The Lambs of London
5 journalers for this copy...
From The Observer:
" Curious, melancholy Charles Lamb has always appealed to Peter Ackroyd. The Georgian essayist, tender and puckish, with a weakness for oddity and alcohol, is one of the great chroniclers of London. He shared his adult life with his sister, Mary, whose fitful but terrible mental illness was at its worst when she murdered their mother in 1796.
The pair are at the centre of Ackroyd's new novel, which returns to the literary plagiarism territory of Chatterton. In 1795, Mary and Charles share a home with their senile father and querulous mother. Mary plays housekeeper, while Charles drudges in the East India Office and swills curacao until the taverns tip him out.
William Ireland, a young bookseller with a desire to prove his worth, enters their disconsolate lives, claiming to have discovered remarkable Shakespearean relics. He is thrilled to share his treasures with the literary Lambs and Mary feels her imaginative and romantic horizons expand.
Red-haired young Ireland emerges from his moth-scented bookshop with Shakespeare's will, a poem and a lock of hair not unlike his own, 'chestnut turning into flame'. For Mary, these lost tokens of the Bard represent an alternative to being immured with her fractious family, 'to dwell in another time - if only for a moment'. But Ireland is an ardent forger, his pitch-perfect art an act of passionately desired imagination.
Eventually, he is flattered into overreaching himself, unearthing Vortigern, a tragedy set in ancient Britain, 'a play of jealousy and mad violence' with 'strange, magical conjunctions of sound and sense'. Ackroyd recreates its notorious premiere at Drury Lane, where reverence swiftly folds into derision and the bubble bursts. Meanwhile, Mary's untethered perturbation darkens the Holborn home.
The Lambs of London is not only historically animated, but emotionally feverish. Ackroyd distributes sympathy between his central trio - their restless desires, their desperation to make a name, even if they have to use someone else's. Each is clasped by a shadow self: overlooked Ireland has his shining literary avatar, Mary her terrifying derangement. Charles barely acknowledges the uncontrolled drunk he becomes by last orders - 'he considered him to be an unhappy and unfortunate acquaintance to whom he had become accustomed'.
Ackroyd's London is, as ever, a clamorous, fateful presence, crowded with suicides and muggers; beggars solicit pity with fake goitres. Its throng is 'part funeral procession and part pantomime'; orange peel, horse dung and old newsprint litter the streets; actors are 'larded with grease and powder'.
Ackroyd trusts the rumbustious London mob - they appear as truth-sifters who see through Vortigern's inert dramaturgy. He counterpoises the dense scrabble of material London with airy imagery, a rare breath of release in a city of sorrows. 'This is a sunny day in all our lives,' sighs Mary, when Ireland shows the Lambs his latest find. The novel begins with Mary holding her pox-pitted face to the sun, imagining herself to be its sister moon. Her madness is heralded by dizziness, 'as if someone had drilled a hole in her skull and had blown in warm air'.
Ackroyd's fiction isn't the place to go for facts (some, remembering the ventriloquised passages in his Dickens biography, would say the same of his non-fiction). But it is instructive reading, alongside The Devil Kissed Her, Kathy Watson's empathetic but unscholarly new biography of Mary Lamb (Bloomsbury £16.99, pp247). Watson describes Mary's life after the murder as a bravely makeshift process of therapy in a pre-therapy age. To her, the murder was 'the best thing that could have happened' to Mary, cutting 'the ties that bound her'.
Historian and novelist both spin stories: Watson yanks Mary Lamb into our era of universal counselling, just as Ackroyd turns the past into a private phantasmagoria of loving fakes and pungent terrors. His antiquarian art wraps us in a world which 'seemed to breathe misery' and makes the past a yearning presence, where even forged words carry a freight of feeling."
" Curious, melancholy Charles Lamb has always appealed to Peter Ackroyd. The Georgian essayist, tender and puckish, with a weakness for oddity and alcohol, is one of the great chroniclers of London. He shared his adult life with his sister, Mary, whose fitful but terrible mental illness was at its worst when she murdered their mother in 1796.
The pair are at the centre of Ackroyd's new novel, which returns to the literary plagiarism territory of Chatterton. In 1795, Mary and Charles share a home with their senile father and querulous mother. Mary plays housekeeper, while Charles drudges in the East India Office and swills curacao until the taverns tip him out.
