The tragic tale of Charles and Mary Lamb

This edited article about Charles and Mary Lamb originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 161 published on 13 February 1965.

Charles and Mary Lamb – close companions in death as they were in life

The lives of Charles and Mary Lamb provide one of the greatest stories in English literature of the love of a man for his sister. For Charles Lamb could have been one of the greatest writers Britain produced in the nineteenth century.

Instead he made writing a part-time occupation and, because of the need to look after his mentally sick sister, he remained a clerk of the East India Company for thirty-three years.

Charles was the youngest son and Mary – her real name was Mary-Ann – the eldest daughter of seven children, all of whom were born in the Temple, in the heart of London. But only their eldest brother John survived out of all their other brothers and sisters.

When he was seven Charles went to Christ’s Hospital, the famous Blue Coat School at Horsham in Sussex, and Mary, now seventeen years old, stayed at home sewing and mending. Charles was always hungry, and it was a common sight to see him dressed in a long blue coat, with mustard-coloured socks and brightly buckled black shoes, hanging on the railings of the playground waiting for his visitors to appear with a basket of food and cakes.

While he was at Christ’s Hospital young Charles Lamb formed a friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge – later to become a great poet – which was to last all their lives. In fact the first Lamb’s poems that ever appeared in print were published as an appendix to a book of poems by Samuel Coleridge.

When their father’s employer died, the Lamb family moved to Holborn, in London. It was here that disaster struck.

Charles had left school and started work in the offices of the South Sea Island company. But he was not happy there and when he got the chance to move to India House, the headquarters of the East India Company, he took it. He was to remain there for thirty-three years.

The family were desperately poor at their Holborn home. The eldest son, John, had made money and was already a “city gentleman,” but he did nothing to support his parents. Only Charles’s income and the money that Mary made from sewing and teaching young girl apprentices how to be seamstresses, supported the family.

Then, one day, Mary had a brainstorm. She picked up a huge kitchen knife and chased a young girl apprentice who was not working properly. Round and round the kitchen table they went with the little girl screaming her head off. Mary’s mother came in and tried to stop her daughter, but Mary stabbed her mother and, tragically, killed her.

Mary was straightaway locked in an asylum. But after a time she was released to Charles’s care – John, the wealthy eldest brother, would have nothing to do with her.

For the rest of their lives Charles and Mary lived together, except when Mary required special attention and was sent away. For the rest of their lives, too, brother and sister were always on the move. They would find a new home, everything would be well for a time and then Mary would have another relapse and they would be forced to find a new home, where their story was not known.

Charles, meanwhile, had fallen in love. But he knew he could not marry the girl of his dreams because of his obligation to Mary and, though he wrote love sonnets to her which were later published, renouncing his chance of marriage caused him to have a nervous breakdown. When he recovered he took to alcohol, and all through the rest of his life he suffered bouts of drunkenness.

Charles Lamb was friends with Wordsworth, with Southey and with most of the other literary figures of the early nineteenth century. His home became a meeting place for them and as he was almost the only one among them with a regular income he wined and dined them and often lent them money.

In 1805, when he was thirty years old – he was born on February 10, 1775 – Lamb had a play he had written presented at the Drury Lane Theatre. It lasted one night only and the audience hissed it. Lamb was sitting near the orchestra and, so as not to be noticed, he, too, hissed his play!

Shortly after this a publisher of children’s books and encyclopaedias named William Godwin came to his home one evening. Godwin said that he thought it a great pity that Shakespeare’s plays were so difficult to teach children, and he wished somebody would put them into simple language. Charles and Mary Lamb jumped at the chance and in a few months produced together their now famous Tales from Shakespeare. But Charles, the already well-known literary figure, wrote only the stories of the six tragedies. It was Mary who produced the fourteen comedies.

Charles Lamb, a lively “clubbable,” gentle mannered, humorous man, fond of his pipe and his glass, became the most famous essayist England had produced with his Essays of Elia. Elia was simply his nom-de-plume; he took it from the name of an obscure clerk who worked with him at his first job.

The richness and resource of his style is shown in his most famous essay, A Dissertation upon Roast Pig. The theme of the essay concerns a Chinese swineherd, Ho-ti, whose house is burnt down by the carelessness of his son, Bo-Bo. With the house a litter of young pigs is burnt, too.

Touching the flesh of the young pigs Bo-bo burns his fingers, sucks them, and gets a taste for roast pig. Thereafter hundreds of houses were burnt down in China – and pigs and fuel grew scarcer every day!

Let us look for a moment at what “Elia” could do with a bit of roast pig as his subject:

“There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is well called – the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance – with the adhesive oleaginous – O call it not fat! . . . fat and lean . . . so blended and running into each other, that both together make one ambrosian result.”

After Charles had retired from his job with the East India Company the Lambs moved to Edmonton to the home of a couple who had looked after Mary in her many and increasing mental breakdowns. Here in December 1834 Charles went out for a walk on his own. He had been drinking and the roads were treacherous. He slipped, fell and cut his face; infection set in and he died before the year was out.

Mary survived her brother by thirteen years, dying peacefully in 1847 at the age of eighty-two years.