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The Lambs of London

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"The Lambs of London" is a nifty little book that blends history and fiction with just a soupcon of mystery to make for a very satisfying read. In the last decade of the 18th century, William Henry Ireland really did produce a number of Shakespeare-related manuscripts (including a letter to the bard from Queen Elizabeth) that experts swore were authentic. I know of no factual connection to Charles and Mary Lamb, but Mary's tragic history (somewhat telescoped here) dovetails nicely with that of Ireland, who, like Chatterton, was but a teenager when he committed his infamous forgeries, the most notorious of which was a "lost play" by Shakespeare entitled "Vortigern," after the Dark-age British King. Other sources give the full title of the play as "Vortigern and Rowena," although this is never mentioned by Ackroyd, and there are other minor discrepancies as well (for instance, Ireland's so-called "patron" and source of the manuscripts is usually given as another young man and not a woman), but Ackroyd is not so much interested in the truth as in the "larger narrative." And a riveting narrative it is! Along the way, we meet such period heavy hitters as Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Thomas de Quincey, and there are fine portraits of lesser-knowns such as Ireland's father, Samuel, an antiquarian who was ruined by the scandal, and Charles Lamb's circle of bibulous friends from the East India House, who stage a play of their own, portraying the "mechanicals" in Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream." The climax of the novel is a brilliantly realized staging of "Vortigern," which may or may not have been the travesty it was later judged to be. There is more attention to character and plot in "The Lambs of London" than is typical of Ackroyd's novels, thus making this one of his best. I recommend it warmly.

The Lambs of London is the story of Charles and Mary Lamb, authors of Shakespeare for Children, and the great literary hoax that was played upon London in the first few years of the 19th century by William Henry Ireland, son of a book seller.

Charles is a clerk at the East India House. He's bored with his job and spends his free time in taverns drinking with his friends. In fact, when we first meet him, he is slightly less than sober. His sister Mary, is a fragile young woman who is emotionally and physically unwell. She idolizes her brother and puts up with Charles's coming home drunk at odd hours. They live with their parents, their overbearing mother and their slightly senile father.

They soon become acquainted with Ireland, who at the age of 17 is already a writer. To suit his own fancy, he "discovers" a lost Shakespearean work called "Vortigern" as well as a testament allegedly written by Shakespeare's father. Its pretty obvious that both works are forgeries; the text of the play uses too many 19th-century phrases and it only has four acts. The documents were also found under suspecious cercumstances that Ireland refuses to discuss. But London, caught up in this extraordianry new "find" recognizes the work as real and the play is performed.

While the major facts of the book are true, there is a lot that is not and there are a few misleading things as well. The dates are slightly off: in the book, the forgery and Mary's death take place in or before 1804; in real life, the forgery took place in 1796. In real life, also, Mary survived her brother. Shakespeare for Children was written in 1807; and while this book does not cover that time period, it might have been nice for the author to have at least mentioned it in his afterword. Also, before I learned very much about the Lambs, I'd assumed that Charles and Mary were much closer in age than they actually were (in realy life they were born nine years apart, she being the elder). Also (and this is a spoiler), when Mary attacks her mother and kills her, Ackroyd makes no mention of the fact that Charles did everything his power to prevent her from being sent to an asylum, including declaring himself her guardian. Aside from these historical details, which makes the book confusing in some places, this book is an excellent depiction of London in the pre-Victorian period. It's a quick read but well written and extremely fascinating. I also recommend reading Ackroyd's Shakespeare: a Biography.

I'm not a scholar of Shakespeare nor historic England, but I found the combination of a book that delved into Shakespeare and life 200 years ago to be an irresistable combination. In this novel, author PEter Ackroyd takes a true event -- the forgery of some Shakespeare letters, poems, and a play -- and brings the perpetrators and other early 19th-century Shakespearians to life.

For me, the most entertaining thing was to try to inhabit the minds of people who literally seemed to have Shakespeare at-hand in their everyday speech and perception. They could quote him as easily as we'd quote lines from a sitcom or commercial. And "they" were not necessarily scholars and children of nobility. These were shopkeepers and clerks -- but with ambitions, intelligence, and intensity. I'd like to think that I would have been able to do so, if I had been raised in that environment, too.

