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Abstract
Mary Lamb’s short story “Margaret Green: or, The Young Mahometan,” in the Lambs’ children’s collection Mrs. Leicester’s School (1809), turns on a girl’s conversion to Islam and her subsequent “delirious” concern for her non‐Mahometan mother’s eternal fate: a religious crisis which has been largely neglected in the criticism. The girl’s delirium corresponds to assertions in treatises of this period that either excessive fear of hell or religious conversion in itself could cause insanity. However, the story also exposes the overuse of labels of madness to discredit “radical” religious views, whether of Muslims or of dissenting Christians. Read in the context of Mary Lamb’s likely exposure via Coleridge to biblical criticism, the story critiques such labels by questioning whether Christianity rests on any firmer historical and rational bases than does Islam. Biographical evidence suggests that the story may register Mary Lamb’s own religious struggles and experiences of mental illness, but she takes no clear stand on the religious issues she raises; rather, she depicts the harm women suffer from censorship of their religious questions, and in the frame of Mrs. Leicester’s School she offers a glimpse of a community in which women may voice their religious views without being labelled “mad.”
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Maria LaMonaca, Jeanne Moskal, and Pamela Corpron Parker for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. This work was facilitated by a grant from the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.
Notes
[1] Although critics have overwhelmingly concurred in attributing “The Young Mahometan” to Mary Lamb, some question remains regarding its authorship. According to Charles Lamb’s letter to Bernard Barton of 23 January 1824, he wrote only three of Mrs. Leicester’s School’s ten stories: “the Witch Aunt, the first going to Church, and the final Story, about a little Indian girl in a ship” ( Letters 2: 416). But in his introduction to the 1995 Woodstock edition of Mrs. Leicester’s School, Jonathan Wordsworth suggests that Charles Lamb actually wrote “The Young Mahometan” as well, citing Henry Crabb Robinson’s letter of 10–17 October 1853 to John Miller. In this letter, Robinson reports that when he told Charles Lamb of a woman who tore “The Young Mahometan” and “The Witch Aunt” out of Mrs. Leicester’s School before giving it to her children, Charles replied, “I am delighted to hear it; I wrote them both” (Robinson 833). Jonathan Wordsworth also believes that the story resembles the “The Witch Aunt,” and remarks on its “quirkiness that one associates with Lamb rather than Mary” (n.p.). I follow Lucas and others in attributing the story to Mary: a statement in Charles’ own hand fifteen years after the story’s date of publication in a letter to a friend seems more reliable evidence than a secondhand report of Charles’ conversation made forty‐four years after the story’s publication in the face of an implicit charge that the story was unfit for children. Even if Robinson did report the conversation accurately, Charles may have been shielding his sister from a slur on her work—one that suggests the potentially controversial nature of her material.
[2] Although Burton’s Anatomy “began to seem a very quaint book” by the early nineteenth century, as Porter observes (108), Lucas describes Charles Lamb’s affection for, and thorough knowledge of, this text: one friend called it Charles Lamb’s “book of books” (Lucas, “Notes” 1: 394–398). Charles Lamb also wrote a set of “Curious Fragments” in the style of Burton, which were published in 1802 (Lucas, “Notes” 1: 31–36).
[3] Mary Lamb uses standard nineteenth‐century British terms and spellings, calling the prophet of Islam “Mahomet,” Islam “Mahometism,” and Muslims “Mahometans.” I will generally use her terminology for consistency.
[4] See Edwin W. Marrs’s detailed chronology of the Lambs’ lives in his introduction to their Letters (xxxvii–lxii). Between confinements, Mary Lamb’s younger brother Charles took legal responsibility for her, and they lived together until he died. Although critics often draw connections between Mary Lamb’s work and her life, they have kept remarkable silence regarding the significance of the matricide itself. As Adriana Craciun points out, such silence suggests an ongoing discomfort with acknowledging women’s capacity for violence (46–70).
[5] Hereafter, I will generally use terms such as “madness,” “insanity,” and “delirium” for both Margaret’s and Mary Lamb’s illnesses; while these terms may seem pejorative and certainly lack precision, I seek to avoid the anachronism of using twenty‐first‐century terms in discussing an early nineteenth‐century text.
[6] All quotations from stories in Mrs. Leicester’s School are taken from the facsimile reprint published by Woodstock Books. Quotations from the Lambs’ other works are taken from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, and cited by volume and page number; Lucas’ notes on the text are cited with his name and the volume and page number. Quotations from the Lambs’ letters come from the collection edited by Edwin W. Marrs unless otherwise noted.
