‘The most difficult challenge in discovering Mary Lamb’s story is hearing her own voice.’

Susan Tyler Hitchcock

It is over two hundred years since Mary Lamb, in a fit of madness, murdered her mother with a table knife. Because of Mary’s mental disorder, there was no criminal trial, only a coroner’s inquest at which she was treated with a surprisingly modern compassion: sent to a private asylum chosen by her brother Charles, and then returned to his permanent care. Once the immediate publicity died down, her crime was forgotten for many years. Then Charles died and the old story was revived in the cause of demonstrating the great essayist’s sterling character. The dutiful sacrifice of his own life and happiness to his sister’s welfare was lauded, and Mary portrayed as a helpless dependent without even wit enough to remember what she had done. Totally eclipsed by her brother, she was consigned to the footnotes of his life.

Susan Tyler Hitchcock has set herself the task of reassessing Mary Lamb, her illness, and her achievements, and also to reveal the poignant story of her relationship with Charles. Along the way, she explores the highways and byways of women’s existence at that time, the treatment of lunatics, and the world of the literati which the Lambs frequented, and in which Mary fully participated.

Hitchcock has considerable sympathy for Mary’s situation before the murder. An intelligent sensitive woman, she was subject to depression and had, prior to the murder, to receive medical attention. Doubtless her home situation exacerbated her condition. She had to look after three elderly people by day - two of them very ill - run the house, care for her brother, and after they had all gone to bed, take up her needle to earn money. Family crisis precipitated her murderous attack on her mother. Charles’s reaction perhaps gives a hint at the cauldron which seethed in that house:

‘Poor Mary, my mother never understood her right’

His opinion was that years of selfless devotion had led to ‘the derangement of her senses.’ Certainly, Hitchcock makes much of the ‘coldness and repulse’ with which Mrs. Lamb responded to Mary’s efforts, but in this early section of the book, she is a little too fond of speculation. ‘Perhaps’ Mary had suffered ‘years of maternal scorn and indignities’ and ‘maybe’ worse. There are a great many ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybes’ because Mary herself was silent on the subject, except for the rather queasy comment to Charles within a month of the murder that ‘her conscience was easy in the knowledge that she had, all told, been a good daughter’ and that in Heaven her mother would understand her better.

Hitchcock discourses at fascinating length on the treatment of lunatics in this era. Opening veins and bowels, causing fear in the patient, leeches, icy cold baths, restraints – all were all common practice, questioned by only a few doctors who advocated gentler more dignified treatment. Charles certainly went to some trouble to find Mary a suitable place of confinement; it is to be hoped she avoided the more draconian treatments. Her only recorded comment on the subject was in a letter to her friend Sarah Stoddard who had to put her mother in an asylum. Mary wrote about the importance of kindness in the care of the mentally ill, and she herself had no hesitation in committing herself during the increasingly frequent attacks of madness which struck her down later in life.

It is Hitchcock’s contention that matricide freed Mary, and that the period between her first committal and her eventual mental collapse was ‘the closest she would come to the woman she might have been.’ Certainly, matricide and the deaths of her other aged relatives spared her from the appalling domestic drudgery she had hitherto endured. Hitchcock is at her most moving when relating the details of Charles and Mary’s state of ‘double singleness’ together, a relationship which was mutually supportive emotionally and in their shared literary projects.

Far from being a burden on her brother, Hitchcock establishes that she was his mainstay. During her absences in hospital, he was bereft without her. She grew to know the symptoms of impending collapse and she and Charles would then journey to the asylum, ready prepared with a straitjacket, tears flowing copiously. Theirs was a peculiar symbiosis, each carrying the other in their alternating ups and downs, for Charles himself had at one time been committed to an asylum (probably drink related) and both suffered form depression.

‘You would laugh or you would cry, perhaps both, to see us sitting together,’she writes to Sarah, ‘ looking at each other with long and rueful faces…he (Charles) says we are like tooth ach (sic) and his friend gum bile (sic), which though a kind of ease, is but an uneasy kind of ease…’

Her bouts of insanity might have disturbed him, but his drinking and inability to finish projects concerned her. And yet Hitchcock paints as fine a portrait of affection as I have seen. Their obvious devotion and care for another shines through all the difficulties they shared.

Frustratingly, Mary made few comments on her view of a woman’s lot, although she knew Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her iconoclastic feminist views, and her literary circle was full of fiery rebels like Coleridge and Hazlitt. In her quiet way, she did rebel against the female conventions of the time – she drank and she took snuff, she mixed with radical literary men, but her role, much appreciated by them, was of good listener and supporter, rather than rebel. And yet Hitchcock has tracked down references which would indicate some resentments in Mary. Freed of much of her domestic burden, she chose to learn Latin, a male preserve, well enough to tutor in it, her intention being to make ‘scholars’ out of her girl pupils, not ‘scholaresses; there is a poem of hers about the dangers of depression in girls due to being selfless – the heroine only recovers her energy when relieved of the burden of caring for others; in her article ‘On Needlework’, written on behalf of seamstresses, she makes a plea to middle class women not to make seamstresses redundant by doing their own needlework, but to undertake educational projects instead, and she makes the point that parents would not educate sons if they too lived in the expectation of being kept by someone else in later life - she takes the argument no further than that and yet in practice, when she had care of young Emily Isola, she and Charles set about trying to educate her in the fullest degree with the intent of making her independent.

Mary’s greatest claim to fame lies in the ’Tales from Shakespeare’, a collaborative effort with Charles. The bulk of the stories were hers, Charles tells us, but her name was left off the original edition, perhaps for fear of the publicity. In these Tales, she succeeded in producing stories geared to the understanding of a child which were still beautiful in language and sense. She was also an innovator, writing a book of stories called ‘Mrs. Leicester’s School’’, which was a world away from the pious matter usually dished up to children. The stories were each told in the voice of a child and while morally instructive, were not in the least preachy, and paved the way for the future of children’s writing.

In her personal life, Charles was her anchor: ‘she lived only for me’he claims, and this seems to have been true. There were no romantic attachments, ever, and Hitchcock does attempt to comment on the suppression of her libido. Is comment necessary? Mary herself stated that marriage seemed to her ‘a hazardous kind of affair’. She had known ‘many single men I should have liked in my life for a husband, but very few husbands have I ever wished was mine.’ She had only to look at the plight of the women in her circle to know the truth of that: Mrs. Coleridge despised by her husband and plagued by his drug taking, Sarah Hazlitt miserably unhappy, Mary Wollstonecraft’s adventures and public humiliation. And then there were her own early years. Family life perhaps never could have any appeal for her.

For many years, Mary led a relatively stable life, occasionally visiting the asylum for short periods and returning home restored. But as she aged, her visits became more frequent and lasted longer, sending Charles into despair. She fantasised about living in the age of Queen Anne, and her ‘clear understanding’, formerly recognised by all those close to her, became muddied. After Charles’s death, her life is largely unrecorded, although her intimates were always loyal.

Hitchcock writes movingly about her funeral: the mourners talked of ‘dear Mary Lamb’ and ‘that most delightful of creatures, her brother Charles.’ And it is as Charles’s sister that until now she has been best remembered. Hitchcock presents an interesting character and gives much insight into the lives of women in this period. Whether Mary’s failure to realise her full potential was caused by the disability of being born female, or by her mental instability, or by a mixture of both, is debatable, but Hitchcock certainly throws into bold relief the difficulties Mary faced in the context of her era, and provides the reader with a lively and scholarly tour round an unfamiliar world.