Focus 580; Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London

Charles Lamb is considered one of the finest essayists in the English language. He's remembered as a member of the romantic circle of poets that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. But if you're not an English Lit major chances are you know him best for a book which was first published in 18 07 and is still in print Tales from Shakespeare. These are retellings of Shakespeare's plays for young readers and it's a book that Lamb wrote with his sister Mary. It is safe to say though that most of the people who know that book and have read it are unaware that ten years before it was written Mary Lamb stabbed her mother to death with a carving knife. The story of that murder and of the relationship between Charles and Mary Lamb is told in a new book that will be talking about this morning the title of the book is mad to Mary Lamb lunacy and murder in literary London and it's published by WW Norton by our guest Susan Tyler Hitchcock. She's someone who's worked in publishing throughout much of her career. She began as an editorial assistant at Harper in roll back in the early 70s and currently is

a contract book editor for The National Geographic Society. She has written for newspapers magazines and essay anthologies. She has also written a number of books including geography of religion where God lives where pilgrims walk and coming about a family passage at sea and of course the new one that's out now. And it is in bookstores if you're interested in reading it. As we talked this morning two questions are welcome. All you have to do to be a part of the conversation is pick up the telephone and call here in Champaign-Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 is the number we do also have a toll free line that's good anywhere that you can hear us and that is 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 so people can join the conversation the only thing we ask of callers is that they're brief just so that we can accommodate as many as possible and keep the program moving but of course anyone is welcome to call it. Also by the way if you're interested in reading more about her and her work she does also have a website that you can check out which is Susan Tyler Hitchcock dot com.

Ms Hitchcock Hello. Hello there. Thanks for talking with us today. Pleasure. Before getting into this story it might be good to talk a little bit about the the received view or the what probably would have been the commonly held view about the lambs for people who just sort of have a casual knowledge of them and and apparently what happened during the time that they were alive. The story of the murder was kept very closely within their circle and it was not until after she died did it become well known what had happened and then apparently that could ever after at least until know colored the way people thought about them and particularly about him. About Charles about Charles D. Yeah well they would have been absolute unknown's at the time of the matricide which was 1796 they were the children and the serving class family within the next say

20 to 25 years. They would have gained some fame really especially among London readers. Not only for their associations with the more famous poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth but also for Charles's work as an essayist he tried early on as a reporter a newspaper reporter but he just couldn't get the once a day habit. But he ended up being a very popular essayist with a wry sense of humor so that in the 1820s see actually was very well known for his essays of Elia he L I A which was his pseudonym. And that means that. At his death in the 1830s he was greatly mourned. He is sister though would not have been known except as a character in those essays actually he calls her Bridget Eliza in those essays and also Well she could tell you that or

she would have even been known aset as a co-author of the children's books that they wrote because her name was not put on the title page when tales from Shakespear were published. So it's only after her death in 1847 that the literary journals begin to seep out the the secrets of the biographies that already been written actually of Charles Lamb keeping it a secret but in 1847 anonymous review came out saying that Charles was such a great writer and would have been even better had it not been for the horrible thing that happened. The secret that the family had kept all these years in 1796 that is that his older sister had killed their mother and had lived the life of a lunatic for the rest of her life being cared for by her brother. From that point on certainly among the Victorians Charles Lamb was called Saint Charles and even the Virginia Woolf in a room of one's own

refers to him that way perhaps slightly ironically but she's still passing on the legacy and that. Comes up to the present day I mean I studied English literature all the way through college and graduate school and. You know I met Mary Lambe and footnotes. There would be footnotes to the famous poem Charles is known for probably the one that comes and anthologies the most commonly the old familiar faces. And each of that's a short poem with stanzas about all the people that he has no longer in his life for one reason or another they have gone they've all gone the old familiar faces and one of those faces is his sister go down to the footnote and you learned she had killed their mother and was crazy and he took care of her all his life. That really is the story that has been told. Very little of an insight into Mary's side of the story and that's what I thought the book needed to be written.