[7] See, for example, Sophia King’s popular novel Waldorf; or, the Dangers of Philosophy (1798), quoted below, and Geraldine Jewsbury’s Zoe: The History of Two Lives (1845), in which a young Roman Catholic priest falls into a fever when he loses his faith.
[8] Burrows (1771–1846) came to own a private asylum in Chelsea in 1814 and owned the Retreat in Clapham from 1823 to 1843 (Skultans xiii).
[9] This terminology has precedent in the Christian scriptures as well; see, for example, Revelation 20.3.
[10] Hannah More’s 1797 Cheap Repository Tract on the “History of Mr. Fantom, the New Fashioned Philosopher, and His Man William,” for example, critiques Thomas Paine’s popular work the Age of Reason. Mr. Fantom proudly explains that “[a]ll this nonsense of future punishment is now done away” ( History 14–15), but his servant William subsequently robs him, commits murder, and is hung for his crimes. The night before his death, William tells his employer that “I should never have fallen into sins deserving of the gallows if I had not often overheard you say there was no hereafter, no judgment, no future reckoning” (18). More’s work follows in a long tradition of hell as moral deterrent; see Walker 4.
[11] For the London 1785 edition of Janeway’s Token, see Woodbridge, CT Research Publications, Inc., 1997, The Eighteenth Century, reel 9526, no. 08; for the 1793 Leeds edition, see the same, reel 8297, no. 02. For 1815 editions, see Early American imprints, second series, no. 35008 and no. 36540.
[12] However, Crowther warned against blaming madness on one sect over another (84–85); see also Domestic Guide 15. By the 1820s and 1830s some physicians argued that excessive religious zeal or anxiety resulted from, rather than causing, madness; see Hunter and Macalpine 774, 834.
[13] For example, Humphry Prideaux’s popular biography, The True Nature of Imposture fully Display’d in the Life of Mahomet (1697), implicitly acknowledged charges that Jesus was also an impostor with the rest of its title: With a Discourse annex’d for the Vindication of Christianity from this Charge. Offered to the Consideration of the Deists of the Present Age.
[14] For Mahometism viewed as Christian heresy, see Daniel 209–213, Said 59–72, and Smith 217.
[15] Cf. Charles Lamb’s story later in Mrs. Leicester’s School, in which “The Witch Aunt” uses her weak eyes as an excuse to read nothing but a prayer book and Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ (132).
[16] Apparently some parents did object to “The Young Mahometan”; see n1 above.
[17] Paradoxically, Mahometism also represented despotism (Sharafuddin xxi), as in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Revolt of Islam (Leask 72).
[18] As Charles Lamb testifies approvingly in “Mackery End,” “she was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage” ( Works 2: 76). Biographers have noted Mary Lamb’s access both to the library at Blakesware, the mansion where her grandmother served as housekeeper, and to the library of Samuel Salt, her father’s employer (Hine 136, 189; Lucas, Life 1: 11; cf. Aaron 116).
[19] George Sale had used similar tactics in his “Preliminary Discourse” and notes to his translation of the Koran (1734). Margaret misses such disclaimers because several pages are ripped out from her book: an odd form of censorship in an English household of the time, since its effects are pro‐Mahometan. Margaret never sees the pages for herself; rather, the physician’s lady tells her about them, mediating and possibly distorting their contents for Margaret’s protection.
[20] Many critics have suggested or simply assumed that Mary Lamb based this story on her own experience; Reginald Hine, for example, completely identifies Margaret with Mary Lamb, referring to “Margaret=Mary” or “Mary=Margaret” in his commentary on the story (138, 148–149).
[21] Their contact with him fell off somewhat after his marriage in 1801 to Mary Jane Clairmont, whom Charles heartily disliked (see Letters 2: 22, 2: 55, 2: 70).