The pace of the story never slackens. We first meet Mary Lamb (an old maid, destined to care for her senile father) and Charles Lamb (her brother, a clerk with the East India company who dreams of glory as a literary critic and essayist). Since childhood, these two have been close, and they have shared a love of language and intellectual conversation. While Mary is house-bound, due to the restrictions of her era, Charles works and goes drinking with his friends several night a week. He's found a boisterous, reasonably literate crew of pals, and they respect the small articles he's been able to place in literary publications. Charles meets -- or rather, is baited by -- William Ireland, an ambitious and possibly genius 17-year-old son of a bookseller. Ireland begins to share with William and Mary a series of Shakespeare pieces -- a letter, a poem -- that he has forged. When these are declared by scholars to be genuine, William presents his greatest forgery: an entire play. The play is produced, and it's met with derision and closes in six nights, as, perhaps, the public senses that it's not really Shakespeare. The forgeries unravel, and lives unravel. Ironically, William did it to impress his father and to test his literary skills, but not for glory or money (which are the reasons his father pursued the verification to its ultimate failure).

The author does a deft job of sketching scenes and then leaving them before you get everything you want. You want to hear more from Charles' cronies, who are witty and foolish at the same time. You want the mini-play that Charles tries to produce to be done more than once (in front a inmates in an asylum). You want Mary and William to fall in love and read plays and poetry together for 40 years. You want Charles to achieve his ambition as a literary critic. And so on.

The only clunker in this book is a two-page visit that William and his father make to a pair of clerics who are Shakespeare scholars, and who become crucial to the deception because they are pleased that the newly found works "prove" that Shakespeare was not a secret Catholic. Those clerics are described as owning a black foundling boy, a former slave, who they molest every night. It's a dumb, unnecessary detail -- as neither the clerics nor the boy appear again in the book. So why does the author go out of his way to make those insults?

In the enthralling (literary fiction) historical novel, The Lambs of London, scribed by renowned British novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd, the author hooks his readers on the discovery of a new dramatic script that might have been William Shakespeare's unknown literary treasure.

Set in London of the Romantic Period (late eighteenth/early nineteenth century), the novel gives a fictitious account of how Charles and Mary Lamb make acquaintance with a young bookseller who claims to have found Shakespeare's yet unknown work. The enthusiasm and skepticism that follow make this story a captivating read.

The author tells you upfront that the situations are purely fictitious. The real historical figures like the Lambs, Thomas de Quincey, and R.B. Sheridan only support the ambience of the literary environment of London at the time of the novel's events. However, the incorporation of these characters provides solid grounds for performing this literary march in which the name of Shakespeare leads the lives of its followers.

As the plot unfolds through the forays of William Ireland into Shakespeare's world, readers get a chance to take a close look at London life that is blanketed by ennui and unanimity at large. For the middle-class literary figures and businessmen dealing in books, Shakespeare's name signifies a boom that would shake people out of their dormancy. Whether it is turns out to their good or ruin is the point illustrated so cogently in the book's ending.

Peter Ackroyd proves to be skilled at `showing' instead of `telling' about a historical situation. As manifest in The Lambs of London, he shows how history can be created and made credible. However, the title of his novel calls critical thought to questioning of its relevance. William Ireland remains the dominant character in the story and precedes the Lambs in both attention and character development. The book's ending, though, makes it a story of the Lambs for a moment.

Armchair Interviews says: Ackroyd's novel is definitely a memorable creation for lovers of literary fiction.

I was drawn to the simple cover on this book and decided upon reading the summary that it sounded interesting. I have no prior knowledge of the Lambs but feel that they provided a frame work for the story of William Ireland rather than being the primary subject of the book. I had hopes of having their characters developed further but that was not to be. The story of William Ireland was very well written and though was not supposed to be completely factual, did leave one with a sense of wonder at just how brilliant a young man he must have been. I was sad to find that in the closing of the book nothing was mentioned of the sucessful career William Ireland went on to have as a writer of Gothic Novels. I have read Gondez the Monk, and Rimualdo or the Castle of Badajos, both very entertaining and complete with amazing poetry and verse. His love of Shakespeare is apparent in these writings as well.

Got to p68 and nearly threw up at the completely out-of-the-blue, unnecessary description of the sexual molestation of an abandoned child. WT??? I'm sick of books that take the terrible, shame-to-all-humanity Catholic Priests' sex scandal and make it into ALL clergy for ALL of history have to molest children. Disgusting, wanton act by an irresponsible author wanting to be very pseduo-PC. RUINED an otherwise fun book. This sort of thing belongs ONLY in memoirs of those who suffered it.

N.B.: FOR ANYONE NOT ALREADY ACQUAINTED WITH THE STORY OF MARY LAMB AND OF WILLIAM IRELAND, THIS REVIEW CONTAINS A SPOILER.