Yeah well it you definitely it seems that you are interested in correcting the record in many respects and this impression as you say that Charles was some kind of a saint and that he sacrificed his life could have been greater had he not given over so much of his energy to taking care of his unstable sister. In fact that's not really the way that it was and the the picture. Or that you paint of them particularly of their later life together because they they did indeed live together neither of them married they lived together for almost 40 years. This was a in very many ways a partnership where they cared in each in their own way for each other and that certainly she was not not some sort of lifelong unstable invalid that needed constant monitoring so that she didn't get into trouble. Yeah actually what I found looking closely was that. Quite honestly Charles was about as on stable as she was. He

managed his. His bouts of of insanity or mental illness. In various ways he he he did dive into the impressions and writes about that in this letters he also had manic episodes where he wrote. Just fast and furiously to get one thing or another finished. He actually was clearly an alcoholic and there are many letters from Mary to friends of hers and friends of theirs talking about how she's trying to keep Charles from drinking so much and smoking so much tobacco and you no one have the sense there are many ways in which she provided the household that alarm allowed trawls slam to become the writer that he was. So I would argue that in fact it's thanks to Mary not in spite of Mary that he became a great essayist. Let's talk or I will I would ask you to talk about what life would have been

like in the lamb household in 1796 before the murder occurred. Certainly the lamb family lived all of Charles and Mary's childhood. In what's called the Inner Temple in London the Inner Temple still exists today. It is one of the Inns of Court in the old part of the city of London and that actually it's outside the city of London because the. Inner Temple was itself a kind of sanctuary walled in kind of a campus where there are sisters and barristers and training would live together they would dine together they would study together and in fact even the barristers who would go to practise law lived in the inner temple. It was one of those people of a somewhat high ranking member of the Inner Temple who for whom

John and Elizabeth the parents of Mary and Charles Lamb worked. John Lamb was both head waiter at the Inner Temple and also an attendant to the barrister named Samuel Colt. And this gave him and his family quarters in the inner temple a very prestigious location to live in London and yet they were living the servants life. It would have been an odd mix of being. Of the servant class and yet in an elegant and somewhat. Sort of isolated pristine setting even in the midst of the of London of the late 18th century which was rather a scruffy and dirty. Not far from the inner temple would have been the jail's Broadwell prison on all kinds of. Down and Dirty scenes. But inside the walls

of the Inner Temple it was very. Quiet and elegant and. Safe. And that was the setting that Charles and Mary who up in Unfortunately in 1792 Samuel salt died which meant that the lamb family no no longer had the privilege of living inside the inner temple and so they did what they moved just a few blocks outside but into the city of London still in the legal district. But in the flats at that point the household was five a number the older brother had already moved out but the two children who were at that time in 1796 the time of the murder Charles was 21 years old and Mary was 31 years old. There were three elders in the family there was John Lamb the father who actually soon after the death of Samuel salt appears to have had a stroke and out of charity he was kept on the roll and the payroll of the inner temple but he really couldn't work there any longer. So he got a tiny stipend

still from the Inner Temple. There was Elizabeth Lamb who perhaps in a kind of a sympathy or almost attention getting away but perhaps honestly and physically became paralyzed in a in these years these years after the death of an assault. And there was an even older aunt the sister of of Mary's father who had never gotten along with her sister in law so it's a. Healthful situation tiny flat three needy elders a 21 year old man who's stepping out in a zone with a new job at the East India Company and a 31 year old young woman who is left behind to take care of household cooking. Three elders two of whom are physically debilitated and on top of that taken sewing to make some money.

That's the scene of Mary Lamb's life. In the days coming up to the day that she murders her mother and apparently right before that she was persuaded to take in a little girl as to be both an apprentice to to learn what Mary know of the needle trade and then also to be to help out with chores around the house and it sounds like this little girl was was about next to useless because she didn't really know how to do anything so here's Mary in this small space trying to care for three elderly relatives with this little girl underfoot having to do all the work and perhaps feeling understandably feeling trapped in this situation maybe feeling that there was there was no no life for her. Other than that life of having to provide care for all of these people and it seems. That she just snapped on this day in 1796 and the way you know and listening to you

say all that it makes me need to say that so much of that particular part of the scenario can only become too by surmise. We don't have. Mary's description we have Charles's description of a day or two later of what happened. But it all fits together I mean there was an apprentice a 9 year old girl probably from a very poor family who had apprenticed her out because that's the only way they could support her. She came into the household about three days before the matricide occurred. I just assume that a 9 year old girl all of a sudden out of her household and into someone else's would be terrified and useless frankly. I mean we just can. But not for a 31 year old woman who already has three or maybe even four dependents. Not for her to take on.