[22] In this argument, Coleridge defended Christian doctrines including the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Fall of Man (Godwin MS b229/2, cited in St. Clair 228). According to Coleridge’s own letter to Robert Southey, he went on at some length: “I did ‘thunder & lighten at him’ with a vengeance, for more than an hour & a half” ( Letters 2: 1072). Whether or not Godwin had triggered Coleridge’s outburst by some particular arguments or remarks that evening, his friends well knew his lack of faith in these doctrines; he had a reputation as an “atheist,” although under Coleridge’s influence he had moved to deism by the end of 1800 (St. Clair 228–229, 540n, citing unpublished Godwin MS b227/8 and c663/4). In his letters following this incident, Coleridge expresses his chagrin, specifically mentioning that Mary Lamb had been present. He apologizes to Godwin for his “Tirade of drunken Enthusiasm” ( Letters 2: 1056), saying, “would that Lamb or his Sister, whose influence over me is uncontrolled, had but said—what is the matter with you, Coleridge?—” (2: 1057). In his report to Southey, he blames Mary Lamb for intoxicating him: “Mary Lamb made me a glass of punch of most deceitful Strength” (2:1072).
[23] Coleridge called the Fragments’ author, whom he believed to be Lessing, “[t]he most formidable infidel.” As he explains in a letter to Benjamin Flower dated 1 April 1796, it
unites the wit of Voltaire with the subtlety of Hume, and the profound erudition of our Lardner. I had some thoughts of translating it with an answer, but gave it up, lest men, whose tempers and hearts incline them to disbelief, should get hold of it; and, though the answers are satisfactory to my own mind, they may not be equally so to the minds of others. (1: 197)
Although Coleridge apparently did not find Lessing’s arguments compelling, he continued to take interest in their supposed author: while in Germany in 1798 and 1799 he conducted research for a biography of Lessing, a project to which he referred several times but apparently never completed (Coleridge 1: 455, 480, 516, 518–519, 553, 559, 563, 610, 632).
Letters indicate that Mary as well as Charles Lamb enjoyed Coleridge’s talk on religious ideas, heterodox as well as orthodox. In a May 1796 letter to Coleridge, Charles praises the last lines of “The Eolian Harp,” calling them “most exquisite–they made my sister & self smile, as conveying a pleasing picture of Mrs. C. checquing your wild wandrings [sic], which we were so fond of hearing you indulge when among us” ( Letters 1: 11–12, original emphasis). Mary Lamb, like her brother, enjoyed Coleridge’s theological speculations; since Charles composed this letter the month after Coleridge wrote to Flower about Lessing, it seems quite possible that the “wild wandrings” to which he refers included comments on this “infidel” Lessing. After Mary killed Elizabeth Lamb in 1796, Charles implored Coleridge for “as religious a letter as possible,” and Coleridge complied (Lamb 27 September 1796, Letters 1: 44, Coleridge Letters 1: 239). By 24 October Mary Lamb had recovered enough that Charles shared Coleridge’s letters with her, whether or not those letters were strictly orthodox; as he wrote to Coleridge,
I read your letters with my sister, and they give us both abundance of delight. Especially they please us two, when you talk in a religious strain,–not but we are offended occasionally with a certain freedom of expression, a certain air of mysticism, more consonant to the conceits of pagan philosophy, than consistent with the humility of genuine piety. ( Letters 1: 53)
At times, Charles appears to have considered Coleridge’s company too stimulating for Mary; in a letter of 28 January 1798, when Mary was recovering from an attack, he says that “ you have a power of exciting interest … too forcible [to] admit of Mary’s being with you—. I consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness—. I think, you would almost make her dance within an inch of the precipice—she must be with duller fancies, & cooler intellects” ( Letters 1: 127). But apparently he did not entirely keep Mary from Coleridge’s company, which her letters testify that she enjoyed; in November 1805 she mentions him affectionately to Sarah Stoddart, saying, “I heartily wish for the arrival of Coleridge, a few such evenings as we have sometimes passed with him would wind us up and set us a going again” (November 1805, Letters 2: 183). Similarly, she writes to Coleridge himself that “a few chearful evenings spent with you serves to bear up our spirits many a long & weary year” (September 1806, Letters 2: 240).
[24] Godwin had rejected Trinitarian Christianity in 1781, the clerical profession of a Unitarian in 1783, and belief in the Bible and miracles by 1788 (Godwin 64–65). The essay “On Religion,” in which Godwin traces the development of his unbelief in divine revelation, is dated 7 May 1818; he makes his comments on Jesus as impostor in his essay series The Genius of Christianity Unveiled, left incomplete at his death in 1836.
[25] Mary Lamb’s friend Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger discussed Hannah More’s book with both Mary and Charles Lamb (April 1800, Letters 1: 199).
[26] Although M. B. records interruptions in other girls’ narratives (e.g. 45, 136, 138), she does not record any interruptions during Margaret’s story.