MARY LAMB
BY
MRS. GILCHRIST
Eminent Women Series
EDITED BY JOHN H. INGRAM
LONDON:
W. H. ALLEN & CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE. S.W.
1883.
PREFACE.
I am indebted to Mrs. Henry Watson, a granddaughter of Mr. Gillman,for one or two interesting reminiscences, and for a hithertounpublished "notelet" by Lamb (p. 248), together with an omittedparagraph from a published letter (p. 84), which confirms what otherletters also show,—that the temporary estrangement between Lamb andColeridge was mainly due to the influence of the morbid condition ofmind of their common friend, Charles Lloyd.
My thanks are also due to Mr. Potts for some bibliographic detailsrespecting the various editions of the Tales from Shakespeare.
Reprinted here, for the first time, is a little essay on Needle-work(regarded from an industrial, not an "art" point of view), by Mary Lamb(p. 186), unearthed from an obscure and long-deceased periodical—TheBritish Lady's Magazine—for which I have to thank Mr. Edward Solly,F.R.S.
[vi]The reader will find, also, the only letter that has been preservedfrom Coleridge to Lamb, who destroyed all the rest in a moment ofdepression (pp. 24-6). This letter is given, without exact date or nameof the person to whom it was addressed, in Gillman's unfinished Lifeof Coleridge, as having been written "to a friend in great anguish ofmind on the sudden death of his mother," and has, I believe, neverbefore been identified. But the internal evidence that it was to Lambis decisive.
In taking Mary as the central figure in the following narrative, wovenmainly from her own and her brother's letters and writings, it is tothat least explored time, from 1796 to 1815—before they had made theacquaintance of Judge Talfourd, Proctor, Patmore, De Quincey, and otherfriends, who have left written memorials of them—that we are broughtnearest; the period, that is, of Charles' youth and early manhood. ForMary was the elder by ten years; and there is but little to tell of thelast twenty of her eighty-three years of life, when the burthen of agewas added to that of her sad malady.
The burial-register of St. Andrew's, Holborn, in which church-yardLamb's father, mother and aunt Hetty were buried, shows that the fathersurvived his wife's tragic death nearly three years instead of only afew months as Talfourd, and others following him, have supposed. It is[vii]a date of some interest because not till then did brother and sisterbegin together their life of "double singleness" and entire mutualdevotion. Also, in sifting the letters for facts and dates, I find thatLamb lived in Chapel Street, Pentonville not, as Talfourd and Proctorthought, a few months, but three years, removing thither almostimmediately after the mother's death. It is a trifle, yet not withoutinterest to the lovers of Lamb, for these were the years in which hemet in his daily walks, and loved but never accosted, the beautifulQuakeress "Hester," whose memory is enshrined in the poem beginning"When Maidens such as Hester die."
Anne Gilchrist.