It would not be a help that would be a burden and and I just it just seems logical that that might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. It is also important to mention that there appears to have been a kind of strain of mental illness in the family Charles unself actually had already spent six weeks in Hoxton house one of the most famous private madhouse of London just the winter before. There are some rumors that other members or older members of the family had mental illness. I think perhaps the mother did as well because she seems to have been somewhat difficult on her daughter and and Mary too had already we don't know very much about it but she had already had one lapse into some sort of mental illness. It sounds like it was a depression it sounds like she actually went to bed and couldn't get up for quite a while and perhaps was given. That the current day. The antidote for that kind of

situation which would have been an opiate derivative laudanum. All of that happened before him. So you think you have huge grounds to say that probably she had a mental breakdown of some sort. I suggest it might be a bipolar breakdown but. You know a function of a bipolar disease. But there's no way that you can really psycho analyze people 200 years ago. Our guest in this hour focused 580 Susan Tyler Hitchcock she's written 11 books has contributed to newspapers magazines essay anthologies the book that we're talking about this morning is titled mad Mary Lambe lunacy and murder in literary London. It's published by WW Norton and is just recently was published in the in late January. And certainly you could find it in the bookstore if you're interested in looking at it of course questions are welcome here on the program this morning 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Certainly I think we. Would have expected that a sensational

event like this now and as well as then would have gotten publicity. How much publicity was there. Well it appears that maybe four of the London newspapers and that would have been many more newspapers in London at the time. Ran some kind of little notice. One of them. I have one and let me just read you the beginning of it. This would have appeared the murder was on a Thursday and the first newspaper account that I found was on a Monday down at the bottom of the bottom corner of a. An inside page of the paper with notes a headline saying on Friday afternoon the coroner and jury sat on the body of only in the neighborhood of Holborn who died in consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day. And it it ends as all of the newspaper reports and the jury of course brought in their verdict.

Lunacy all over the newspaper these few but all of them. Newspaper accounts. Or so similar word for word that I'm quite sure that they all took language from. That this coroner's report in London at that time if there was a a in and natural death what would have happened would be that the coroner who was sort of like a sheriff for that district of London would gather together a small group of worthy citizens who would come as a coroner's jury and as this article says sit on the bottom that is examined to sit on the body examine the body of the dead and determine what they could of what happened. And that did happen then the day after the murder what had happened in the meantime though was that Charles Lamb had taken his sister Mary to a private matter. Not big Hoxton house that he had been in six months before but a smaller one in the village

is Linton. Which would have then been country now as of now it's actually part of the the larger metropolitan area of London. But he has probably Thursday evening had her admitted to a private madhouse so that when the coroner arrived the the plot was already in a sense laid to express this as an act of lunacy. And that was in fact what the coroner's jury determined. Well as you say there was this coroner's inquest and certainly what had happened. It's not known precisely. What happened and what were the precipitating events but. But what had happened in a sense was clear that Mary had killed her mother and so there was no doubt about that and left no doubt. And in fact you know the answer was probably cogent enough to be a witness to The Apprentice girl certainly was a witness. The lamp their landlord came up

and walked in on the deed and Charles arrived actually just minutes after it happened. So all of these newspaper articles actually are the source for the dramatic details of the of the act and I take it that someone probably Charles had given the coroner's jury some details but I think they may have taken a little bit of fictional license and made it more dramatic than the family account. Well the the inquest that concluded that as you say that this was an act of lunacy and that was a term of law of the time. What exactly did that mean. Right in that the English courts. And I suspect this continues to the present day there was a distinction between idiocy and lunacy. IDiocy was dissent. A state of mental imbalance from which one never have and never would escape. That is someone who was out of her or his mind all their life.

Lunacy on the other hand coming from the word lunar for Moon was a a person was a way to describe a person who was in and out of mental instability that is. There were times of rationality and sensibleness And then there were periods or spells or breakthroughs of of irrationality and that was the description of how they saw Mary Lambe that that she had been and this even was put in the in the newspaper she has the longest account from one newspaper she had in fact been a good and beautiful daughter. But that this was a momentary break out of that behavior that could only be described as lunatic in their terms. So Charles clearly right at the beginning there he took his sister out of the house placed her in this his private institution and clearly the coroner ruled that that she had.