William Ireland, a young bookseller with a desire to prove his worth, enters their disconsolate lives, claiming to have discovered remarkable Shakespearean relics. He is thrilled to share his treasures with the literary Lambs and Mary feels her imaginative and romantic horizons expand.
Red-haired young Ireland emerges from his moth-scented bookshop with Shakespeare's will, a poem and a lock of hair not unlike his own, 'chestnut turning into flame'. For Mary, these lost tokens of the Bard represent an alternative to being immured with her fractious family, 'to dwell in another time - if only for a moment'. But Ireland is an ardent forger, his pitch-perfect art an act of passionately desired imagination.
Eventually, he is flattered into overreaching himself, unearthing Vortigern, a tragedy set in ancient Britain, 'a play of jealousy and mad violence' with 'strange, magical conjunctions of sound and sense'. Ackroyd recreates its notorious premiere at Drury Lane, where reverence swiftly folds into derision and the bubble bursts. Meanwhile, Mary's untethered perturbation darkens the Holborn home.
The Lambs of London is not only historically animated, but emotionally feverish. Ackroyd distributes sympathy between his central trio - their restless desires, their desperation to make a name, even if they have to use someone else's. Each is clasped by a shadow self: overlooked Ireland has his shining literary avatar, Mary her terrifying derangement. Charles barely acknowledges the uncontrolled drunk he becomes by last orders - 'he considered him to be an unhappy and unfortunate acquaintance to whom he had become accustomed'.
Ackroyd's London is, as ever, a clamorous, fateful presence, crowded with suicides and muggers; beggars solicit pity with fake goitres. Its throng is 'part funeral procession and part pantomime'; orange peel, horse dung and old newsprint litter the streets; actors are 'larded with grease and powder'.
Ackroyd trusts the rumbustious London mob - they appear as truth-sifters who see through Vortigern's inert dramaturgy. He counterpoises the dense scrabble of material London with airy imagery, a rare breath of release in a city of sorrows. 'This is a sunny day in all our lives,' sighs Mary, when Ireland shows the Lambs his latest find. The novel begins with Mary holding her pox-pitted face to the sun, imagining herself to be its sister moon. Her madness is heralded by dizziness, 'as if someone had drilled a hole in her skull and had blown in warm air'.
Ackroyd's fiction isn't the place to go for facts (some, remembering the ventriloquised passages in his Dickens biography, would say the same of his non-fiction). But it is instructive reading, alongside The Devil Kissed Her, Kathy Watson's empathetic but unscholarly new biography of Mary Lamb (Bloomsbury £16.99, pp247). Watson describes Mary's life after the murder as a bravely makeshift process of therapy in a pre-therapy age. To her, the murder was 'the best thing that could have happened' to Mary, cutting 'the ties that bound her'.
Historian and novelist both spin stories: Watson yanks Mary Lamb into our era of universal counselling, just as Ackroyd turns the past into a private phantasmagoria of loving fakes and pungent terrors. His antiquarian art wraps us in a world which 'seemed to breathe misery' and makes the past a yearning presence, where even forged words carry a freight of feeling."
From JemmaJ, thank you so much for the wishlist book :D
Congratulations on being one of the lucky winners of 2x the Fun Sweeps. I saw in your profile you're reading through the 1001 list so I hope you haven't got this one yet. :D
Enjoy!!
Enjoy!!
Thanks so much!
I was disappointed in this book. I thought it to be very predictable and flaccid.
Sent to the winner of the Export a Menagerie Sweepstakes!
turns out I'm the decoy - thank you for this book
Yay! Thank you for your surprise Christmas package. I look forward to reading this book.
Just finished reading this book. It was a bit predictable, but great for a vacation read.
P.S. to my previous journal entry: I didn't realize that this book was sort of a biography, that this is about REAL people. The very next book I read (The God of the Small Things) has a reference to Mary and Charles Lamb and their work on "Tales from Shakespeare". How cool is THAT?
Since only one person signed up for the ray (and I didn't feel like bumping the thread several more times) this book is going out as an RABCK. Happy reading!
Thank you so much for this book!