Charles Lamb spent his life caring for the sister who killed their mother
In September 1796, Mary Lamb, in the grip of severe mental illness, killed their mother at home in London. Her younger brother Charles, just 21, refused to let her be locked away for life and spent much of his modest income keeping her in private care. Together they later wrote Tales from Shakespeare and hosted a celebrated literary salon.
Charles Lamb was born on 10 February 1775 in Crown Office Row, in London's Inner Temple, where his father John worked as clerk and assistant to the barrister Samuel Salt. His elder sister Mary taught him to read very young. He loved visits to Blakesware, a Hertfordshire country house where his grandmother kept house, and later wrote of its tapestried bedrooms peopled with scenes from Ovid. In October 1782 he entered Christ's Hospital, a charity boarding school where he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who became his oldest friend.
The school was harsh; its headmaster James Boyer supposedly knocked out one of Leigh Hunt's teeth by hurling a volume of Homer. Lamb, whose family lived nearby, escaped the worst. A stubborn stutter, however, barred him from the top scholarly rank, and with it a clerical career and Cambridge. He left at fourteen for clerical jobs, first with a merchant. In 1792, while nursing his grandmother, he fell for a young woman named Ann Simmons, a love that surfaces in his story Rosamund Gray. In 1795 he himself spent six weeks in an asylum at Hoxton, writing to Coleridge with rueful humour that he was now rational enough not to bite anyone.
After the tragedy of 1796, Charles found Mary a place in a private madhouse and rejected his brother John's idea of a public asylum; with friends' help he secured her release. When their father, long disabled by a stroke, died in 1799, Mary came to live with Charles, and from 1800 they shared rooms at Mitre Court Buildings in the Temple until 1809. Her illness kept returning, and in one bleak letter Charles confessed he almost wished her dead.
Yet their home became a weekly gathering place for leading writers and actors, and friends included Wordsworth, Southey and William Hazlitt. His first poems, four sonnets, appeared in Coleridge's 1796 collection. He is best known for the Essays of Elia, which include a portrait of his father under the name Lovel. His biographer E. V. Lucas called him the most lovable figure in English literature, and a London club named The Lambs was founded in 1869 to keep their salon spirit alive.
Source: Charles Lamb