Done it but that she was considered to be quote a lunatic that is someone who was rational sometimes irrational at others and I guess to us now might seem a little bit surprising though that the corner would look at Charles decision to to place his sister in this private mad house and apparently that was that there was there was no trial she wasn't charged with a crime. They apparently thought that he had everything under control in and that was the end of it. That's right and that's the way it was in the English legal system at that time. There really was nothing like what we today call the insanity plea in the courts. That would have started not until the 1840s 1843 to be exact with a very specific case. The McNaughton case in which a man attempting to kill the prime minister actually did kill his attendant and he was arguably he was argued his defense was argued on the basis of. Physicians are

examinations of him and his mental state. That really was a watershed in English and and thus American laws but before 1840 things were a lot looser. There was a general sympathy toward people who conducted acts of. Violence out of a crazed state although there certainly are cases both before and after Mary land in which family murders whether we're talking about murder of apparent murder and murder of a child murder of a spouse got just excruciating punishment. I mean including excruciating forms of death. And in this case somehow Mary Lamb was viewed sympathetically and Charles probably did a very good job of presenting himself and affirming not only when the coroner visited but then six months later when Mary Lamb was released from that madhouse

affirming to the authorities that he was going to be her guardian and that he would protect her and also protect his community from her if that needed to happen. What could be said about how Charles felt about it. What his sister had done. That's an interesting question. Charles wrote a number of letters to his best friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the the days weeks and even months after the murder in which we really get a clearer glimpse of Charles's psyche than we do of Mary's at that time. There was sorrow Indeed although it was measured sorrow and in fact there's one letter when he tells Coleridge that it's only on a Saturday or maybe it was Sunday night a night when they had a group of friends in a sort of a a memorial service. That was the first time he

cried. He is greatly a champion of a sister from the very beginning and there is a very revealing letter in this timeframe of the first week or two after the murder in which he tells Coleridge that his mother had always favored their older brother and had really responded coldly and Judge mentally to her daughter despite the fact that Mary was the one who had given the most to her. We're in a life time and and serve her the most. So you get the sense I mean this is very difficult to say because it sounds so horrible but you do get the sense that Charles to some extent understood marry him Paul. And Mary herself. This is you know Mary wrote Charles a letter from the madhouse and Charles it never was was found

but Charles rephrased it and and Charles reports that a week into his time in the madhouse Mary says I believe that my mother is looking down from heaven at me and understands me. So there was this fence between these two children that it was as it should be. Maybe there was an element of putting her mother out of her misery because she certainly was ailing. She was paralyzed she needed Mary to help her move from place to place she had Mary living in the bed sleeping in the bed with her. And to have help in the middle of the night and there may have been a little bit of mercy involved in this killing but I also think that Charles understood Mary's frustration this well. And Mary apparently for her part never said in so many words that. She regretted what she had done.

She never did. And I have talked to some people both legal and psychiatric who say that that proves that Mary was beyond a knowledge of right and wrong and that in the you know the current insanity plea that would show her to you know to really be insane that is she had no. No sense of right or wrong no sense that she had done wrong but I don't quite read it that way I think she recognized the wrong. I think she grappled with it. All her life she from that point on her life she had about 10 or 20 years of productivity and good lively adult life. But but from about 1815 she began to decline to the point that she had more periods of retreat and depression than she has living productive you know lively productive times and I think that the the

crime really ended up being a burden that pulled her down. Beyond being an active adult but for those remarkably for the 20 years after the murders she she did cycle through occasional manic periods when she would say it's time to go to the madhouse and Charles and she would walk solemnly and she would really sort of find herself in a way for for a couple of weeks a couple of months at a time. But through those those 20 productive years there were only there were fewer than one time one time in the madhouse per two years. So there were plenty of days and months when she was living a good life. And not only writing with her brother but providing the household setting for a wonderful circle of literary friends artistic friends who would come weekly and eat and drink and talk. Arts and Culture.

