Children’s Classic Read 2019
What a wonderful delight! These each individual stories are so much fun to read. Especially aloud to a group of children. I am sorry to not have read these before. As a lover of Shakespeare this was such a lovely find. This is as promised a wonderful way to introduce Shakespeare to children.
The story of Charles and Mary Lamb is beautiful and sad. The following is from The Poetry Foundation.
British Poet and anthologist Mary Lamb worked as a seamstress for 10 years to support her ailing family. She suffered from bipolar disorder and, during an episode in 1796, killed her mother with a kitchen knife. Her younger brother Charles, a poet and essayist who worked for the East India Company, agreed to serve as Mary’s caretaker rather than consign her to lifelong institutionalization. They lived together for nearly 40 years, save for Mary’s annual manic episodes, during which she was institutionalized.
Despite her illness, the siblings developed a collaborative writing relationship and produced many well-known collections of poetry and prose for children, including Tales from Shakespeare (1807), Mrs. Leicester’s School (1809), and Poetry for Children (1809). The books they wrote together were published anonymously or under Charles’s name in order to shield Mary from unwanted publicity.
Charles and Mary were forced to move often due to Mary’s notoriety. In 1823 they adopted an orphan, Emma Isola, who lived with them for a decade until marrying their publisher. Charles died in 1834, and Mary was cared for by family members and a nurse, and at times placed in asylums, until her death in 1847.
There is a book: A Double Life: A biography of Charles and Mary Lamb, by Sarah Burton that I now want to read.
Book summary: Charles and Mary Lamb were part of London’s famous literary network in the early 19th century. But they were also siblings tied together by a horrific event. In September 1796, Mary murdered her mother with a carving knife during a fit of insanity as the family prepared for dinner. Charles, who was only 21 at the time, took it upon himself to care for his sister throughout her life as she swung between sanity and madness. Meanwhile, Charles also suffered from severe depressions and alcoholism and at one point had to admit himself to the Hoxton madhouse. This account of Charles and Mary Lamb reaches to the heart of early 19th-century London, meeting its eccentrics and its literary giants. It also visits the city’s darker corners, where poverty stalked rented rooms and madhouses concealed terrible abuse.