In a note at the beginning Peter Ackroyd gives fair warning that `This is not a biography but a work of fiction. I have invented characters, and changed the life of the Lamb family for the sake of the larger narrative.' I do not myself object to fictionalized biography so long as it credibly fills in details of speech or incident, does not depart too far from what is known, and does not deliberately contradict what actually happened. Ackroyd credibly invents speech and the incidents of daily life; but in the depiction of the relationship between Mary Lamb (whose life is well documented) and William Henry Ireland (ditto) he invents a connection for which there is no historical warrant; and in the case of the Shakespearian scholar Edmond Malone and in the dates he gives he runs directly counter to the known facts. This may not trouble most readers; but it irritated me and considerably reduced my appreciation of what is a well-told tale, with the atmosphere and the literary scene of late 18th century London being knowledgeably conveyed with Ackroyd's usual skill and light touch.

The novel gives us a good picture of the principal characters: of Mary Lamb and her brother Charles; of their parents; and of William Ireland and his father Samuel, a bookseller and collector of historical memorabilia. Mary is very close to Charles; she is at times mentally disturbed, and is driven mad by having to attend on her old father, who has lost his mind and whose talk is completely inconsequential, and on her controlling old mother.

Brother and sister are devoted to the works of Shakespeare; and that makes for the invented bond with William Ireland, who claimed to have discovered a hoard of Shakespearian manuscripts, including a hitherto unknown play, `Vortigern'. He had forged them all; but he fooled his father, Mary, Edmond Malone (in historical fact it was Malone who exposed the forgeries) and many others into believing in their authenticity. This is the spoiler referred to at the top of this review. The reader who does not already know of the forgeries will, when reading this novel, be as taken in by the charm and enthusiasm of William Fielding as were, for a while, so many others.

Those readers who already know the dreadful deed Mary Lamb committed will yet be surprised by what Ackroyd produces as the trigger for it. The final chapter contains a few more deliberate conflicts with the historical facts, for no artistic reason that I can make out.

Never has Georgian London been so rife with sensationalism as it is on Peter Ackroyd's The Lambs of London. When a short poem - the first verse to be discovered in two hundred years and then Vortigern, a lost play, both written by William Shakespeare are discovered, the city's literati are swept up in a flurry of excitement and anticipation.

Even the diffident and self-effacing Mary Lamb is intrigued by the unearthing, not the least because feels a romantic attraction to William Ireland, the ambitious young bookseller, who is now in possession of the manuscript. Picture poor Mary Lamb, holed up in her house in Holborn Passage reduced to a spinsterish-like existence, sleepwalking though life with only her nagging, irksome mother and her partly senile father for company.

Mary aches to connect with Charles, her brother and longs for him to come home each evening - when he is not wretchedly drunk of course. The egocentric Charles, however, seems more content to drink his life away at the local tavern, happy to pay little or no attention to his father's condition, and making no comment on the elderly man's increasing incapacity.

A budding writer and essayist, Charles continues to earn his living, as his mother has insisted, as a bored and jaded clerk at the East India House. Charles, in fact wishes to consider himself as a journalist and novelist, with all his hopes and ambitions directed towards literature. And he's exactly the sort of man the red-haired young William wants to court, hoping these newly revealed tokens of the Bard will enamor him of Charles and the rest of the Lamb family.

Are these Shakespearian manuscripts real or zealous forgeries? The experts all agree that the play at least is real. It doesn't matter to Samuel Ireland, William's father. As soon as William had first brought the papers to him, he immediately saw the profit in them. Convinced there will be more Shakespeare papers, he encourages his son to seek them out.

The author displays a fine grasp of the particular world, bringing the late-eighteenth century London to life, transporting the reader right into the city's fabric. It's a world of dusty bookshops, overcrowded theatres, and cramped alleyways, it's denizens of literature drenched in drama and passion and the very possibility that these masterpieces are really that of the world's most famous playwright.

As the story goes on, Mary unexpectedly unravels, her emotional state bursting without warning, and her evident unease and fits of temper becoming more pronounced; whilst William - whose ambition is matched only by his self-distrust - finds himself caught up in a complex web of betrayal and deception beyond his control. He's a man, who has aspired to success but expected failure, and his eventual comeuppance is a fitting testament to his devilish plan to fool everyone.

Blending fact with fiction, Aykroyd has written an irreverent romp, a somewhat bawdy journey through 1790's London, ultimately thrusting the reader into the stuffy world of antiquarian literature and the people who think highly of it. The true irony is that these manuscripts so easily captivate this community of authors, journalists, historians and booksellers, and the whole issue becomes a reckless and chaotic amalgamation of reference, hubris and misinformation.

When Vortigern is given its premier at Drury Lane, it doesn't take long for the naysayers to form their opinions and the poor William is forced to face some difficult truths. With characters that abound with intellectual snobbery and their appetite for battling with themselves and the world, The Lambs of London is an absolute delight for those who truly love the plays William Shakespeare. It's a reading experience that should be cherished, respected and savored. Mike Leonard August 06.

I didn't care for this book at all. Too speculative, and the characters were not especially likable.