At the time in England there were a couple of public hospitals for people who were mentally ill and the most famous of which would be bedlam from which we get the expression. There also were private institutions and if you had the money you could go or a family member could go to one of these places like a Fisher House where Charles took Mary what was what sort of treatment was it. They are available at the time for people who are mentally ill. Well it's quite remarkable some to be horrifying. There's been an enormous amount of study and description of the man houses both public and private. It's a fascinating time of the in the history of mental health treatment. It is kind of a turning point. Looking back in time from 1796 there would have been remarkably

physical and we would call them cruel absolutely cruel and inhumane ways of treating the mentally ill. I mean historically the mentally ill and the poor were lumped together in English law and the mentally ill in particular were treated physically with the thought that the problem was something in the body. It was could maybe it was an imbalance of fluids because they had this whole theory of the humors the theory of the fluids that energized or debilitated a person. And the Siri would have been that the fluids were out of balance and a person who was was crazy it was a lunatic and they needed to be brought back into balance. So people would be there would be bloodletting there would be leaching there would be a copping which is a way of putting a. I see a glass cup that rescues me on the body to make a kind of a welt. There would be dunking which would be

fast dipping. Kind of putting a person on a chair strapped to a wheel and dunking them into cold water or dunk pouring cold water on top of them. A lot of them as I mentioned began to be used more and more but others other herbal and mineral remedies some of which now we look back and we realize they actually would have been harmful to the people. And often times people who were physically demonstrative that is they would thrash or hit and in fact we know that Mary did thrash it sometimes and her manic periods they would have actually been chained to the wall chained to the floor chained to their beds put in straitjackets which would have been the more Actually the more humane treatment. Now I said though that this is a turning point because at about this time in the late eighteen hundred there were new ways of treating the mentally ill a kind of more

humane more compassionate. And in their terms they called it a more moral treatment of the mentally ill. This had to do more with engaging the personality engaging the person in spirit and mind. Looking straight in the eyes of the person talking with the person one very famous historian of the Times named rape Roy Porter actually says that this was a period of time when psychiatry as we know it today began. And it seems to me as I'm looking at the the lamb family history that Charles had reason to be aware of this. And also to have a number of friends who were in the dissenting community that is the community of religious groups like the Unitarians and the Quakers. The Quakers were the leaders in this moral treatment of the of the mentally ill. And I believe that through his friends and his knowledge of the possibilities. Charles Lamb from the very beginning sought out

humane and and calm peaceful and loving man houses far as he could go and avoided the B-1 that had the the older a more physical and more cruel treatment as their main way of dealing with their patients. Our guest in this part of focus 580 Sula Susan Tyler Hitchcock and if you're interested in reading this story you should go up to the bookstore and look for the book Mad Mary Lamb lunacy and murder in literary London that's published by WW Norton. Our guest has written 11 books and has also contributed to magazines newspapers essay anthologies. She has a B.A. an Emmy in English from University of Michigan Ph.D. in English from University of Virginia and for much of her career. He has worked in the publishing world he's currently a contract book editor for The National Geographic Society. And again questions welcome 3 3 3 W I L L toll free 800 1:58 WY or 9 4 5 5 as you

explained after the murder. Charles had his sister put his sister in this private madhouse as a private institution. She was there for six months. He then moved her to her own room a room of her own. She lived on her own there until their father died and then she came home and that was really the beginning of their life together. They lived together. Neither of them married. They were together for almost 40 years and live this life where during the daytime she would basically take care of the household. Initially I guess that doing all the work later when they had enough money they had a servant but I think that was sort of her sphere during the daytime he went off to work he was a Clark at the East India Company but then at night they would invite friends over and they had a salon they would talk about literature in the arts and they'd eat and drink and have a great time. I did. How did people regard to this arrangement of theirs the fact that that the two of

them were living together. Nothing. Not suggesting anything improper about it but that in essentially that was that they were a family. The two of them they lived together and had this sort of odd life where they got through life in the daytime and the real part of the exciting part of their life and their writing work was the evenings and other times how did people think about them. Oh well. Trolls cold called it in one famous passes that they had they lived a life of double singleness. I don't think that in those days we would have even they would have had to add that that comment that you make about nothing was wrong with it because I think that families lived together not many generation families live together. You know there were there wasn't as much money or space it really would have been more common I

mean Dorothy and William Wordsworth were also a famous brother and sister peer. It's interesting though that the human edge of a brother and sister in the romantic tradition and the tradition of the poet Shelley Byron there are all sorts of interesting implications to the brother sister here. I mean Shelley took it to an extreme of writing poems in which he said that the essentially that the woman he was looking for would be even closer than the sister he would be if she would be kind of the sister of his soul. Byron of course is known to have had a sexual relationship with his half sister. So you hear it in the wind. There certainly were implications I don't think anyone saw that or thought that I have to tell you that in trying to make this a book that would sell well.

