Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London

Rating:
Summary: Literature, Feminism, Madness
Review: 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 the title page. Hitchcock gives an excellent summary of how the Lambs changed the plays into stories, often difficult changes that were accomplished with such success that the book has remained in print ever since, and is still a useful guide to each play. She wrote other books for children, innovative for their time. For a woman and a mental patient she achieved a great deal in the literary world to which she and her brother were devoted. Hitchcock's book is a welcome reminder that she is not just a footnote to her brother's life.