary establishment. But Susan Tyler Hitchcock advances the intriguing argument that the act of matricide freed Mary to become a 'woman of letters'. As a mental patient, she experienced few of the expectations or demands that women of her era traditionally dealt with, leaving her free to undertake the unconventional role of female writer. The death of her mother was the birth of her literary career.

"Lunacy replaced moral defect as an explanation for violence in extraordinary circumstances."

In 1796 Mary Lamb thrust a knife into her mother's chest, in that instant breaking free of the drudgery that consumed her days, but at what cost? Sent to Fisher House, a private, quasi-affordable madhouse in Islington, Mary underwent the usual brutal and humiliating treatments dictated by science at the time, similar to those King George III was subjected to ten years before. Whether the madhouse experience damaged her creatively is still a source of discussion, but certainly she fell into line, causing no further disturbance, eventually moving into rooms of her own with the help of her younger brother, Charles Lamb. Eventually Charles and Mary Lamb devised a manner of living, what he called "double-singleness", Mary accepted into her brother's literary circle and appreciated for her sharp intelligence and intellectual curiosity. Together they co-authored three books, Tales from Shakespear (1807), Mrs. Leicester's School (1809) and Poetry for Children (1809). Mad Mary Lamb is an extensively researched, impressive reconstruction of Mary's life on the fringes of literary society, freed by the act that sundered her from family obligations beyond the society of her brother. London was teeming with literary genius, the country infused with political uncertainty and a rapidly changing world where ideas were exchanged in lively debate in salons all over the city. Most women were hidden behind society's restraints, great literary achievements solely the purview of the male gender. While Charles moved in and out of his own creative forays, Mary nurtured seeds of her own writing. Her contribution to Tales of Shakespear was certainly equal to her brother's, a challenging task in any case. Mary's ability to empathize enabled her to step inside the identities of others: "It was her deep and sympathetic feeling, coupled with her intellect, that brought her admiration from men of such high standards as Coleridge." What Mad Mary Lamb points out most succinctly is the blossoming of her writing life after the tragic event of the murder. Her creativity stifled by a spinster's role in society that relegated her to little more than a domestic servant, albeit to family, the murder offered Mary a unique opportunity she might otherwise not have known. Never audacious or brave enough to tackle the more dangerous boundaries, Mary Lamb transgressed just enough to participate in a lively literary life, at the side of her prolific brother, Charles Lamb, who was also an accomplished essayist. Yet her life after the death of her mother and interment in the mental hospital was far more than the dreary spinsterhood that would have been her fare had she not committed the crime. Hitchcock's attention to detail is extraordinary and extensive, with copious notes, bibliography and index, Mary Lamb brought to life on these pages, her crime, tentative reach toward life and the fulfilling world of writing afforded by a violent transgression against society's most basic tenant. Luan G

Murder, Madness, and Devotion

This is the story of the lives of Charles and Mary Lamb, a brother and sister who heretofore I knew primarily as the authors of a series of children's stories adapted from Shakespeare. The full history of the Lamb siblings is much more complicated. Mary was a repressed and overworked daughter who suffered from some unidentified mental illness which, one day without warning, caused her to murder her mother. After spending several months in a madhouse, she was placed under the guardianship of her younger brother Charles, who looked after her the rest of his life through numerous committals to various institutions and several moves to different homes in London and its environs. Together and separately the Lamb siblings were responsible for many essays, stories, and other publications which established them as leading literary lights. Besides this tale of fraternal devotion, this book also provides a good depiction of life in London in the late 18th and early 19th centuries among the Lambs' literary milieu.

Literature, Feminism, Madness

When criminals are touched with madness, we try to figure out ways of keeping them from being punished unfairly. No one would think it right to punish a child, for instance, for something the child could not conceive as wrong, and it should be the same for criminals who lack such judgement. There have been many laws concerning such matters, starting with the famous McNaughton rule, formed in England in 1843, which ruled that one could not be found guilty if there was no capacity to know an action was against the law. It is surprising that society may have been dealing with insane criminals with more sensibility and sensitivity before McNaughton than after. That is one of the lessons in _Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London_ (Norton) by Susan Tyler Hitchcock. Mary Lamb probably had a bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder, starting around 1796, and it had to be treated intermittently for the rest of her life. This did not preclude her producing, with her brother, the classic _Tales from Shakespeare_. Hitchcock has brought light to this forgotten instance of madness, and examined Mary Lamb's case from literary, social, legal, and psychiatric sides, to tell a remarkable story of madness and redemption. On 22 September 1796, Mary Lamb, 31 years old, was at her parents' home above a wig shop in London, when she took her knife and stabbed her mother in the chest, killing her, and she threw a fork that cut her father's forehead. The gruesome crime is at the very start of Hitchcock's book, and it made a sensation at the time. She was not tried for murder, and she was not put into prison. She was put under the care of her younger brother Charles, a renowned essayist, and remained in Charles's care for the rest of his life. Many of their years together were spent in fruitful literary collaboration between brother and sister. Mary was lucky; Charles was a clerk, not well off, but he was able to get her into private asylums rather than the public ones like Bedlam. Once Mary had emerged from her initial confinement, she and Charles set up house together, and were to do so for life. Neither married. They held in common close friends, many of whom had literary connections. They held salons, at which might be found such lights as Samuel Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Mary Wollstonecraft, or William Wordsworth. Originally, Mary helped Charles merely as a copyist, making manuscripts of his essays or plays to be delivered to others. But gradually, she began writing on her own, not just copying, but making her own poems and essays. Through the book, her writing grows in competence along with her confidence in herself, first stilted and halting letters and then poems. Her printed work was often written in tandem with Charles, and it is difficult to tease who wrote what in their joint productions. In the most famous of them, _Tales from Shakespeare_, she gave the bulk of the stories, according to Charles, but his name, not hers, was on