I look everywhere for sex and I couldn't find any. So I was really ready to find it and I just I just couldn't. I think that the that Mary was a counterpoint to her brother in their circle of friends in the sense that Charles was. He was. He was extremely sarcastic he would always make fun of people he would make fun of himself as well would sort of win win him over. You know he doesn't end up being totally supercilious. He makes as much fun or more of himself than of other people. But Mary on the other hand would have been a listener a in a kind of support person. One of their friends. William Hazlett wrote that it was Miri who helped him feel comfortable in the midst of all those you know poetic Giants. So I think the two of them were a great team. Among their they are their close circle of friends from

the outside. Again I don't think it would have looked unusual. Although I will say that there was a point. Just a few months really after Mary had moved back in. Both the aunt and the father died within the year and a half after Mary's active matricide and her going into the madhouse. So that. When that had happened and when they had died when Charles was then alone he was able to move Mary back to the apartment where he had lived with his father for a little while and just months after that he moved again and he wrote a letter to Coleridge saying the phrase was we are in a manner. In other words I'm afraid our neighbors know that she's crazy. There's something funny going on and we gotta get back basically into the middle of the city where they aren't going to be watching so closely. So there are hints of a feeling in him that

you know there may be some public. Of displeasure a judgment against them but one that's one of the reasons actually they live their whole life in the city even though they're friends. Wordsworth and Coleridge were the poets famous for you know ode to nature and addresses in the in the you know to the the the majesty of the universe and all that Charles and Mary wanted to be right there in the middle of the city of London because it conferred some anonymity. Pardon. Because it conferred anonymity or because they just liked city life both fighting both I think they love the theater. There's a really famous letter from a funny letter from Charles. They take a. They take a week long take a summer vacation on the Isle of Wight. And so throw back to one of his friends saying I just missed the girl at the door. So I think they genuinely liked city life as well as feeling that they could live their lives without being

spied upon. Well we have a caller here let's bring them into the conversation someone listening here in her band in where we are. Line number one morning this is a terribly interesting program and I'm sure the book is very interesting also. I one thing about the actual writing. Did each of them write separately or did one write in the other edit or what was their relationship in terms of their writing. That's a very interesting question and that's one that I I did think a lot about in wrote about in the book. There are some records. Mostly you know letters from trolls. So that kind of thing where he says for example in tales from Shakespear he clearly says that although Miri was given the assignment as it turned out she wrote the comedies and he wrote the majesty of cry I believe that in fact there was an intimate collaboration going on all the way along because sometimes Mary will write a letter to a friend saying. Charles

is in the slump he's just not doing too well with Macbeth. I'm having to help him Lord Charles who say marriage is just you know stuck on All's Well That Ends Well and you know we've been talking about it. I'm paraphrasing here but you get the sense even in tales from Shakespear. That they helped each other because there is a sort of uniformity of voice. The other two books that they wrote together are interesting in that way too. They wrote what I think is really the best and probably the Cope closest to Mary Lambe own book a book of short stories called Mrs. Lester school. Now again we've been told by letters from Charles exactly which ones he wrote and which ones Mary wrote. In this case I think it might be closer to true because the style of writing in those designated by Mary is a sweet simple direct and almost as if she is writing at the level that she knows her readers can

manage. Her hunch would be about young adolescent girls. Then Charles on the other hand whose writing style if you know his essays is very convoluted and dependent clause upon dependent clauses and very ornate. And somewhat sarcastic a lot. You see little glimpses of that in the few stories of Mrs. Lester schools that that are said to have been by him so I think there may have been a little bit less of passing the paper back and forth. But the third book is called poetry for children and again although we never got the we never got the list that Charles actually marked the table of contents up for a friend in a volume he sent. Saying these are mine these are hers and of course he said Of course mine are the best. But in that volume there is a poem in which there's a brother. Also many of the poems have to do with brothers and sisters and some of them are

dialogues like the brother says a stance of them the sister sense says a stance and one of those is about the sort of like if you've ever played a game called round robin yet where you write a line and then you pass it right next right. Just like that. So the brother writes one stanza hands it to the sister she writes another than the Sansa back and forth I think that is a clue to us that a lot of that kind of writing went on between the two of them so they were very collaborative. I'm absolutely sure and the last word of Mrs. West is Mrs. West will world school. It's true I'm general. It's actually a finishing school for young girls and my theory is that the school that Mary wishes she could have gone to our home and it. The the the plan of the book is that the schoolmistress gathers up the new girls in front of the fire and each of the girls has to tell a story or not that will let the others get to know her. Oh what a wonderful I must get that book. Well thank you hard to find but good luck.

