Women, Religion, and Insanity in Mary Lamb’s “The Young Mahometan”Footnote¹

[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.

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