I'm working on a company through the Co. Back when we started to take the conversation in. You talked first about Tales from Shakespear which is that again the probably the thing that the lambs are for most people will be most known for when the book was first published. Her name was not on it was her name on the other books that they wrote again though as a matter of fact what happened was this just Lester's tells her Shakespeare was published by Charles Lamb. Mrs. Lester's school was published without an author name and poetry for children was published by the author of Mrs. Slessor school. So it's all kept secret that she had anything to do with the writing of any three of these books. How was that. It was writing for children that they became involved in. Well that's that's that question brings in another major major character in the story who is William Godwin William God one is not much known

today perhaps he would be best known if I said that he was the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote a vindication of the rights of woman and is considered which is considered really the first feminist tract ever written in history. And but Godwin himself in his heyday was a political hero. He wrote a massive volume called and an inquiry concerning political justice which believe it or not this is like a 700 page book. But believe it or not labor unions in the north of England would buy one copy and they would have union meetings and read it aloud to their union members. It was so important to the working classes of England. Unfortunately Godwin and a number of his other people other friends and colleagues who were very active and vocal about. The underling and the poor.

In fact they were hoping that England would have a revolution on the on the in the same line that they saw France having because the French Revolution went sour and also because France was threatening all through this period to attack England. People like odd one who had once championed the rebel revolutionaries and France were considered enemies of the state. And although Godwin was himself not arrested or tried many of his friends were and so he had to figure out a way to express his political beliefs more quietly. And the way he did it was to begin publishing children's books. He had known Charles Lamb to some extent through friends through this literary circle but really came to him first of all to ask him to do the king and queen of tarts. A A A small town it was. It was like a comic book it was a redo of the famous the King of Hearts the queen of hearts she had some tarts or bake some starts

the children's rhyme that we all know but it went on through about 12 versus And which all the trolls wrote can ended up. This was illustrated in the Godwin edition but it ended up with the Queen and King getting tipsy as royalty is want to do and I think that was going a little over the line for Godwin So when he came up with another children's book project he went to trial the sister he said of the Charles himself and I got a little bit more proper product out of the deal we are getting very short on time when I try to include one more caller that way. Have your some listening and champagne so we'll go there. Line 1. Well yeah I was curious to know about your studies on bipolar is it more about mental illness and things like that in literary talent or poetic talent and you just mentioned for example that Charles Lamb piled one dependent clause upon another dependent clause. I mean did you

ever look at the issues of things of that nature bipolar as women and syntax and things like that. I think that that would be a really fruitful line of study. I chose not to do it partly because of my concern over this issue of psychoanalyzing the past and partly because it was the it was a direction I didn't want to become expert in myself I was more interested in the history and literature. But where I found my information I did talk to psychiatrists. I did do some reading. And the most important. A book that I found which I refer to in my book and found to be sort of a light came on when I read it is a book called The Fire Within. Yes that was what I was thinking exactly Manic Depressive Disorder in the creative imagination is by a psychologist named Kay Redfield Jamison who's also written a number of books including a memoir of her own as a sufferer of bipolar

disorder. And um that book the fire within really describes the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Yes. It it it they often can lead to bursts of creativity. And at the end of the book she actually has a list of authors composers poets artists all of whom she suspects may have had bipolar disorder. Percy Bish Shelley Mary Shelley Samuel Taylor Coleridge Charles Lamb all are on that list. And I actually believe that Mary Lambert walks on that list as well. Well you know I'm going to have to jump in here my apologies to the caller but we're simply going to have to stop because we've used our time. There is more then and then we have discussed in this book so if you're interested in reading more you should go out and look for the book we're talking about is mad Mary Lambe lunacy and murder in literary London. It's published by WW Norton by our guest Susan Tyler Hitchcock and if you're interested in finding out

more about her and some of her other work she does have her own website which is Susan Tyler Hitchcock dot com and you can check that out in Miss Hitchcock I want to say to you thank you very much for talking with us. It's been a great pleasure I love to talk about the fairy again.